Harry Smith; Folk Music Archivist, Filmmaker

Harry Smith, innovative filmmaker and legendary folk music archivist whose work had a seminal influence on many modern American musicians, died Wednesday night. He was 68.

Smith was stricken at his quarters in the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan and taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead of heart failure.

A resident teacher since 1988 at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., Smith was visiting in New York when he died.

Smith was best known for his historic, three-volume record collection, “American Folk Music,” released by Folkways in 1952.

“Mr. Smith’s work collecting and preserving American oral song literature and artifacts was a primary source of the post-mid-century folk music revival,” said poet Allen Ginsberg, a longtime friend.

Singer Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead are among the musicians who drew inspiration from Smith’s recordings of music around the nation from the bayous of Louisiana to the mountains of Appalachia, from blues singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson to the musical Carter family.

Smith donated much of his work to the Smithsonian Institution “for restricted scientific use” and last February was awarded a Grammy by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for the preservation of American music.

Smith was equally celebrated for what he referred to as “my cinematic excreta.” He was one of the first filmmakers to paint directly on frame and produced 23 films, specializing in animated collages and underground cinema classics shown regularly at the Anthology Film Archives in New York founded by Jonas Mekas.

Smith once said of his films: “They are valuable works, works that will live forever--they made me gray.”

Born in Portland, Ore., in 1923, Smith left no known survivors. Services and burial were planned next week at the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, near Red Feather Lakes in Colorado.