COSMIC SCHOLAR

An overdue, comprehensive biography of a strange, singular man.

Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a polymath who “effaced, erased, or trashed most of the facts of his life, as he did his art.” Nonetheless, Szwed, piece by obscure piece, masterfully puts his puzzle of a life together. Smith was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in Washington in an unusual family and isolated childhood, and Szwed, biographer of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and Alan Lomax, admits Smith’s past is rather murky. He was frail, precocious, and fascinated by the local Indigenous population, and he began photographing, filming, and making recordings of them. At 18, he began an ambitious dictionary of Samish and Swinomish languages and began his lifelong obsession with string figures and, much later, paper planes. He was painting, drawing, reading widely, watching movies, and collecting many records, especially folk and blues. Smith spent the mid-1940s in the Bay Area soaking up its rich cultural and artistic milieu—and drugs. By 27, he discovered nonobjective hand-drawn animated film and visual music, his surrealistic “record paintings.” A job at the San Francisco Museum of Art’s cinema program enabled him to hone his prodigious skills. In the late ’40s, invariably broke, he taught a course on Afro-American music and started friendships with poet Jack Spicer and musicians like Gillespie, Monk, and Mingus. Smith’s experiments with light shows earned him much-needed financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation. After he moved to New York City in 1951, his mythic reputation grew. Szwed ably describes the substantial impact that Smith’s momentous Anthology of American Folk Music had on folk singers, and he offers telling looks at many of the people Smith came to know, like Allen Ginsberg, whom itinerant Smith stayed with. The author is clearly impressed with Smith’s accomplishments, especially his experimental animated film work, which filmmaker Jonas Mekas called “magic.” Smith was more sage than scholar, and his peaks-and-valleys life was one of a kind.

A revelatory portrait of a unique pop-culture figure.