Upon its release the Anthology sold relatively poorly and had no notable early coverage besides a minor mention in Sing Out!

Smith himself designed and edited the anthology and wrote the liner notes, which are almost as well known as the music, using an unusual fragmented, collage method that presaged some postmodern artwork.

"[13] Each of the three sets carries the same cover art, a Theodore de Bry etching of an instrument Smith referred to as the Celestial Monochord,[14] taken from a mystical treatise by scientist/alchemist Robert Fludd.

By 1953, Folkways had sold only fifty albums, forty-seven of which went to libraries and colleges and for a time, it was out of print because of copyright issues.

An additional booklet included expanded track information for each song by Jeff Place, excerpts from Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, essays by Jon Pankake, Luis Kemnitzer, Moses Asch, and Neil Rosenberg, and tributes and appreciations by John Fahey, John Cohen, Elvis Costello, Peter Stampfel, Lucy Sante, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt, Chuck Pirtle, and Allen Ginsberg.

[18] The album features Beck, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Beth Orton, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Richard Thompson, Wilco and others covering the songs of the original anthology.

[20] Writing for AllMusic, critic John Bush wrote the compilation "could well be the most influential document of the '50s folk revival.

Many of the recordings that appeared on it had languished in obscurity for 20 years, and it proved a revelation to a new group of folkies, from Pete Seeger to John Fahey to Bob Dylan...

Many of the most interesting selections on the Anthology, however, are taken from [obscure] artists... such as Clarence Ashley, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, and Buell Kazee.

"[21] In his review for The Village Voice, music critic Robert Christgau wrote "Harry Smith's act of history... aces two very '90s concepts: the canon that accrues as rock gathers commentary, and the compilations that multiply as labels recycle catalogue.

In its time, it wrested the idea of the folk from ideologues and ethnomusicologists by imagining a commercial music of everyday pleasure and alienation—which might as well have been conceived to merge with a rock and roll that didn't yet exist... Somebody you know is worth the 60 bucks it'll run you.

In 2005, the album was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, aesthetically, or historically significant".

[32] Though relatively little was written about the Anthology during the first years after it was released (the first known press reference to the collection was in the folk music magazine Sing Out!

The collection brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

As the liner notes to the 1997 reissue say, musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.

In terms of academic credibility, this partly came from the work of [Robert] Cantwell and [Greil] Marcus, which was published fairly close to the reissue of the collection.