Harry Smith: He was a stranger in a strange land

Harry Everett Smith was neither born nor died in Anacortes, but he did live there for about 10 years as a youth before and during the Great Depression. Salmon canneries brought his family, and his father, R.J. Smith, to Anacortes and cannery work took the Smith family to Bellingham, where Harry Smith graduated from high school. After living in Seattle, he left the Puget Sound area, never to return.

As a high school student Harry Smith studied Salish Sea traditions, recording and collecting tribal songs on 78 rpm shellac records. He went on to collect thousands of records focused on blues and hillbilly music that he cataloged as “The Anthology of American Folk Music.” Andy Beta, in the Washington Post, called the six LPs and 84 songs “revelatory and often magical” in reviewing how “this personally logical and quasi-mystical collection” won the 68 year-old Smith a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1991. Long before that, Smith had moved to Seattle, San Francisco and finally New York. He became an avant-gard filmmaker and friends with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol.

Historian, musician and director of the Anacortes Museum Bret Lunsford spent 15 years “Sounding for Harry Smith,” publishing this year a sort-of-biography of Smith’s “Early Pacific Northwest Influences,” as he subtitled this obvious labor of love coffee table book. It is, as promoted, “A beautifully printed and bound 232-page hardcover book that includes chronology, selected bibliography, endnotes, maps and over 100 historic photographs within 17 substantial and hearty chapters.”

Lunsford writes “Harry Smith, the main subject of this book, was strange. I won’t claim that this book mirrors Harry’s uniqueness, just that it allows itself idiosyncrasies. This exploration of Harry’s early and prehistory is not a straightforward story.” And this book is strange. Its cover photo, of a 19-year old Smith recording in the Lummi Smokehouse with Julius Charles, August Martin and Ann Jones in 1942, was reversed for graphic effect. From the start Lunsford presents an altered view – reality – of his subject.

Lunsford, with the sensitivity of a poet and the soul of a sociologist, has written a biography of Anacortes and the Pacific Northwest and stitched together the places and people around Harry Smith. Lunsford has recorded “the sounds of time and place echoing across his unique homeland, over diverse shores, new villages, blasted headlines and imagined communities.”

Lunsford starts with the very real and old native communities, only after recognizing the geological and biological features shaped by the last glaciers.

“’The cost of contemplating history is often an uneasy conscience,’” Lunsford quotes Richard Kluger. That is the theme as well as coda of “Sounding.”

While in high school, Smith studied and collected items as well as the sounds of Salish Seas peoples. In an oral history interview, Jack Wells tells of driving together to “one of the potlatch celebrations near La Conner – Swinomish Indians. And we had rigged up an inverter to operate off of a battery to power a fairly conventional disc recorder.”

Lunsford groups Smith as a teenage ethnographer with Bill Holm, a peer. Holm, famous regionally, an author, artist and educator and curator of Northwest Coast Indian Art at the Burke Museum, met Smith at a Winter Dance on the Swinomish Reservation. He said “he was a young man, … 17. 18, 19 years old, doing work that I felt was probably the equivalent of graduate student work in anthropology.”

“Sounding” is more of a group biography of the Smith family and of Anacortes, both specific human influences on Harry and the physical, social and cultural dynamics of white settlement as the twentieth century advanced. Lunsford has a sensitive and critical eye to the influences of the white culture on the region.

Lunsford is as interested in the influences he infers Anacortes had on Smith, whether it was Ku Klux Klan parades or socialist strikes or the racism Chinese and Japanese immigrants faced. He connects the school age Smith to artists Louise Williams, Henreitta Blaisdell and Lawrence Kronquist. Morris Graves gets a mention and a photograph. So does Wallie Funk, a high school classmate.

This book is rich in interviews, quotes, photographs, press clippings and maps, as behooves a museum director. Lunsford does not answer who was the young Harry Smith. He does show where and when he grew up in Anacortes and what people who lived there may have influenced him. Lunsford plumbs the depths of his corner of the Pacific Northwest to get at the shape of the region that shaped them both.

“Sounding” is published by Lunsford’s KNW-YR-OWN PRESS and P.W. Elverum & Son. The foreword is by John Szwed and preface by Phil Elverum. Price: $35.