American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (review)

American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957. By Richard A. Reuss with JoAnne C. Reuss. (American Folk Music and Musicians Series, 4.) Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. [xviii, 297 p. ISBN 0-8108-3684-X. $55.]

It has long been acknowledged that folk music played a central role in both the "Old Left"--the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS) and its affiliates--from 1930 to 1955, and in the "New Left" of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. In fact, historians usually take the association of folk music and left-wing politics for granted, assuming that the Left had a natural affinity for the "music of the people."

Richard A. Reuss's fine study, however, corrects this assumption. The book originated as a doctoral dissertation in folklore, completed at Indiana University in 1971. Reuss was a passionate participant in the folk-music "revival" of the late 1950s and 1960s who chose to study the pre-revival era, when activists such as Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Irwin Silber promoted folk music as a radical voice. Reuss interviewed these figures and researched recordings, newsletters, and personal archives. The author died in 1986 and never saw his dissertation published, but his widow, JoAnne C. Reuss, prepared the present version. Her work is not an updated revision. She takes note of books and articles on the subject that have appeared since 1971, but she admits to having "made little attempt to update the study to take account of recent scholarship" (p. xii). The result, not surprisingly, is a work rooted in its era's scholarly conventions, but it also happens to be useful to scholars and engagingly accessible to all readers.

The first chapter is the most dated, surveying the interrelation of folklore and politics from a fairly static functionalist perspective that has been out of vogue among folklorists for decades. Chapter 2, though, commences a straightforward history of the radical Left's growing attachment to folk music as a medium for their message. Briefly noting the seminal effect of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) protest songs before World War I, Reuss then traces the gradual acceptance of folk song among communists in America and abroad. In the formative years of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks experimented with traditional songs as "agitprop," but Reuss notes that folklore, being largely rural, agricultural, and ideologically conservative, "had its drawbacks as a propaganda vehicle" (p. 30). During the forward-looking Third Period of 1928-34, Joseph Stalin barred any traditional-sounding or nonideological art. In the United States, this dictum encouraged the CPUS (which gained its greatest following in these years, at the depth of the Great Depression) to form the Composers' Collective to write new musical agitprop and party choruses to sing it. Ironically, the urban, bourgeois aesthetic tastes of composers such as Charles Seeger and Elie Siegmeister guided this effort. Party labor organizers, however, brought stirring rural protest singers to the cities, and folklore gained in prestige during the Popular Front years of the late 1930s, when the CPUS joined with other left-wing groups to warn against fascism. Soviet doctrine soon took a pro-folklore stance, the CPUS leader Earl Browder promoted communism as "twentieth-century Americanism," and radical composers such as Seeger now praised folk song. The city choruses now performed southern labor songs, and the African American protest tradition became a tool in the party's attempt to recruit blacks. While the Popular Front also espoused Tin Pan Alley-style musical propaganda and big-band jazz (often mistakenly considered "folk" material by party activists), rural sounds and styles were now in ascent.

By 1940, young activist musicians such as Alan Lomax, Lee Hays, Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, and Charles Seeger's son, Pete, were creating an urban folksingers' subculture. That year, taking the rakish self-promoter Woody Guthrie as their model, some of them formed the Almanac Singers, an organization that collected folk...