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assessment. First Blues was compiled by beat biographer Ann Charters and was released on Moe Asch’s Folkways label. Compounding the mystique, confusion, and interconnectivity of these beat/archival coincidences is the fact that there are actually two First Blues albums credited to Allen Ginsberg. Both albums were recorded in the ’70s, and both remained unreleased until the early ’80s.
    Columbia Records impresario John Hammond produced the other First Blues . But because Columbia considered Allen’s works too brazen, Hammond was compelled to release the double album on his own (short-lived) JHR label.
    Unlike the solo recording produced by Harry Smith at the Chelsea, Hammond’s production features Allen singing with group accompaniment. Musicians like David Amram and Happy Traum performed on the Hammond sessions, as did Allen’s lover Peter Orlovsky, and Allen’s dear friend Bob Dylan.
    Although some of the same songs appear on both First Blues albums, the two recording sessions were quite different—as different, we might say, as Harry Smith and John Hammond.
    When I discussed the Smith-Ginsberg First Blues with Hal Wilner (who produced the Ginsberg CD anthology, Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949–1993 ), he wondered, “Was it a conscious decision to record in Harry’s room at the Chelsea for environment as opposed to Allen’s? [There is] kind of a tense atmosphere and Allen doesn’t sound all that relaxed.”
    Wilner’s observation seems accurate—singing his “blues” while playing a small harmonium from Benares, India, Allen Ginsberg struggled through those Chelsea performances, mostly bereft of conventional musicality.
    But if Ginsberg was really the sole performer, the lonesome entertainer, the solo-ballad-blues disciple, why does Harry Smith loom so large in the proceedings?
    Practically speaking, Smith’s documentation of Ginsberg at the Chelsea is no different from any other anthropological fieldwork, just like Smith’s 1965 recording of peyote rituals by the Kiowa Indians in rural Oklahoma (see Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua for additional clues).
    And what of the eternal Bob Dylan? Allen loved Bob and was eager to impress him. “I don’t think I would have been singing if it wasn’t for younger Dylan,” Ginsberg told Harvey Kubernik. “He turned me on to actual singing. Dylan’s words were so beautiful. The first time I heard them I wept.”
    Not only did Dylan inspire Ginsberg with his words, but Bob also showed Allen the three chords he needed to write a folk or blues tune—insisting that it was Allen’s time to sing out rather than recite his prose. So, while Smith may have been Ginsberg’s twin tower of aesthetic strength at the Chelsea, Dylan figured into their First Blues as a more subliminal conspirator.
    While Dylan repaid artistic debts to Ginsberg (and Kerouac) by encouraging the poet to sing, there’s a less obvious connection between Bob Dylan and Harry Smith. That is, Dylan’s first album (produced by John Hammond) contains songs drawn from The Anthology of American Folk Music . And surely as Dylan gained insight into America’s folk/blues evolution by listening to the Anthology in the early ’60s, Bob made his circuitous back-payment to Mr. Smith via First Blues .
    Dylan wasn’t present during the Chelsea recording session, but he played on the “other” First Blues , thereby further illuminating the extended relatedness between himself and gurus Ginsberg, Smith, and Hammond.
    What does all of this say about Harry recording Allen at the Chelsea? Merely that Ginsberg’s eccentric performances would have been forgotten were it not for Smith’s predilection for recording folk art and documenting everyday life.
    â€œIt was just another example of field anthropology in a post-modern mode,” said Ed Sanders of the Fugs. “Allen