Music Arcades: Various (Harry Smith, editor): Anthology of American Folk Music

Along with , this was one of the boxed sets I ripped on to my iPod in 2004 because (a) I had 5 GB of storage and felt the need to use at least half of it, and (b) I'd had the set for maybe three years by then, but hadn't made much progress in digesting it, so I thought carrying it around with me might help. My main memory is of listening to it in a coach going to and from Tunis while on a November break later that year. In fact, iTunes tells me that some of the tracks were played just once then and never again since — until now, when I've made my way all the way through from beginning to end.

Despite the long lay-off, the collection feels much more familiar to me now than it did then. What drew me to it in the first place was how it was referred to as a touchstone by every great songwriter from Dylan to Meritt. By listening to the Anthology, then listening to the songs that flowed from it downstream, and then going back to it, well, the lines of descent are clearer, and I guess that's how songs can sound more familiar without hearing them.

Little things that you pick up on each new listen (wondering how you never noticed them before). Dock Boggs, who featured heavily in one of Greil Marcus's books about Dylan, has a song called Sugar Baby, which Bob may have had in mind when writing his own with that title, though as you'd expect there's no clear connection beyond that correspondence. Also Nick Cave seems to have spent almost as long with this collection as with the Old Testament.

On this listen, it's the fourth disc, the religious and gospel strand of the "Social Music" volume, that connects most.

Other miscellaneous notes.

How time slows and then speeds up in popular music. So when this collection was first released, it was (I'm told) received like the music of a long lost generation. Yet the songs were recorded 20-25 years earlier. If you released a collection in 2011 of songs released between 1986 and 1991, it would be received as though it were the music of yesterday, or maybe last week.
Harry Smith never got licenses for the recordings he copied and distributed. He was the Napster, the Limewire, the GrooveShark of 1952. If you accept the Marcusian argument that almost all of what we now recognise as popular rock and folk music is descended from this evolutionary channel, then you could argue that most of the profits of the major labels over the past half a century are the fruits of piracy.
Speaking of rip-offs, Gracenote's metadata for this collection is a complete mess, or was at the time I ripped my CDs. Across the six CDs they used four different ways of writing the disc titles and numbering: Anthology of American Folk Music - 1-B Ballads; Anthology of American Folk Music: Ballads 1-A; Anthology Of American Folk Music (Disc 4); Anthology Of American Folk Music, Vol. 3 (Disc 2). They may have fixed that now, but I can't check because they've removed public access to the data they sourced from the public. But then Gracenote has always smelled bad.