Various Artists – Old Town School Of Folk Music Songbook Volume One / Various Artists – Harry Smith Project: Anthology Of American Folk Music Revisited

My father learned banjo through the Old Town School of Folk Music, my sister studied guitar there, and during my last visit to the Chicago institution, I saw Townes Van Zandt perform one of his final shows. I also picked up the folk manual Songbook, which is to blame for whatever proficiency I have on the six-string.

All of which simply reflects upon Old Town’s vision. Founded in 1957, the school offers classes to 6,000 students and works actively in underprivileged communities. The school never defined folk; it has taught by doing. The songs and styles it teaches will never be authoritative. They’re in a constant state of becoming, existing only to be rendered again and again. That’s what it means to call them inexhaustible.

The first volume of the audio Songbook, featuring performers who have frequented OTSFM concerts and workshops (and some that haven’t), conveys the school’s utopian traditionalism: acoustic, direct, shared, unpretentious. There’s nothing special about Steve Rosen’s clawhammer banjo version of “Cripple Creek”, yet its transparent ordinariness is beautiful. And the durability of these tunes can be inspiring. Janet Bean has never sung so sweetly as on “Deep River Blues”; Robbie Fulks has never picked cleaner and truer than on the guitar-and-voice “Brown’s Ferry Blues”. Danny Barnes contributes a wholly earnest and whispered “Wabash Cannonball”, while Jon Langford has all the fun you’d imagine he would with “Take This Hammer”. The closing “Goodnight Irene” is a charming, blurry snapshot of how the song has been sung at musical gatherings in Chicago and anywhere for decades.

The two-CD plus two-DVD Harry Smith Project: Anthology Of American Folk Music Revisited is another beast entirely. Packaged to echo without aping the original Anthology Of American Folk Music, the box hopscotches between the 1999 and 2001 concerts produced by Hall Willner to celebrate the impending 50th anniversary of Smith’s folk kabala.

In multiple senses, the original compendium was anti-folk: Hyper-intellectual and hermetic, Smith had little interest in offhand and one-off performances. His curatorial vision was dedicated solely to commercial releases, objets d’arte, whose eternality he would reaffirm.

As exciting and thrilling as Willner’s tribute concerts were, timeless they’re not. And so folk they are. On the first disc, Steve Earle moans through Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Prison Cell Blues”; Bill Frisell’s guitar can’t redeem the underlying stiffness. Nick Cave and Gary Lucas turn in predictably overwrought versions of “John The Revelator” and “Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting”, respectively, while Maude Hudson just sounds lost on “No Depression In Heaven” despite her husband Garth’s whimsical squeezebox prologue. Wilco gives “James Alley Blues” a loose Mermaid Avenue-ish stroll, and Beck slides and snaps across “Last Fair Deal Gone Down”. Ultimately, Kate & Anna McGarrigle own the show with a full, haunting “Sugar Baby” that rocks the cradle with a gone-long-gone groove.

The second disc begins with Robin Holcomb’s wry, cat-like “A Lazy Farmer Boy” and Van Dyke Park’s neo-classical “Sail Away Ladies”. Less imaginatively convincing are Geoff Muldaur’s “Poor Boy Blues”, an exertion without payoff, and Lou Reed’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”, a toothless noisefest. Backed by jazz orchestra, David Thomas gets as weird as ever on “Fishing Blues”; backed by just guitar and bass, Marianne Faithfull evokes stateliness and wisdom on “Spike Driver Blues”.

The two DVDs focus on remarkably well-directed concert footage, sometimes interspersed with illustrative Depression-era clips. There are also talking-head snippets from Elvis Costello, Bob Neuwirth, Greil Marcus and Philip Glass (among others). More interesting is the footage of Smith himself, plus three of his short and quite beautiful experimental films. His legacy is vast; this box set scratches the surface as well as any but the original Anthology could.