Harry Everett Smith (May 29, 1923 – November 27, 1991) was an American polymath, who was credited variously as an artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, hoarder, student of anthropology and a Neo-Gnostic bishop.

Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City, and his activities, such as his use of mind-altering substances and interest in esoteric spirituality, anticipated aspects of the Hippie movement.

As a child he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located.

Smith's parents were Theosophists with Pantheistic tendencies (involving the belief in an immanent God who is identical with the Universe or nature), and both were fond of folk music.

His mother, Mary Louise, originally from Sioux City, Iowa, came from a long line of school teachers and herself taught for a time on the Lummi Indian reservation near Bellingham.

Smith was also a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg's folksong anthology, American Songbag.

During World War II, he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard-to-reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him.

He focused on American Indian tribes concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten to know through his mother's work with them.

[7] When the war ended Smith, now 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene.

[9] Immediately after her funeral, Smith, who was estranged from his father, left Berkeley for a room above a well known after-hours jazz club in the Fillmore district of San Francisco.

Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances; and San Francisco abounded in night spots and after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard.

Originally issued as budget discs marketed to regional, rural audiences, these records had long been known, collected, and occasionally reissued by folklorists[17] and aficionados,[18] but this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers.

A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler, and never completed by Smith.

[20] The music on Smith's anthology, performed by such artists as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, The Carter Family, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee, and Bascom Lamar Lunsford, greatly influenced the folk & blues revivals of the 1950s and 60s and were covered by The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, to name a few.

Rock critic Greil Marcus in his liner-note essay for the 1997 Smithsonian reissue, quoted musician Dave van Ronk's avowal that "We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.

His annotations avoided localized historical and social commentary, consisting instead of terse, evocative synopses – riffs – written in the manner of telegraph messages or newspaper headlines as though from an otherworldly realm, seemingly both timeless and avant-garde.

[22] Smith told interviewer John Cohen that he had first heard this kind of record at the home of Bertrand Harris Bronson, the eminent English professor and ballad scholar,[23] who collected them.

In 1946 Smith reportedly lived for a time in small room with a separate entrance on the first floor of Bronson's Berkeley residence, and it is thought he may have received informal tutelage in folk music through his acquaintance with the scholar.

[24] Smith also told Cohen that in selecting his material he relied heavily on the Library of Congress's mimeographed "List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records", a monograph compiled by Alan Lomax in 1940 with the assistance of Pete Seeger, that Lomax and Seeger had sent out to folk song scholars (and which could also be purchased directly from the Library for 25 cents).

In his notes to a 2006 revival CD, Elvis Costello wrote: "We're lucky that somebody compiled the Anthology as intelligently and as imaginatively so that it can tell a series of stories to future musicians and listeners, and be a starting point.

"[31] Peter Stampfel recalled that, as the album's editor and producer, "Harry's contribution to the proceedings were his presence, inspiration, and best of all, smashing a wine bottle against the wall while we were recording 'Nothing,'"[32] But Sanders recalled learning a lot from watching Smith's adept, businesslike tape editing at the Folkways studio, adding that, as far as he knew, Smith received no financial reward for his work.

In keeping with his interest in chemically altered states of consciousness, Smith made field recordings documenting Kiowa peyote meeting songs, which Folkways issued as a multi-LP set.

[39] Smith's early efforts in the field of fine art painting were freeform abstractions intended to visually represent notes, measures, beats and riffs of the beatnik era jazz music that inspired him.

He recorded Lummi songs and rituals using homemade equipment and notation of his own devising, and had an important collection of Native American religious objects.

A set of "irregularly-shaped Tarot cards" he designed was apparently used for the degree certificates for a branch of Ordo Templi Orientis founded by occultist Aleister Crowley.

[40]Smith also studied the Enochian system in depth and as it was recounted by Edward Kelley and John Dee, which was later elaborated upon by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the aforementioned OTO.

[citation needed] In 1986 Smith was consecrated a bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, an order which lists William Blake and Giordano Bruno in its pantheon of saints.

[40] In 2023, Smith was accorded a very rare honor of being canonized a Gnostic Saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica by Hymenaeus Beta, the head of the EGC.

[54] Of the estimated (by Szwed) 3000 titles Lomax and Seeger listened to, Alan selected 350 for inclusion in a Library of Congress monograph called the "List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records," published in a September 1940 Report of the Committee of the Conference on Inter-American Relations in the Field of Music.

This was the first methodological research made into the pre-war commercial record companies' documentation of rural vernacular music and, despite its main shortcoming — the fact that the team had little or no access to titles from the Gennett or OKeh catalogs — it proved to be a highly influential road-map for at least two of the earliest and most influential collectors of this music, Harry Smith and James McKune, who in turn paved the way for the many years that followed of its further excavation, investigation, and publication — which, of course, continue apace today (Nathan Salsburg, "Alan Lomax's, 'List of American Folk Songs on Commercial Records', Library of Congress, 1940", Root Hog or Die, September 24, 2012.)