There is no doubt that vernacular histories such as American early blues music are highly refined artistic expressions. Artist and archivist, Harry Smith, insisted that symbolic developments across cultures were fundamentally related, and found many distinctions to be arbitrary at best. Tensions between so-called high and low culture is a dynamic constructive force that drives culture forward to express the needs and realities of every new age.
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link below is an audio file (opens a quicktime page) taken from the internet archive.
Harry Smith lecture on the Native American cosmos, July, 1990. – Smith, Harry
