Marisa Anderson questions the folk archive on The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music

Marisa Anderson’s The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music remains one of the most conceptually powerful records from the 22 May release wave. Issued through Thrill Jockey, the album responds to Harry Smith’s famous Anthology of American Folk Music by looking outside the American canon and toward non-American 78rpm recordings connected to regions affected by U.S. conflict during Anderson’s lifetime.

That premise gives the record a serious political and historical frame, but Anderson’s guitar keeps it from becoming dry theory. Her playing can make an instrumental line feel like geography, witness, lament and argument at once. The title is deliberately sharp. UnAmerican here does not simply mean foreign. It asks what gets excluded when a country tells stories about its musical roots, and what happens when a guitarist listens to those exclusions with humility instead of ownership.

For a 24 May indie digest, this is an essential folk and instrumental item because it treats folk music as a living, contested archive. It is beautiful music, but it is also a question: who gets remembered, who gets translated, and what is lost when music moves from one world into another? Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/may/15/marisa-anderson-the-anthology-of-unamerican-folk-music-review-harry-smith