The Ghost in the CD

photo: © 1965, John Palmer

Harry Smith pursues his life work: Programming your mind.

Details

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four
Revenant

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The song ends: "As I lay down. To take my rest. No scornful one, to wake me; I'll go straightway, unto my grave, just as fast as time, will take me."

Revenant: "A person who returns. A person who returns as a spirit after death; ghost." Of course! What we are hearing is Harry's hearing. It is Harry Smith, now, not the Carter Family or the Blue Sky Boys, who is being summoned from the spirit world. It was nearly 50 years ago that Harry gathered these recordings together for his fourth volume, and only an accident of history that their release should come in a new technology whose headlong career has buried us in the tailings of our own past. We are, in a sense, just where Harry was in the Seattle warehouse when he began the monumental task of rescuing a discarded human story out of a mass of junk—a prolonged act of sympathetic attention whose ultimate form, Revenant's Volume Fourmakes evident at last, was the beleaguered soul of the rescuer himself. Harry only wanted what was hardest for him to do, which was simply to make contact. In Volume Four he does, even as he bids aay-doo.