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

Ronald D. Cohen has an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth-century folk music in the United States. His great output of writing on the subject, especially what is arguably his best work, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Amherst, Mass., 2002), already gives credence to his expertise in and commitment to this subject. Perhaps due to his past emphasis on the post-Depression years, Cohen has gone back to the era when left-wing politics and folk music were first joined through the efforts of many individuals and groups, including the federal government to some degree.

In the introduction to Depression Folk: Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America, Cohen states that he counts grassroots, vernacular, and even commercial compositions as folk music, and he pledges to investigate a broad range of genres and artists, such as "hillbilly (country) songs, rural blues, spirituals, cowboy songs, western swing, ethnic music and performers, singer-songwriters, labor songsters, and various others" (p. 5). In particular, he vows to "highlight the complex role that folk music and musicians, collectors and promoters, record companies and others, played during the decade" and to explore "the clash between capitalism and the emerging grassroots proletarian movements" (p. 6). Certainly, this spectrum of music and the author's commitment to historically and politically examining it offers much potential. Unfortunately, the book's organization and emphases work against its stated purpose.

First, the discussion is laid out chronologically, which does not initially seem wrongheaded. But because there are so many veins of music, Cohen mentions multiple people, organizations, and political forces without a single thread, except for time, to hold any chapter together. As a result, each section only provides a broad review of people, companies, and organizations that were conceivably recording or documenting music that Cohen would place in the broadly stated folk category, but no sustained or unifying discussion of any grassroots or left-wing political movement appears. There is no centering push, chapter by chapter, toward defending a significant part of the book's central thesis.

Second, although many forms of folk music are promised, the bulk of the book focuses on the usual suspects, especially materials collected by John and Alan Lomax, and the efforts of left-wing figures from the urban Northeast and those they embraced, such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. However, we find little discussion of how country music, blues, spirituals, and other forms less likely to fit into the traditional leftist folk canon were also connected to grassroots movements and commented on the political realities of the day.

What Cohen promises certainly fits with and expands on arguments by important scholars such as John Greenway, R. Serge Denisoff, Robbie Lieberman, Richard A. Reuss, and even Cohen himself, who have commented on the music of the political Left in the 1930s. But the problems noted above detract from any new revelations concerning the vast amount of material mentioned in Depression Folk. In fact, Cohen has already achieved some of what this book pledges to accomplish, in part, in his largely ignored book first published by the little-known Carquinez Press, Work and Sing: A History of Occupational and Labor Union Songs in the United States (Crockett, Calif., 2010). This book's chapters are organized around particular occupational and racial folk groups and their musical output, which makes it easier to digest than the book being reviewed here. However, both works suffer from a lack of an overarching discussion about how the political forces at play affected and were in turn changed by the music Cohen discusses.

But do not let the above discussion lead to the assumption that Depression Folk is without merit. Cohen's new book shows that he is well versed in the...