Harry Everett Smith collector, spiritualist, film-maker, innovator and adventurer in an intensely creative life. May 29, 1923 to November 27, 1991. Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon. His paternal great-grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. His parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas which were to persist, through his fascination with unorthodox spirituality, a comparative approach to culture, and a desire to unify Philosophies of East and West. Smith's father, Robert James Smith was a watchman for the Pacific American Fisheries, a salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many Indian songs and rituals, and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. In addition to developing complicated techniques of transcription he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects , an interest that continued throughout his life. A 1943 article in the American Magazine featured a full page photograph of young Smith posing with local Indian chiefs recoding the spirit dance at the Lummi Potlatch. Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. His classes included the Evolution of Man, American Indigenous Linguistics, and Chinese Art. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met a number of bohemians, intellectuals and artists and experienced marijuana for the first time, Harry realized he could no longer be content at college. In 1947 Smith relocated to Northern California, living in the Bay Area. In Berkeley, Smith lived in a small apartment adjacent to Betrand Bronson, a noted musicologist, tending to the lawn and the garden in exchange for rent. He also worked as an assistant to noted anthropologist Paul Radin, at U. C. Berkeley. Shortly thereafter he moved to San Francisco, in the Fillmore District above Jimbo's Bop City, the infamous waffle shop and after-hours jazz club. At Jimbo's he would screen his films while jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk improvised. Smith is credited with developing ingenious methods of animation, hand-painting directly on film and collage techniques. Smith got involved in the avant-garde film world through the Art in Cinema Series, run by Frank Stauffacher and Richard Foster at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Through this involvement he came into contact with other filmmakers including the Whitney Brother, Oscar Fischinger, and Norman McLaren. He associated extensively with the abstract filmmaker Jordan Belson, both of them consciously basing their work in the genre of the non-objective movement of Kandinsky. Rudolph Bauer and Franz Marc. Hilla Rebay of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, (now the Guggenheim Museum in New York), had been sporadically supporting Harry. They corresponded for a time, with Smith sending Rebay his films, stereoscope drawings along with a stereoscope, and non-objective paintings. She visited Smith at his apartment / studio, and provided Smith with a stipend, a plane ticket and a studio in New York to continue his studies. After receiving a Guggenheim grant he created two optically printed films, a 3-D film, and several paintings for Rebay. In New York, he began serious study of the Qabalah with fellow genus Lionel Ziprin. He went to work for Lionel Ziprin's greeting card company Inkweed Arts developing unique 3-S cards and his hand drawn image of the Tree of Life. During Many Periods in his life he was involved in the O. T. O., Aleister Crowley's hermetic fraternity, and the occult in varying degrees. The fifties found Smith living in the Bronx in New York and uptown in a small room on the Upper West Side. In 1952, Folkways Records issued his multi-volume Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian / Folkways 2951-3). Smith's work in collecting and preserving American song literature and artifacts is immense. These six discs are recognized as having been a seminal trigger for the folk music boon of the 50's and 60's. He also produced and recoded The Fugs' first album, as well as working with Thelonius Monk and Billie Holiday. The sixties found Smith living at the Chelsea Hotel working primarily on films. He mingled with Jean-Luc Godard, Janis Joplin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter. One could walk into his room and meet anyone from Jimmy Page to the local drug dealer on the block, a Hell's Angel or Allen Ginsberg. Smith made no class distinctions; he could bring people of all backgrounds together on common ground. The again, he could have his door barred and "Do Not Disturb" sign attached, not leaving his room for days on end, laboring alone on a film or research project. Harry spent much of 1964 living with American Indians in Oklahoma and recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians released in 1973 as "The Kiowa Peyote Meeting" (Ethnic Folkways 4601). Harry's broad range of interests resulted in a number of collections. He donated the largest know n private paper airplane collection to the Smithsonian Institute's Air and Space Museum. He was a collector of Seminole textiles and Ukranian Easter Eggs. He was the self-described world's leading authority on string figures, having mastered hundreds of forms from around the world. Harry studied many languages and dialects, including Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. He compiled the only known concordance of the Enochian system (forward and reverse). He made a study of the underlying principles of Highland Tartans, correlated it to the Enochian system and painted elemental tablets that combined them. The early seventies found Smith working on the filming of his epic Mahagonny and the rest of the decade assembling it . A four screen project that was projected with colored gels and synchronized th the Kurt Weil / Bertolt opera of the same name, Mahagonny consumed Smith entirely. He spoke of the film in revolutionary term, it would re-define cinema as we know it. Smith states "You have to live Mahagonny, in fact be Mahagonny, in order to work on it." The film had a ten show run in 1981 at Anthology Film Archives. The eighties saw Smith moving around, staying at various friends' houses, a stint in Cooperstown, New York, at the home of Mary Beach and Claude Pelieu. Smith arrived at the Cooperstown bus station with five thousand dollars, living money given him by Allen Ginsberg. Before he was met by Claude and Mary, he found his way into an antiques shop, spent all of his money, and then lived for the next nine months in a small room impossibly crowded with early American furniture, folk art, and artifacts. Smith later returned to New York and stayed at the Andrews House on the Bowery (a cheap men's shelter) and Allen Ginsberg's apartment on the Lower East Side, where Smith stayed for over eight month. Under the recomendation of Allen's psychiatrist, Allen brought Harry to Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Smith spent his last years 1988 - 1991 as "shaman in residence" at Naropa Institute, where his life's work culminated in a series of lectures, audio tape recordings, and continued collecting and research. In 1991 he received a Chairman's Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony for his contribution to American Folk Music. Upon receiving his award, he proclaimed, "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music...and all that stuff that the rest of you are talking about." Harry Everett Smith died at the Chelsea Hotel on November 27, 1991. For more information visit the Harry Smith Archives. Biography from www.harrysmitharcives.com. |
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