“I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National IdentityRachelClare Donaldson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.

Abstract

I Hear America Singing: Folk Music and National Identity Rachel Clare Donaldson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.This book corrects the oversimplified notion that the folk-music revival was a midcentury fad that peaked in the 1960s and then vanished forever. Rachel Clare Donaldson treats folk music as a broader cultural phenomenon that shaped and was shaped by varying concepts of nationalism. She also explains why folk music, unlike country music, is in the domain of liberals. Revivalists, as she sees it, collected, recorded, and performed folk music as part of their political agenda: envisioning America as a pluralistic nation.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, professional folklorists tended to focus almost exclusively on the music of isolated places like the Appalachians, where British songs had been preserved by a rural, white populace. That concentration shifted when the United States suffered a national identity crisis during the Great Depression. The New Deal spurred and, through the WPA, funded a revival of interest about America. Revivalists rejected the traditional metaphor of the melting pot, which had emphasized cultural unity at the expense of diversity; instead, they viewed America as profusion of disparate and rich cultures-ethnic, religious, and racial. Revivalists saw the failure of the capitalist system, which had caused the Depression, as the enemy of this pluralistic society; many favored socialism or Soviet communism (relatively untouched by the Depression). They repurposed folk songs, and topical parodies of those songs, to forward pro-labor and socialist causes, like organizing unions and improving working conditions. With the advent of the Second World War, revivalists transformed themselves from communist isolationists to democratic patriots, from anti-capitalists to antifascists. The postwar Red scare and revelations about Joseph Stalin made survival challenging for a movement that had associated itself with internationalism and leftist causes. Revivalists managed to keep the torch lit by playing to smaller audiences and fighting more politically acceptable battles against social conformity and for democracy and diversity.This is where the Weavers, arguably the most influential folk group of all time, came in with professionally performed arrangements of traditional songs, celebrating the common people of many cultures. The foundation was laid. By the time that the apolitical Kingston Trio (late 1950s) and the politically charged Peter, Paul, and Mary (early 1960s) proved that folk music could sell albums, the boom was on. …