Your phone can access more music than you could listen to in a lifetime. It’s a vast archive, and we have no shortage of Baedekers. For the modest price of a subscription, your streaming service tells you what music you’ll like and where it comes from, and the playlists never stop. If they think it’s worth it, Apple Music will tell you an artist’s “essentials,” their “next steps” and “deep cuts.” Apple has around 30,000 of these playlists drawing on more than 100 million tracks, and the space for them is infinite. Making them would be a dream job for a music geek, but they are, with a tweak or two, programmed by algorithms.
In 1952, though, when cutting-edge audio was the LP, there was such a geek who landed such a job. That geek—a freak, a visionary, a sage, a derelict—was Harry Smith, and his masterpiece was the Anthology of American Folk Music, six LPs released by Folkways classifying the songs as “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs.”
