The 1930s were marked by a multitude of struggles for America and its people, but perhaps one of the most all-encompassing was the question of what it now meant to be an American. It was certainly much harder to sell the former American identity of prosperity and success that marked the industry of the Gilded Age and the 1920s when a grand majority of the country\u2019s working class was now facing unemployment, homelessness, and even starvation. Environmental disasters such as the Dust Bowl, stacked on top of often total financial loss, only exacerbated the desperation of the decade as \u201cfarms literally dried up and blew away\u201d[1] with the old promises of the American Dream. The solution of turning to the arts, via government programs such as the Federal Music Project, helped to craft a narrative that still resonates in American society today \u2013 taking such hardships and rebranding what came of them as the fruit of American culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take the FMP\u2019s extensive efforts to record the folk music of\nthe decade. The very nature of \u201cfolk\u201d music, regardless of the discourse that\nlater arose over what qualified, necessitated looking to the rural populations\nof America \u2013 in particular, to the large groups of migrant workers who were striking\nout west with their families in hopes of better fortunes. It might have been\nunintentional, but this undertaking still helped to prove how many different\ncultures formed together to make \u201cAmerican\u201d folk culture. Many of the songs and\ninstrumentations that were recorded as such, in actuality traced their roots\nback to listen<\/span> genres that were brought to America by immigrants. Even the most\nstraightforward \u201cfolk\u201d music, thought of today to be the earliest predecessor of\nthe \u201call-American genre\u201d that is contemporary country music, shared many\nstylistic similarities with the rhythm-and-blues music that evolved from the work\nsongs listen<\/span>of enslaved African Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a sense, this did help to prove the FMP\u2019s ideal that \u201call of this music belongs to the nation\u201d[2]. But it also raises the issue of appropriation \u2013 because of this music\u2019s source diversity, is it truly accurate to lump all of it together under a label as broad as \u201cAmerican\u201d? And who has the right to decide what art belongs to a nation that continues to often reject said art\u2019s human creators?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sources Cited: The 1930s were marked by a multitude of struggles for America and its people, but perhaps one of the most all-encompassing was the question of what it now meant to be an American. It was certainly much harder to sell the former American identity of prosperity and success that marked the industry of the Gilded … Continue reading “Who Can Claim “Folk”?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2374,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessicadoeshistory.com\/courseblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
[1] Bindas, Kenneth J.\u00a0All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: the Federal Music Project of the WPA and American Cultural Nationalism, 1935-1939<\/em>. UMI, 1989.
[2] \u201cThe Migrant Experience \u00a0: \u00a0Articles and Essays \u00a0: \u00a0Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941 \u00a0: \u00a0Digital Collections \u00a0: \u00a0Library of Congress.\u201d\u00a0The Library of Congress<\/em>, https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/collections\/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941\/articles-and-essays\/the-migrant-experience\/.
[3] “The Dark cloud and a Caucasian folk song”, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/2017702005\/<\/a>
[4] “We Hab a Jest Gawd”, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/item\/flwpa000069\/<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"