Smith was born in 1923 and raised in the Northwest by theosophists, who instilled in him the idea that all elements are derived from one another. This notion guided his life's work, which aimed to "synthesize universal patterns into a unified theory of culture," writes Rani Singh, Smith's former assistant and one of the editors of Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular: Smith's heroes were alchemists and anthropologists, and his goal was "the magical conversion of common materials into precious objects." Singh and coeditor Andrew Perchuk are striving to canonize Smith; the question is, which canon?

While the Anthology was provoking a tectonic shift in American culture, Smith labored in bohemian obscurity, embarking on grand experiments with painting and film. The contributors to this volume—all academics, though hailing from disciplines as varied as Smith's output—make a compelling, if overbearing, case for his status as a modern artist with outsider tendencies. The Anthology may be the foundational document of the Greenwich Village folk scene and the nationwide revival of old-time music it spawned, but it is also a signal achievement of modernist collage, "one of the first times that a collection of music was curated and presented as a unified work of art," Singh writes. It's an argument that has been made before, yet this is the most comprehensive book on the subject to date, and the most strident in its claims (the best single volume for Smith study remains 1999's Think of the Self Speaking, a collection of interviews with him). According to Singh, a new label is necessary to describe Smith's chronic hoarding in relation to his erratic creative output: "ethnographic modernist." Thus the collector redeems the artist.