Ross Hair is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry (2010) and Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present (2016). His essays on modern American and British poetry have appeared in, among other publications, the Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

Thomas Ruys Smith is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (2007), and Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (2011). He is also the editor of Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories (2010), and, with Sarah Churchwell, Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers, from Charlotte Temple to The Kite Runner (2012).

Part I Introductions

1 Introduction: America changed through music

Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith

2 "Spun in a wheel of vertigo": Harry Smith and the magic of history

Geoff Ward

3 Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: thecritical heritage

Rory Crutchfield

Interlude 1. "This unknown body of Americana": Alan Lomax's List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Nathan Salsburg

Part II "The whole bizarre package"

4 Harry Smith, the Anthology, and the artist as collector

Justin Parks

5 Collage, politics, and narrative approaches to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

Dan Blim

6 Harry Smith: collecting thought-forms and programming the aerial computer

R. Bruce Elder

Part III Deep cuts

7 "Fatal Flower Garden": the execution of a Child ballad

Robin Purves

8 Smith's Amnesia Theater: "Moonshiner's Dance" in Minnesota

Kurt Gegenhuber

9 Dead Presidents: "Charles Guiteau," "White House Blues," and the histories of Smithville

Thomas Ruys Smith

Interlude 2. How weird is folk?

Sharron Kraus

Part IV "Other lives"

10 "Volk Roots and Hiart Leaves": John Fahey and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Ross Hair

11 Recycling the South: contemporary literature and the Anthology of American Folk Music

Phil Langran

12 The "other lives" of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music

Paola Ferrero

Afterword

Rani Singh