For centuries music has been an autobiographical tool to remember. It has been used to pass on information, gather support, or to lament the passage of time and what once was. This was particularly apparent when perusing the Library of Congress Archives. All of the music I listened to was a part of the California Gold collection, an anthology of folk music from Northern California from the 1930s, which highlighted the migrant experience.
During this time period music became a powerful political statement that captured the ideas of the Popular Front. This was a coalition of left leaning organizations that was under girded by the communist party, socialists and independent leftists. When this political movement eventually crumbled and dissolved its underlining tenets remained embedded in the literature, movies, and music of the time. This Cultural Front was led by “black, left, and labor dissenters-who-organized in a newly conducive climate”1
and eventually led the country into the long civil rights era.
A majority of folk music from this time is a direct reflection of the lives those people lived, the hope they had, the hardships they faced, the religions they clung to2
, and their homesickness. The dust bowl drove a lot of people west in hopes of work and that was reflected in the music that was recorded. A number of songs ” depicting California as a veritable promised land“3 4
enticed workers and the mythology surrounding the west became a part of the popular culture.
Having these more personal moments shared through music had a unifying cultural effect because it underscored that many people were experiencing the same things. Although it was well known that impacts of the great Depression were widespread, hearing it sung to you has a different effect. In this way folk music was both a mirror, reflecting the shared trials of life, and a magnifying glass, broadcasting the widespread problems of inequality, dislocation, and joblessness.
Beyond immortalizing the pain of a generation, music was also used to bolster the spirits of the people. Migrants living in labor camps were able to recount stories of their homes, and commune with others. In current popular culture you can see direct link to how music way used back then. At times music is a tool with which to disrupt the system, while at other times music becomes a little bit of oblivion to make life a bit more tolerable.
- Ritterhouse, Jennifer. “INTRODUCTION: The Same Journey, Writ Small, That the United States Was On.” In Discovering the South: One Man’s Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s, 1-19. CHAPEL HILL: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469630953_ritterhouse.4.
- “There is a land of pleasure”,California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, Library of Congress,https://www.loc.gov/item/2017701424/
- “The Golden West”,California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, Library of Congress,https://www.loc.gov/item/2017701551/
- Fanslow, Robin A. “The Migrant Experience : Articles and Essays : Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed December 6, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/.
