Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States by William G. Roy (review)

For the majority of the last forty years, sociologist William G. Roy has delved into the underlying structures of American industrial corporations. Surprisingly, he has now released Reds, Whites, and Blues, which explores how certain American social movements have used music. Roy deems this shift “curious” (ix) and attributes it to several factors, including his youthful political involvement (such as a years-long stint with Radio Free People, a leftist communications collective in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and “an unfulfilled scholarly commitment in graduate school” (ix) to examine activist culture. Thus, an early personal and professional impulse now has gripped the author and brought him to investigate how particular social movements drew upon song to disseminate their ideology and/or to create group solidarity.

In particular, this book focuses on two American social movements in the twentieth century, both of which emphasized music as a part of their political/cultural underpinnings and worked to create racial unity: the “Old Left/communist-led movement of the 1930s and 1940s” and “the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s” (2). Roy also examines how members of these groups and others attempted to classify “folk music,” a process that often defined or defied racial boundaries.

The second and third chapters focus on this latter goal, laying out the origins of folk music as a genre. Roy affirms that folk music has always been an engineered category, one reflecting debates as to what cultural products are acceptable expression of a people. For example, he notes that white abolitionists and black activists in the nineteenth century chose the spiritual over minstrel music as the authentic representation of African Americans, a rejection that Roy finds telling as the latter song tradition was the most popular musical form of the era even though it largely represented the black community negatively. The author heightens his argument about genre development in the third chapter, wherein he excoriates early American folklorists for being racist in their determination of what songs truly represented the national character. He points to Francis Child, whose scholarly work on ballads in Great Britain largely established the standards of and emphasis in folk song analysis for a generation. Those who followed Child’s lead excluded many popular forms from the genre of folk music as they did not meet his criteria and also centered their own work on how English ballads could be found in America, thus setting white songs as the norm.

These general arguments are useful, but they sometimes suffer in their particulars. For example, Roy overreaches when he argues that early folklorists specifically worked to establish folk music as a purely white form. In particular, he states that the Journal of American Folklore aided the push for white folk music to be the standard, noting that “there were few articles on African Americans until the 1920s” (62). However, a survey of this journal from its beginnings in 1888 to 1919 finds that there were dozens of pieces by such people as Howard Odum and John Lomax discussing spirituals and secular songs from the black community (along with many other articles on Native and Hispanic American folk music).

The next three chapters explore how the American Left of the 1930s and 1940s adopted its own brand of folk music, one meant to propagandize to the nation’s workers, especially African Americans. The Communist Party and its allies strove for a particularly American mode of expression during the Cultural Front era, so various “cultural entrepreneurs” (100) such as members of the Lomax and Seeger families chose and disseminated certain homegrown traditions. Unfortunately, urban-based northern union members did not embrace the political songs offered to them as this particular music did not connect to their own song traditions or to popular commercial forms. But the publications, recordings...