Recording the Nation: Folk Music and the Government in Roosevelt's New Deal, 1936–1941

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-1930s, government-sponsored fieldworkers canvassed the nation as part of a series of unprecedented folk music research, collecting, and recording projects, conducted under the auspices of the Federal One arts programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. In most cases, the thousands of instantaneous recording discs, transcriptions, and song texts were deposited at the recently established Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, under the watch of Harold Spivacke and John and Alan Lomax. The network of individuals involved in these projects reads like a who's who of folklore and folk music scholarship of the era: Benjamin A. Botkin (Federal Writers' Project, WPA Joint Committee on Folk Arts); Sidney Robertson Cowell (California Folk Music Project); Herbert Halpert (Federal Theatre Project, Joint Committee); George Herzog (Columbia University); Zora Neale Hurston (Federal Writers' Project), and Charles Seeger (Federal Music Project, Joint Committee). The reasons behind making these collections were as varied as the individuals involved, but mainly reflected intellectual currents of the time: functionalism, comparative musicology, salvage ethnography, and an archival instinct. This dissertation explores the institutionalization of folk music during the New Deal era and the place of "the folk" within the prevailing "national fabric" metaphor used to describe the United States as, in theory, a culturally pluralistic nation.