American Demos Vol. I, Recoveries

Introduction by Harry Smith 

Art is made through the coinage of contrivances, references, and precedence.  The greatest honor one artist can pay another is to use his or her work as a birdhouse. It is this, (through a JSB riff,) that proffers the muse to muse that the mask is the washer("balm" was her actual word,) between the cement mixer and the shoe. 

I was fortunate enough to have listened to these songs only of late, long after my death many years ago.  They are songs I would not have liked when I was alive. But now that I am dead everything is changed. Now, I can thread horsehair through the needle's eye.

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Introduction by Harry Smith 

Art is made through the coinage of contrivances, references, and precedence.  The greatest honor one artist can pay another is to use his or her work as a birdhouse. It is this, (through a JSB riff,) that proffers the muse to muse that the mask is the washer("balm" was her actual word,) between the cement mixer and the shoe. 

I was fortunate enough to have listened to these songs only of late, long after my death many years ago.  They are songs I would not have liked when I was alive. But now that I am dead everything is changed. Now, I can thread horsehair through the needle's eye.        

The author somehow channels a scratched, fractured devotion to American music, from the recordings in the Anthology, not only out of personal delight, but for the validation of association; an appeal, perhaps gleaned from Eliot.  It is as if to say, "I know wherefore I speak."  

(nevermore)

America is now expected to act like an adult, while never having learned what it meant exactly, we are now making a U turn into the mirror.  Huck and Jim reverse roles as the 20th century washes out to sea, its monuments revealed as mere continuum before high tide sweeps it yet again and submerges what was once now into the archaic ocean of the eternal past.

He is, in many ways, an innocent, following the classic desire-architecture of would-be poets, the neurosis of mother guilt combined with an iron claw sense of responsibility to the advancement of the art, he has modeled his cycle on the songs of the AAFM all six albums.

He claims to have used either a Kaballistic codex or channeled directly the hands of one Formon Cleave, a New Orleans pianist from the 1880's who, after his violent death, attainedin the hereafter, a reputation as Beethoven's jazz instructor, who Beethoven now calls, "Mein freund" and dedicated to him his 2215th piano sonata, a very different sounding work.  

In this way the author was able to call forth the spirit of homage ("upgrades," he calls them) and compose parallels to the songs on the first album of the Anthology.  

Although one hears thematic echoes, there are no melodic or stylistic references.  Mere imitation is not in his possession.  The fact he is a technophiliac and a church pianist depletes consideration of him as a folk musician.  Instead, he has adapted the poet's art, that most reclusive of all meditations, and focused it, not only on words, but on the song in the mind, in the hand, in the heart, of which collaboration, wholly internal, working the neuron factory, integrating foulest breath with fragrant blood through body, hands, eyes, and ears, as song, (poetry's natural oasis.)  

Centuries old connections linking the digital 21st century to early 20th century analog,  songs which have their origins in the Middle Ages, a subtext whose foundation is sifted from Dante: ancient Dante, original Dante, whose vision fostered belief in the pursuit of happiness, this is how the project identified itself.

Through youthful tragedy, through the healing that comes with love and time, in community and reverence for all that is, through these connections we feel the power and penetration of all time, past and present, and realize the future is assured.

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