The Band
Music from Big Pink
Capitol
1968

The Band
Stage Fright
Capitol
1970

The Band
Cahoots
Capitol
1971

David Johansen and the Harry Smiths
David Johansen and the Harry Smiths
Chesky
2000

In American folklore, we hear a lot about the endless highway: a magical stretch of asphalt with no fixed start or finish; a black ribbon long and wide with possibility. In fact, our musical history, like America itself, is the sum of many roads, a cat's-cradle network of blacktops and alleys, of hard turns and odd detours. In this retrospective feast, those pathways rarely run in a straight line. Harry Smith's collation of pre-World War II blues and hillbilly 78s begets both protest-folk -- the 1960s explosion of baby-boom socialism documented by Broadside magazine -- and the dusty existentialism of the Band's country-rock pioneer fables. An ex-glam-rock singer, David Johansen, reinvents himself as a living toast to Smith's archaeology. But these records also form a full, rich circle, one that begins and always returns to the story of America's birth and bloom, as first told in the blues and ballads of the country's working class.

Smith, who died in 1991 at the age of sixty-eight, was a man of multiple obsessions -- painting, filmmaking, alchemy, American Indian ritual. But his greatest achievement was his Anthology of American Folk Music. Issued in 1952 (and reissued in 1997), Smith's three-volume survey of songs and stories from the dawn of