Dwight Garner at the NY Times:
Two pages into his new biography of Harry Smith, the enigmatic anthropologist, underground filmmaker, painter and music collector responsible for the influential “Anthology of American Folk Music,” John Szwed sends up a flare of distress. “How did I get here?” he writes. “Who is Harry Smith? Why am I writing this book?”
His unease is understandable. Smith (1923-91) is a hard moth to pin to the specimen board. Facts about his life, especially his early life, are hard to come by. The occupations I provided above aren’t the half of it. Smith had his fingers in a thousand pies, the more occult and arcane the better.
He was one of the great downtown New York figures of the second half of the 20th century. Scraggly, stooped, wild-haired, impeccable in his sloppiness, he was a knowingly inverted dandy, as Walker Evans once said of James Agee.
more here.