Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930's America by Ronald D. Cohen (review)

I have been an admirer of Ronald Cohen's work for a good twenty years since I donated my 78 of Paul Robeson's "Spring Song" to the ten-cd Bear Family anthology, Songs for Political Action (Bear Family Records, 1996). The book that comes with this unique collection of left-wing Americana remains a brilliant contribution to the study of political music and Ronald Cohen is the co-author along with Dave Samuelson. Cohen's anthology of Alan Lomax' writings, the autobiographies of Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, 1930s activists and founders of Broadside Magazine, which he edited, and his Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society 1940–1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002) are all in my library. The prospect of a new book on the Left and music in the 1930s by Cohen whetted my appetite. By and large I am not disappointed.

This short book – 158 pages from introduction to epilogue – covers a lot of ground. Its central theme is the creation, during the Depression years of the 1930s, of a style of popular music that came to be called folk music and the role of the political left, mainly members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of the United States of America (cpusa), in creating it. It connects a lot of dots and identifies many of the key players who laid the foundations for what today is a mass popular music form. The book offers an immense amount of detail that links the early study of folk music with its support by agencies of the American government through the New Deal. It would be hard to find this elsewhere. Perhaps its strongest contribution is explaining how a group of folks had been assembled by the end of the 1930s who, after World War II, would make folk music the important part of American popular culture it remains today. With today's accolades for Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan getting the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, Cohen fills in the story when folk music was seen as a curiosity rather than a vital, living musical form. He describes how this was a project of a handful of radicals, mainly Communists. Cohen follows the Lomaxes and Seegers, pères et fils, and the varied cast of characters, some well known and others lost in obscurity. This is a book that is made to order for anyone who wants to understand where folk music came from and what the 1930s sounded like. It is popular history in the best sense.

However, there is a big hole in the analysis and it shares this with many others writing about the American folk music revival in the 1930s and later. This is its failure to explain sufficiently the evolution of the left-wing politics it identifies in its title as being key to the project. One word that Cohen never uses is Stalinism. The fact that the policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, (CPSU), starting in the late 1920s, would be the template for the policies of the Communist movement in every country is never really described. The fact that the policy of the cpusa was determined not by Americans but in Moscow is never clearly stated. From the mad sectarianism of the Third Period which would aid Hitler's rise to power, to the endorsation of the Moscow Trials and mass purges of thousands of loyal Communists later on, to the defence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the American Communists followed every twist and turn of Soviet policy. One aspect of this, one of the few positives in my view, was the embrace of folk music.

The role of the members of the cpusa and the party itself in promoting folk music was not only the result of a genuine appreciation of the richness of the creation of American workers and farmers. It...