Depression Folk

Grassroots Music and Left-Wing Politics in 1930s America

Ronald D. Cohen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469628820
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Folk Music

While music lovers and music historians alike understand that folk music played an increasingly pivotal role in American labor and politics during the economic and social tumult of the Great Depression, how did this relationship come to be? Ronald D. Cohen sheds new light on the complex cultural history of folk music in America, detailing the musicians, government agencies, and record companies that had a lasting impact during the 1930s and beyond. Covering myriad musical styles and performers, Cohen narrates a singular history that begins in nineteenth-century labor politics and popular music culture, following the rise of unions and Communism to the subsequent Red Scare and increasing power of the Conservative movement in American politics--with American folk and vernacular music centered throughout. Detailing the influence and achievements of such notable musicians as Pete Seeger, Big Bill Broonzy, and Woody Guthrie, Cohen explores the intersections of politics, economics, and race, using the roots of American folk music to explore one of the United States' most troubled times. Becoming entangled with the ascending American left wing, folk music became synonymous with protest and sharing the troubles of real people through song.

CHAPTER ONE

On the Trail of Folk Songs

By the 1920s, folk music—rural and urban, North and South, black and white, foreign and domestic—from a variety of sources had numerous outlets in the United States, including books and articles by folk music collectors, commercial phonograph records and field recordings, radio programs, public shows and concerts, fiddle contests, folk festivals, and plenty of home entertainments. It posed some commercial competition for Tin Pan Alley tunes and popular band music, while occupying an important musical, social, and cultural niche. The groundwork had been laid for folk music’s subsequent role in promoting a nationalist agenda, particularly on the left of the political spectrum.1

Carl Sandburg’s highly influential songbook The American Songbag appeared in 1927 and quickly captured a welcoming audience while documenting the current state of folk music scholarship. He parted company from the established experts, however, in significantly broadening the concept of folk music, following on the heels of John Lomax and the other cowboy collectors since the century’s beginning. In contrast, and five years before The American Songbag, Louise Pound, an English professor at the University of Nebraska, had issued American Ballads and Songs with scores of selections. “The pieces in the following collection depend for their vitality upon oral, not upon written transmission,” she explained in the introduction. “They have a subliterate existence, as apart from verse preserved in a form fixed by the printed page.… Other characteristics of genuine folk-songs are that they have retained their vitality through a fair period of time and that all sense of their authorship and provenience has been lost by their singers.” Pound adhered to the academic definition of a ballad or folk song as having been passed down orally for centuries with no known author.2

Sandburg rejected such a narrow approach. Born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878, he had dropped out of school after the eighth grade, hit the road during the hard times of the late 1890s, served in the army during the Spanish-American War, and then entered college. He next resumed his travels, began writing poetry, and became a Socialist Party organizer and a journalist. In 1912, he moved with his family to Chicago, which he was to be closely identified with. Within a decade, he became a famed poet and writer, having picked up a love of folk songs along the way. With a rudimentary voice and guitar style, he nonetheless began to sing in public in 1925, starting with “The Buffalo Skinners,” which he had learned from John Lomax’s collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910). While busy with his famed Lincoln biography and extensive public speaking schedule, Sandburg continued to pick up songs and ballads throughout the country; he managed through much hard work to finish The American Songbag by late 1927. “There is presented herein a collection of 280 songs, ballads, ditties, brought together from all regions of America,” he explained. “The music includes not merely airs and melodies, but complete harmonizations or piano accompaniments. It is an All-American affair, marshaling the genius of thousands of original singing Americans.” While “100 pieces, strictly folk songs, have never been published; they have been gathered by the compiler and his friends from coast to coast and from the Gulf to Canada,” he nonetheless included a long list of published collections. He divided the songs into numerous sections, illustrating his eclectic approach: dramas and portraits, minstrel songs, pioneer memories, Great Lakes and Erie Canal songs, hobo songs, prison and jail songs, “The Big Brutal City,” “Blues, Mellows, Ballets,” Mexican border tunes, railroad songs, as well as lumberjack and sailor songs. Sandburg furnished each selection with a prefatory note. His focus was on songs and ballads in English, except for a few in Spanish. An immediate popular and critical success, the songbook remained in print into the next century and served to open the door to a less academic, more comprehensive and straightforward, as well as nationwide, understanding of folk music.3

Among the large number of grassroots music collectors besides Sandburg, Robert Gordon explored a variety of musical sources, expanding the field but with little initial impact. Born in 1888 in Bangor, Maine, as an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Harvard, he studied with the ballad scholars George Lyman Kittredge and F. B. Gummere. He next taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, 1918–24. His interest in folk songs led to his editing the “Old Songs That Men Have Sung” column in Adventure magazine, beginning in 1923 for over four years, which reached 2 million mostly male readers. This was similar to the music features in Railroad Man’s Magazine and Sea Stories. Gordon’s column reached a national audience, and he received a wide range of song texts from his readers, amateur collectors who were guided by Gordon’s advice. He particularly liked collecting songs along the San Francisco waterfront, working with Frank Kester, who ran the sea songs and stories column “The Dogwatch” in the Oakland Tribune. Gordon used a cylinder record player to record over 200 local songs, mostly shanties and other sea songs, from sailors and hoboes, but also some Child ballads, blues, and bawdy songs.4

Gordon returned to the East in 1924 and the next year began an odyssey that took him to the South, resulting in many hundreds of recordings. In Asheville, North Carolina, he recorded Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a noted banjo player and collector who was also recorded by OKeh Records, since the commercial companies were now hot on the trail of rural black and white musicians in the South for commercial release. One of the pioneering field collectors in the South, along with Lawrence Gellert, Gordon preferred dance tunes and American ballads. From 1926 to 1928, he relocated to Darien, Georgia, where he focused on documenting African American musicians; he even entertained Carl Sandburg in 1927, on the trail for his own folk music research.

For a year (1927–28), Gordon published a series of articles on folk songs in the New York Times Magazine, on the basis of his fieldwork. “Of folk-song alone, America has a body perhaps greater in extent than that possessed by any other nation,” he wrote in the first issue, “and certainly unsurpassed in interest and in variety of types.” Gordon had done much work with African American musicians but had little feeling for their culture or history: “The negro of the South is perhaps our best folk-singer. He possesses not one but a dozen distinct types of folk-song ranging from the tragic and the sentimental to sheer bubbling humor. Some of his types—perhaps most of them—he derived in the beginning from the whites, for he is a marvelous assimilator. But in nearly every case he has so thoroughly made over the material that it would be unfair to say that is not now his own.” Subsequent articles dealt with mountain songs, African American sea shanties from coastal Georgia, spirituals, outlaw ballads and jailhouse songs, lumberjack songs, old ballads, banjo tunes, nursery ballads, and cowboy songs—an eclectic mix rich with song lyrics. For those who missed the Times articles, the federal government reprinted all of them in 1938, although the publication’s circulation was limited.5

In early 1927, Gordon offered a complete set of his “Old Songs” columns to Carl Engel, chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Impressed with Gordon’s folklore credentials, and with the backing of Herbert Putnam, the librarian of Congress, Engel appointed Gordon to head the newly created Archive of American Folk Song (AAFS) in July 1928 at the Library of Congress. While Gordon continued his research and donated some of his field recordings to the AAFS, he spent little time in Washington; and because of the government’s mounting financial problems, his job ended in 1932. He died in 1961 and unfortunately never published a book on folk songs that would have summarized his life’s work.

Lawrence Gellert, born Laslo Grunbaum in Hungary in 1898, grew up in New York. He moved to the South in the early 1920s, perhaps due to a nervous breakdown, and was soon living in Tryon, North Carolina, where he became interested in African American folk songs and folklore. Using a crude machine, he began recording informants in North and South Carolina, as well as parts of Georgia, including in chain gangs. His brother Hugo Gellert, then becoming a noted radical artist, became involved with the Communist Party’s publication New Masses, first appearing in 1926, with Michael Gold and Joseph Freeman as executive editors. Under Gold’s direction, the May 1930 issue included Philip Schatz’s article “Songs of the Negro Worker,” using some of the songs that Gellert had been sending to Hugo. The article gave a political twist to known African American work songs, but some of Gellert’s finds were variants of those that had already appeared in Howard Odum and Guy Johnson’s Negro Workaday Songs (1926). By the mid-1930s, Gellert’s self-styled African American “songs of protest” had become influential within Communist Party circles.6

Robert Gordon and Lawrence Gellert were not alone in focusing on the unique range of folk music to be found in the country, soon going beyond the traditional interest in ballads from the British Isles. Francis James Child, a professor of medieval studies and English literature at Harvard, published five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–96), which quickly dominated the ballad-collecting field. In the United States, William Wells Newell authored two articles on “early American ballads” in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) (1899–1900). While Child ballads long continued to fascinate folklorists, a source of native songs was quickly discovered that deftly altered the field. In 1910, John A. Lomax issued Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, which brought increased attention to these unique tunes. N. Howard “Jack” Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys had appeared in 1908, which included “Old Paint,” “The Cowboy’s Lament (Streets of Laredo),” and “The Old Chisholm Trail,” but this limited edition received little notice. Lomax’s book, however, made a major impact. Charles Finger followed with Sailor Chanteys and Cowboy Songs in 1923; then four years later, he issued the expanded Frontier Ballads, now with more from the West but missing the sea songs. Also, in 1927, the writer Frank Shay published My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, with illustrations by the Jazz Age artist John Held Jr. He included “Casey Jones,” “Sam Bass,” “The Dying Hobo,” and “Clementine.” “The music-lover who frequents the symphony concerts and delves deep into the works of Wagner and De Bussy [sic] will dismiss them as trivial,” Shay explained. “The folk-lorist will dismiss them with the phrases profane and vulgar. To him they are but the product of low resorts, gutter songs, the communal musical expression of an artistically destitute society.” For Shay, however, they truly represented the music of the folk.7

By 1910, Olive Dame Campbell had assembled a collection of native white songs from Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee, but she could find no publisher. She was not the only woman in the South with an interest in local song lore. Katherine Pettit and May Stone, the founders of the Hindman Settlement School in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1902, had been collecting songs from the children at their school; George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard published some of their collection as “Ballads and Rhymes from Kentucky” in the JAF in 1907. From 1912 to 1915, E. C. Perrow’s “Songs and Rhymes from the South” appeared in the JAF, including 270 texts from the Appalachian region. In 1916, Loraine Wyman and Howard Brockway issued Lonesome Tunes: Folk Songs from the Kentucky Mountains, quickly followed by Josephine McGill’s Folk-Songs of the Kentucky Mountains (1917). Wyman’s Twenty Kentucky Mountain Songs appeared in 1920.8

Child, an American, had set the standard for future collectors of British ballads before war had broken out in Europe in late 1914. On the other hand, Cecil Sharp, a British traditional song and dance scholar, first traveled to the United States with his colleague Maude Karpeles in 1914. Returning in 1916, and with the collaboration of Olive Dame Campbell, the wife of a missionary schoolteacher and social reformer in Appalachia—the namesake for the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina, founded in 1925 by his wife following his death—they collected 400 songs from sixty-seven informants in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. They published much of their collection in English Folk-Songs of the Southern Appalachians (1917). The following year, while the Great War raged, Sharp and Karpeles gathered another 600 songs and in 1918 an additional 625 tunes before returning to England. Sharp died in 1924, and in 1932 Karpeles produced English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians, the final two volumes of their collection, with another 274 songs. Along with the bulk of American collectors at the time, Sharp had the romantic, and highly fanciful, notion that the backwoods southerners were cut off from modern society, living in a cultural cocoon. Many had already migrated to industrial centers, however, while radio programs and phonograph records were soon plentiful, further connecting rural with urban, and modern, influences. There were few isolated settlements by the 1920s.9

While Sharp and others were gathering songs and ballads from southern white musicians, a separate group of collectors began focusing on African American singers and songsters. Howard W. Odum, born in Georgia and a graduate of Emory College in 1904, entered the University of Mississippi as a graduate student and soon discovered a wealth of African American songs. While a fellow in Psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts, he published his highly detailed “Religious Folk Songs of the Southern Negroes” in the American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education in 1909. Next, armed with a cylinder record player, he collected and published 115 secular songs in the JAF in 1911. Odum’s major study with Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs, appeared in 1925, quickly followed by their Negro Workaday Songs (1926), a year after Dorothy Scarborough’s fascinating On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs.10

African Americans appeared on phonograph records as early as the 1890s, performing the popular coon songs, from both white and black composers, as well as spirituals and much else. The team of Bert Williams and George Walker began recording in 1901, while an increasing number of black musicians entered the recording studios through the nineteen-teens. Various styles and types of blues songs and performers were popular before the 1920s, playing in juke joints, barber shops, and on concert stages. A national commercial breakthrough came in 1920 with Mamie Smith’s OKeh recording of “Crazy Blues,” which sparked the blues fad of the following decade and after. Five companies soon dominated the race market: Brunswick, Gennett, Paramount, Victor, and Columbia (which included OKeh after 1926). The female classic blues singers, such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, backed by piano players or jazz bands, originally captured the national market. Until 1927, the female singers dominated the output of race records, although there were a few exceptions. Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake recorded for Paramount in Chicago—the company was located in Grafton, Wisconsin—in the mid-1920s, before the floodgates opened after 1926, spurred by Jefferson’s popularity. A few rather obscure bluesmen also recorded early for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana.11

The last three years of the decade, however, witnessed numerous recording sessions in the South, particularly by Columbia and Victor in Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, and New Orleans. The rural bluesmen included Blind Willie McTell; the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers; Big Bill Broonzy, along with Georgia ...