When guitarist Marisa Anderson asked to see the famed folklorist and anthropologist Harry Smith’s record collection—or what was left of it when he died in 1991—she was given 15 minutes. It was enough time for her worldview to explode. Sitting in the climate-controlled room in the back of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, she shuffled past the expected southern gospel, country blues, and Native American ceremonial records to discover literally thousands of folk recordings drawn from around the world: Afghanistan. Pakistan. Central Vietnam. Eritrea. Yemen. Soviet Russia. Her mind reeled. What was this music, and how had it wound up in Smith’s collection?
When she returned a year later with a grant, she downloaded about 900 songs spread across 70 records—nearly 45 continuous hours of raga, of taqsim, of forms and lexicons of folk languages she didn’t even begin to speak. She didn’t know how the music was made, or what rules undergirded it. So she set about researching: She investigated Arabic music theory; she pored over maps and migratory paths. She consulted Smith’s indispensable yet maddeningly gnomic notes for clues about the disembodied sounds that had captured her attention.
No score yet, be the first to add.
On the first volume of The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, Anderson finds a way to show us her own image reflected in all of this study. The songs she has chosen to interpret and record all come from places that her home country, the United States, had deemed “the enemy” at some point during her life. She plays them on guitar, yes, but also on requinto jarocho, the tres Cubano, keyboard, accordion, and the pedal steel. The assignment has brought untold depth and sensitivity out of her. She pours herself deeply into this music, as if she might herself take new shapes inside it.
Born in 1970, Anderson grew up as a member of Gen X, the precise generation for which the idea of the “forever war”—distant, clamorous, troubling, ever-present, global conflict existing in the psyche like tinnitus—became common. The War on Drugs justified incursions into South America while the Cold War dominated the television. For anyone of this age, the idea of America as an imperial power creating constant chaos thousands of miles away while you sat in relative comfort in your home was your baseline reality. When you’re asked to hold a cognitive dissonance for that long, you make it rhyme. This project is how Anderson makes it rhyme.
Much like the conductor Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together students from Israel and the Arab world, Anderson’s project bears the comet trails of some starry-eyed beliefs about what playing and listening to music can accomplish. “In order to truly hear, we must learn how to listen,” she writes in her liner notes. “I have listened and played my way through the past 50 years.” Thankfully, Anderson has spent too long squinting at this music to believe she understands it. Her relationship to these pieces has grown warty and gnarled in the manner of a lifetime partnership, and when she plays, her humility glows like a pilot light.
