I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source way off the beaten track of American biography.

Harry Smith was the artist duck you never heard of in the art underground, an unsightly

often obnoxious genius, only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude, Bob Dylan,

who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected, Thelonious Mark, who talked him

through the Bob era, Patty Smith, the songster, no relation, the poet Alan Ginsberg, who

looked after the homeless Harry Smith, and now the historian detective John Sweat has

filled in a thousand details in his portrait of the cosmic scholar and catalyst of our culture,

Harry Smith.

He was a compulsive worker who never took a straight job, a heavy drinker, and a drug

druggy, a social outcast with time on my hands, he called himself, he was a working artist

in film, a mystic, and a philosopher who said late in life that he had had the thrill of

proving Plato right.

Music, he declared, can change the direction of a civilization.

What if he's right, John Sweat?

What do we owe him?

And did his life prove his point?

He proved a lot of points.

The problem with Harry is he was a jack of too many trades.

More trades than people could handle, and that added to the fact that he was quite mysterious

about himself, and sometimes I'm not even sure he had his own story straight, he kept shifting

his stories over the years, but what we do know is that he qualifies in some serious way

as an anthropologist, a pioneer filmmaker and multimedia artist, a painter, a folklorist,

...