When guitarist Marisa Anderson asked to see the famed folklorist and anthropologist Harry Smith’s record collection—or what was left of it when he died in 1991—she was given 15 minutes. It was enough time for her worldview to explode. Sitting in the climate-controlled room in the back of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, she shuffled past the expected southern gospel, country blues, and Native American ceremonial records to discover literally thousands of folk recordings drawn from around the world: Afghanistan. Pakistan. Central Vietnam. Eritrea. Yemen. Soviet Russia. Her mind reeled. What was this music, and how had it wound up in Smith’s collection?
When she returned a year later with a grant, she downloaded about 900 songs spread across 70 records—nearly 45 continuous hours of raga, of taqsim, of forms and lexicons of folk languages she didn’t even begin to speak. She didn’t know how the music was made, or what rules undergirded it. So she set about researching: She investigated Arabic music theory; she pored over maps and migratory paths. She consulted Smith’s indispensable yet maddeningly gnomic notes for clues about the disembodied sounds that had captured her attention.
On the first volume of The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, Anderson finds a way to show us her own image reflected in all of this study. The songs she has chosen to interpret and record all come from places that her home country, the United States, had deemed “the enemy” at some point during her life. She plays them on guitar, yes, but also on requinto jarocho, the tres Cubano, keyboard, accordion, and the pedal steel. The assignment has brought untold depth and sensitivity out of her. She pours herself deeply into this music, as if she might herself take new shapes inside it.
Born in 1970, Anderson grew up as a member of Gen X, the precise generation for which the idea of the “forever war”—distant, clamorous, troubling, ever-present, global conflict existing in the psyche like tinnitus—became common. The War on Drugs justified incursions into South America while the Cold War dominated the television. For anyone of this age, the idea of America as an imperial power creating constant chaos thousands of miles away while you sat in relative comfort in your home was your baseline reality. When you’re asked to hold a cognitive dissonance for that long, you make it rhyme. This project is how Anderson makes it rhyme.
Much like the conductor Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together students from Israel and the Arab world, Anderson’s project bears the comet trails of some starry-eyed beliefs about what playing and listening to music can accomplish. “In order to truly hear, we must learn how to listen,” she writes in her liner notes. “I have listened and played my way through the past 50 years.” Thankfully, Anderson has spent too long squinting at this music to believe she understands it. Her relationship to these pieces has grown warty and gnarled in the manner of a lifetime partnership, and when she plays, her humility glows like a pilot light.
She may have strained in her studies, but her playing belies none of it, which is relaxed and supple and careful and patient. Her phrasing on “Taqsim for Guitar” is rapt and careful, the subtlety of her note-bending suggesting an instrument far wispier and more pliable than a wooden acoustic guitar. It’s transformative and beautiful.
Anderson’s devotion to this music shines through most brightly in the thoughtfulness of her arrangements. “Zar” is a piece of Yemeni ceremonial music meant for driving out spirits of illness from the sick. Anderson arranges this work, which dizzies itself with pentatonic scales in endlessly shifting patterns, for the requinto jarocho, a Mexican instrument that has nothing to do with Yemeni tradition, and invited her friend Gisela Rodríguez Fernández. to play the other lines on violin and viola. The piece she springs loose from all of this work lives nowhere—neither in Mexican tradition nor in Yemeni ones. But it moves with the leaping grace of a fountain beneath Anderson’s fingers.
On “Rop Koh,” she transforms herself into a one-woman Cambodian string orchestra. The original piece relies on bowed and plucked instruments; hers glimmers at us from the meeting point of electric guitar and piano and pedal steel guitar. The loping 4/4 pentatonic melody, circling endlessly, sounds like a faint imprint of a piece of music as it recedes slowly from memory. Maybe this is what the piece sounds like to Anderson: the after-image produced after a shock of light against our retinas. Somewhere in the trails of wonder the piece leaves after it fades, we find our own humanity reflected back at us: listening in to someone listening, all of us straining with every fiber we’ve got to hear one another.
