Sounding for Harry Smith with Bret Lunsford

Pacific Northwest musician-historian, Bret Lunsford (Anacortes Museum) unravels a string of mysteries to reveal the avant-garde shards of a 20th century alchemist in his hometown.

Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was a boyhood resident of Anacortes, Washington for ten years of the Great Depression. Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences is a visually compelling oral history-based biography that immerses the reader in Salish Sea traditions and discord to explore the myths of a countercultural shaman whose strange impacts on art, music and film resound from studies of place to beat improvisation, through brain paintings to a Grammy Award for his folk music bible.

Speaker Bio:
Bret Lunsford is a founding member of the bands Beat Happening and D+. In addition to his own musical endeavors, Lunsford operates the loose collective of Knw-Yr-Own, an independent record and book maker based in his hometown of Anacortes, Washington. He is also a writer of history, author of “Croatian Fishing Families of Anacortes” and "Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences." Lunsford is currently the director at the Anacortes Museum. He reef-netted at Iceberg Point in the mid-1970s.