Political Music and the Politics of Music in the Twentieth Century

When working at their best, historians often find ways to make connections across occasionally rigid methodological and thematic interests. Music historians, as in the works under consideration here, can take this lesson to heart. These authors move beyond a focus on musicology and narrow genre histories to show the ways that examining the music-making process can illuminate larger issues about the past. In I Hear America Singing Rachel Clare Donaldson tracks the struggle to define American identity through the folk music revival. Charles Hughes’s Country Soul sees American race relations at play in the recording studios of the American South in the latter half of the twentieth century. Both authors stress continuity in the musical developments they examine. The two authors also weave cultural and political developments alongside the history of these cultural forms.

Donaldson delivers a comprehensive “intellectual history of the folk revival” from the 1930s to the 1970s (19). For Donaldson, the larger revival was a political as much as musical movement with an emphasis on cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, and democratic ideals at each stage of the movement. According to her, cultural pluralism of the early folk revival “provided a bridge” to the multiculturalism of its latter stages (5). Donaldson notes key differences in the two ideas: the former a response to the early twentieth-century xenophobia, and the latter a product of racial nationalism in the era following the Second World War. Despite these conceptual differences, civic idealism and social and political justice provide continuity across these terms, a critical feature for Donaldson. Whereas other scholars have emphasized distinct movements within the revival, she synthesizes these histories to convey a more coherent, lasting revival. For example, rather than focus on folk music of the New Deal era or baby boom influences on 1960s folk music, Donaldson characterizes “a cultural movement that lasted for decades” and “went through phases” (20). This is a welcome addition to the historiography that puts the entirety of the revival era under one broad umbrella and within a concise narrative.

As an intellectual history, dominant figures in Donaldson’s narrative will be recognizable to folk music historians and general music enthusiasts alike. Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Sarah Gertrude Knott, and Moe Asch all figure prominently and their biographies often follow the trajectory of the revival. Donaldson places the origins of the revival in the late 1920s and early 1930s, emerging from a new form of nationalism associated with the Old Left politics that spawned the New Deal, and, more specifically, emphasizes political action through a musically nationalist vision. Unlike the xenophobia of the World War I era, this nationalism planted the seeds for what became multiculturalism. World War II offered a sea change for the revival, by creating opportunities for the folk revivalists to expand their audience around a pluralist rhetoric of anti-totalitarianism. For instance, Lomax found an increased audience through radio programs produced under the auspices of the War Department and the democratic ideals of the folk music enthusiasts paired well with an increased emphasis on “civic consensus” in American politics (75).

The idea of “civic consensus” created problems for revivalists in the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, but Donaldson counters the traditional narrative that the practice of blacklisting artists thrust the music industry wholly on the defensive. Instead she notes that the politics of the Cold War shrank the folk music audience momentarily, but did not really affect the zeal driving core revivalists. Publications like the magazine Sing Out! kept a spirit of pluralism alive and maintained at least some of the rhetoric of the earlier period. Festivals had a new emphasis on peace, and folk music began to move into the mainstream with the growth in popularity of groups like The Weavers. At...