Marisa Anderson Builds an Un-American Songbook From Harry Smith’s Private Archive

On May 22, Thrill Jockey will release The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music Vol. 1, a record that takes Marisa Anderson deep into the private library of folk archivist Harry Smith. Her source material didn’t come from the famed 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music that shaped Dylan and a generation. She went straight for the foreign records Smith collected until his death, pulling pieces from countries the United States has been in conflict with since 1970, the year Anderson was born.

The project started with a rumor. Invited to Tulsa for a joint production between Foxy Digitalis and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Anderson toured the Bob Dylan museum and heard whispers about Smith’s books and records stored there. The head of the museum initially told her the collection wasn’t open to the public. She pressed, got a look, and immediately noticed a 1950s record from Niger, a country with no recording industry at that time. The shelves held music from everywhere. “A whole globe of records,” she says.

The Tulsa Artist Fellowship later encouraged a project proposal. Anderson asked for full digital access to the archive. She skipped the American material entirely. The phrase “The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music” surfaced in her mind while she worked, and the political frame became clear. She limited herself to music from nations cast as adversarial in her lifetime. The second rule was practical: only instruments she already owned. No learning the oud. No elaborate setups. “The project was big enough without having to learn the oud or something,” she says. The result is a conversation, not a recreation. Anderson treats the music as something people carry when they move, a living friction between place and sound.