This is something I knocked out about Harry Smith’s Anthology at the request of an acquaintance a couple of years ago.  I couldn’t resist slipping in The Hold Steady (“Your new favourite band!”  Though better) but I managed to let it alone otherwise.  It’s kind of a manisfesto.

On my planet, the Stooges’ ‘Funhouse’ is one of the four or five greatest rock and roll records ever made.  Another would be Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’.  Or Diamanda Galas in full gothic cry – Gothic like a cathedral, that is, not something lacy encrusting a village war memorial.  Dock Bogg’s take on ‘I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground’ would be a fourth.  The better informed than myself might mention Augustus Pablo (and New Order sealed the humble melodica as an authentically rock and roll instrument at the beginning of ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’) You can hear it in the early Wu Tang or the-wind-in-the-wires swell of God Speed You Black Emperor.
Rock and roll has nothing to do with Bill Haley.   Rock and roll is a kind of breath.  It’s in the vital hum a wall of amplifiers makes before anyone hits a note.  It’s in the harmonies left ringing after someone finishes beating pure bloody hell out of an unfortunate banjo.  It’s etched into every groove of the Anthology of American Folk Music that the deeply peculiar Harry Smith assembled at some point in the fifties – an all-but-bootlegged collection of 78s and field recordings no-one ever questioned the provenance of as it was assumed that all the cuts included were the work of the a) dead, b) black and c) ‘traditional’ to whom no royalties were due.
‘They’ were wrong on all counts.  The Anthology contains within its elaborately rustic Neo-Platonic packaging music by early Jewish tin-pan alleycats, poor sharecroppers, Pennsylvanian miners and (in some cases) the very much alive.
The aforementioned Dock Boggs was one of the latter and embodies the contradictions and stereotypes the Anthology endorses, challenges, satirises and mines.  After the original folk revivalists of the 1950s (authenticity and originality being the key concern of the kind of individuals who initially bought into the anthology) got over the shock of having one of the keystones of their ‘ancient’ traditions amble back on-stage very much alive (not to mention the even greater shock of discovering he was white – lovers of the primitive and the exotic have rules about these things) Boggs had something of a second career, decades after abandoning music altogether.
His sound epitomises the fascination of the anthology – jarring, disorienting, unethical and unnervingly, drivingly rhythmical.  Not World music but music of The world – the Gnostic world ruled by the Devil.  And he’s only one of the fifty or sixty holy or unholy terrors documented.  No wonder Harry Smith decorated the Anthology’s sleeves in occult and voodoo paraphernalia – it was as much to wrap up the demons within as to warn off the uninitiated.  The six records are a catalogue of human frailty and iniquity and the consequences thereof.  Equal parts biblical text (—-‘s ‘John the Revelator’ and ‘——-‘) and 18th century ballad sheet (Pretty Polly or —-), they enthral, horrify, perplex and bore by turns.
The way into this (and any) labyrinth is via a thread – in my case tracing Nick Cave to Bob Dylan and via a set of the original Basement Tapes to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic and a detailed account of the Anthology as the bedrock of not just Dylan but pretty much everything.
Which it is.  Each singer was a gatekeeper into a lost world, a world that was being overwritten by technologies of reproduction, taste and economics as fast as their 78s were released.  By the time Smith came along to pick over the bones, it was finished.  Music had become a chain of ghettos.  All that was left was, well, the recordings, a number of ‘living treasures’ and an inheritance of incredible fluidity and bottomless resource.
And that brings us back to my initial rather random sampling of the Stooges, Pink Moon and Diamanda Galas.  The lurch and thump of ‘Down in the Street’ is warp to the weft of Boggs or The Hold Steady.  Drake pulled the fatal weight of his seemingly gossamer constructions from both the country blues and the English folk that that provided the tunes and subject matter for so much of it.  Galas’ dread incantations draw on the mortal terror of —- (and her cannon of blues and gospel interpretations provide the undertow for much else of her work).  I could mention a hundred others – Nirvana’s famous Leadbelly cover, Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads (a promotional video for the single “Wild Rose” had Kylie Minogue re-playing the fate of a dozen unfortunate victims of the unabashedly misogynistic exponents of that old time music).  The beat goes on, in between the spaces and not uncommonly, in your face.