Folk Music, 1930s-1960s

FOLK MUSIC, 1930s–1960s. Americans have been creating and sharing music since the arrival of colonial settlers in the seventeenth century. In the centuries that followed, a host of musical styles influenced the vernacular form that scholars deem “folk music,” including the music of the English, Scots, West Africans, American Indians, Spanish, Welsh, Germans, and other Europeans. These styles found use in American topical folk music early on. Protest songs emerged from the struggle for American independence, anti-slavery, women’s rights, socialism, an end to child labor, control of big business, and the rights of workers in the workplace. By the time of the Great Depression, folksongs of protest had a long tradition and coal miners, textile operatives, share croppers, small farmers, iron miners, unemployed workers, and other victims of the downswing used their skills to create new and timely songs. In 1931, for example, during a fierce battle between coal miners and owners in Harlan County, Kentucky, Florence Reece recruited the tune from an old Baptist hymn and penned her classic “Which Side Are You On?” Hundreds of other protest songs by workers throughout the nation found a place in similar labor struggles of the era.

In the early part of the decade, the organized Left expressed little interest in folk music as a tool for advancing the working-class cause. The Communist Party’s official line at the time held indigenous cultural expressions of workers in low regard. Indeed, the trained and educated composers of the Composers Collective, whose members included Charles Seeger, Pete Seeger’s father, favored the more refined and complex models of European activist composers over the unassuming, cracker-barrel model prevalent among blue-collar writers like Reece, Aunt Molly Jackson, John Handcox, or the martyred Ella May Wiggins. The music of earlier labor struggles of the Knights of Labor, the United Mine Workers, or the Industrial Workers of the World did not figure into the Collective’s thinking on using music to unite the masses against capital. Ironically, few of the Collective’s own compositions proved successful in the struggle. Writing for the Daily Worker in 1933, Mike Gold felt compelled to ask readers: “Why don’t American workers sing? The Wobblies knew how, but we still have to develop a Communist Joe Hill.”

By 1935, the Popular Front took shape and profoundly impacted the course of music throughout the Left. Composers within the Collective shifted their thinking and began to feature the protest songs of earlier generations of workers in their concerts and publications. Cisco Houston, Aunt Molly Jackson, Paul Robeson, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Jim Garland, and other “folk” musicians soon found themselves celebrities in radical circles and featured performers at left-wing gatherings. Folk music became the standard musical form for communicating political messages to wider audiences.

Among the most important songwriter-performers of the era were Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) and Woody Guthrie, both of whom would relocate to New York City. Each had a broad repertoire of material and could place songs in a political and social context on stage and on recordings. A powerful blues singer from Louisiana, and an agile twelve-string guitar player, Leadbelly recorded for the Library of Congress in 1933 and again in 1935-1940, guided by early folklorist John Lomax. Guthrie hailed from Oklahoma, knew the Dust Bowl and personal disaster firsthand, had hoboed the West in the 1930s, possessed a folksy vocal and guitar style, and eventually wrote nearly two thousand songs. In 1940, he also recorded under the direction of Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.

Labor unrest across and the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) gave folk music with a protest message a powerful boost, as striking workers and organizers brought music to the fore. In Detroit, Chicago, San Pedro, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities, workers’ music found a welcome home among labor groups. New labor songs, and classics from the past, could be heard at labor gatherings. Moreover, new labor songbooks appeared. In 1937, for example, the Kentucky Workers Alliance published Songs for Southern Workers, which folksinger and organizer Don West prepared. A year later, Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas published Commonwealth Labor Songs.

Inspired by labor’s upsurge and determined to spread songs of social significance to larger audiences, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Millard Lampell formed the Almanac Singers. A loose-knit batch, which sometimes would also include Burl Ives, Sis Cunningham, Cisco Houston, Bess Lomax, and composer Earl Robinson, the Almanacs took to the road, singing various topical folksongs and recent labor numbers for progressive political functions and performing at CIO organizing drives and events.

By the end of World War II, a “folk revival” with topical music as a key component began to take shape. Enthusiasm for folk music and social change swelled, leading an assorted group of musicians to form People’s Songs in 1945, an organization that sought to “create, promote, and distribute songs of labor and the American people.” The group published a monthly bulletin and its first issue declared that “the people are on the march and must have songs to sing.” Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, Earl Robinson, Betty Sanders, Irwin Silber, Josh White, Barbara Dane, Ernie Lieberman, and many more singers and composers joined People’s Songs chapters around the nation, determined to spread their message and inviting others to join their “hootenanny” singalongs. Appropriately, at a board meeting for the organization, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote lyrics for “If I Had A Hammer.”

The Cold War, not surprisingly, had a strong impact on folk music. The folk revival gained momentum in the 1950s and the strumming guitars and hootenannies resonated with ever larger segments of the public and the entertainment industry. Concurrently, many of the artists who used music as a tool for social change became targets for government authorities determined to stifle voices of discontent. The Weavers, founded in 1948 by Hays, Seeger, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert, would function as the model for any folk group that saw itself as part of the “folk revival” in the 1950s and 1960s. As the McCarthy era gained steam, however, the group’s members found themselves subjects of government scrutiny and were blacklisted. By 1953, the band could no longer find bookings or venues and disbanded, though they later reformed and continued as a group until 1963.

Ironically, as the organized Left faced increasing obstacles during the Cold War, and a less receptive labor movement, folk music in milder political form became increasingly popular.
Leftist folk aficionados led by Dawn Greening, Frank Hamilton, Big Bill Broonzy (founding faculty member), and Win Stracke created the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago in 1957 and other schools and camps with folk music at the center were established throughout the country. Elsewhere, groups such as the Kingston Trio and the New Christy Minstrels offered smoother stylings and little political message, but counted box office success and hit recordings among their laurels. That success, and a somewhat more moderate political climate in the early 1960s, made folk music, including more topical varieties, among the more popular music forms of the day.

The Civil Rights Movement also factored strongly into the burgeoning folk scene. African American artists such as Josh White, J. B. Lenoir, Big Bill Broonzy, Odetta, and Nina Simone brought blues, gospel, and jazz to the movement and found a home and fans in the US and European scenes. New compositions using “folk music” as a stylistic moniker were written and recorded by a host of artists. Bob Dylan may have been the most notable, but Malvina Reynolds, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Peter LaFarge, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and many others wrote or recorded successful songs with political messages and participated in liberal-left political causes. Among the most politically engaged of the revival stars was Joan Baez. She used her considerable status in the entertainment business, and her abundant musical skills, to advance a variety of progressive causes from civil rights, to ending the Viet Nam War, to aiding war refugees in the former Yugoslavia.

By the end of the 1960s, folk music counted a host of music styles in its ranks, including bluegrass, country and urban blues, folk rock, traditional folk, and country rock. Publications such as Sing Out! and Broadside reported on new performers and new protest music. Folk music festivals, which had begun in the 1930s, proliferated and became a critical method for introducing the masses to older folk musicians of all stylings and newer acts as well. Groups fusing folk and rock such as the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and the Mamas and Papas were among the best-selling acts of the day, filling larger concert halls, selling millions of records, and taking folk music in directions far beyond the “traditional folk music” of scholars of song and lore. Little wonder that some commentators, veteran activist musicians, and fans began to ask if folk music had become pop music, replete with pop’s commercial and ideological shortcomings. Still, who could deny that a clear musical bloodline existed between Florence Reece singing her 1931 miner’s strike song “Which Side Are You On” and Country Joe and the Fish belting out the sarcastic anti-war anthem “Fixin’ To Die Rag” at Woodstock in 1969. Folk music and political causes in the 1970s would be an entirely different story, however.

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