My historical question asked what folklore and folk music from 1930’s Chicago could reveal about the social climate of the time. I based this question off of a collection of ten different sources from the FWP corpus, with this specific interest in mind while I compiled them and close-read them in the first part of the assignment. Folklore and folk music have always interested me, as I see them as a crossroads between the fields of history and english, so when I discovered a wealth of documents pertaining to music in particular, all from the same place and time, I was immediately intrigued. I recognize after working through the second half of this assignment that my topic perhaps might be better suited for a paper or presentation, instead of a key-word based assignment using Voyant Tools, however I have tried my best to make it work with the technology at hand by focusing my text analysis specifically on my own smaller corpus of materials rather than the extensive library of files downloaded from Dropbox. Originally, I tried to navigate through the entire zip file provided to us, however this proved extremely frustrating and hindered a lot of the research I wanted to get done.
So, having uploaded my own miniature corpus of FWP sources, I began looking up keywords. Some of the suggested terms, ranked by their prevalence throughout the documents provided (and which were not merely derived from the standard headings of each), were: play, union, picket, music, sick, and old. I think that these key words give an interesting summary of the topics, but also of the themes at play in the city. The sources which I compiled covered a variety of subjects, all centered in Depression Era Chicago. From my close readings as I looked deeper into the prevalence of these key words, I learned that during this period, there was a strong push for unionization and workers rights. A surprisingly large percentage of the recorded children’s songs—mostly sung while playing jumprope games or other similar activities in the schoolyard—referenced parents working in factories or organizing picket lines, indicating the reach and social upheaval of the workers’ protests of the time. According to other sources, which recounted the folklore of various pockets of Chicago’s community, illness and disease were also prevalent during this time. In some Jewish communities, it was believed that these illnesses were caused and spread by an entity called a “Dybbuk,” yet it is noted that the Dybbuk only attaches itself to Jewish people, and that the illnesses did spread elsewhere as well. Finally, the last key word that struck me was music. Beyond the song games of Chicago children at the time, there were also multiple sources in this collection which discussed jazz and blues music, suggesting an uptick in their importance and popularity in the city. Especially where the blues genre is concerned, music provided an artistic outlet and an escape from the hardships of daily life, in a context which was not only heavily impacted by the Depression itself, but was also undergoing radical social changes and demonstrations in terms of its industrially-based economic.
Overall, I felt like this tool was incredibly useful in helping me visualize and articulate my exploration of my historical question. The various ways that key word prevalence was displayed helped me find common threads throughout the majority of my compiled sources, and isolate core themes of the time. Ultimately, I was not surprised by what I found through this tool. The commonalities presented through the charts, lists, and graphs were similar to those that I had noticed while converting, compiling, and close-reading my files in Part I, however the tool greatly helped me understand which points called for the most focus, and how things overlapped. It is a great visual tool for those who, like myself, need a visual representation of the information in addition to written notes.
My final note on my historical question is this: The folklore and music of New Deal Era Chicago is home to a wealth of information. These sources provide us with incredible commentary on political issues, community health, and forms of escapism, even in the places we would least expect, such as the children’s jump rope rhymes. Combined together, this collection paints a vivid, albeit austere, portrait of Chicago between 1939-1941, and allows for a more personal view of the state of the city. The interview and observation based sources effectively capture glimpses of daily life, in a way that formal histories may fail, and because of this I will close with the argument that folklore and song serve a vital purpose in shaping our understanding of a culture, from city to civilization.
(Please note: I’m still having trouble figuring out how to make footnotes, but I promise I am trying)
Works Cited:
Posner, Miriam. “Miriamposner/Voyant-Workshop.” GitHub, github.com/miriamposner/voyant-workshop/blob/master/investigating-texts-with-voyant.md.
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/about-this-collection/.
