Cosmic Scholar

Starred review from August 7, 2023
In this vividly detailed biography, music scholar Szwed (Billie Holiday) brilliantly captures the life and legacy of the enigmatic filmmaker, folklorist, painter, producer, anthropologist, archivist, Kabbalist, and alchemist Harry Smith (1923–1991). Gathering information about Smith’s “scattered” life from incomplete archives (much was lost during Smith’s stints living on the streets), Szwed paints his subject as an influential force in American art, admired by the likes of Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, and Allen Ginsberg. Smith’s work elided boundaries between folk and fine art; his landmark 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP collection of rediscovered commercial recordings, was instrumental “to the folk music revival,” while several of his films, including Heaven and Earth Magic (1957) and Mahagonny (1980), were featured in the Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre. Despite his influence, he died destitute, of cardiac arrest, in a Manhattan hotel room in 1991, the same year he won a Chairman’s Merit Award Grammy with Harry Belafonte. Drawing on extensive research to fill in his subject’s emotional states, Szwed sensitively renders the extraordinary, bizarre, and ultimately tragic life that Smith “devoted... completely to art, in some ways turning into a work of art, his own personal surrealism.” The result is a masterful ode to a “strange and singular character” in American arts.