Music and the Us War on Poverty: Some Reflections

Abstract

Jesus reportedly said that “the poor will be always with us” (Matthew 26:11) but, brimming with confidence after the Second World War, sociologists and economic policymakers in the United States dared to think otherwise. In a modern, affluent society, poverty was embarrassing. Social critics used to believe individuals were poor because they were unlucky or lazy or stupid, but mid-twentieth century sociologists saw the causes as cultural: if society could but change those cultures, then poverty would disappear (Galbraith 1998; Harrington 1963). The editor of this volume invited me to reflect on music and poverty in relation to my scholarly research over the past forty-five years. It so happens that the musical communities in the United States where I've done most of my field research were characterized as cultures of poverty and targeted in President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 State of the Union address in which he declared a War on Poverty. Daniel Moynihan, one of the architects of the War on Poverty in the US, put the then culture-of-poverty theory into bureaucratese: “Poverty leads to cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation which lead to poor health, inadequate education, and low mobility limiting earning potential which leads to limited income opportunities which lead to Poverty” (1966:4, my italics). While I did find material poverty in the musical communities that I participated in and studied since the 1960s, I found the people in those communities to be rich in music and expressive culture. I never found a cyclic culture of poverty in the Moynihan sense, either. Instead, I came to understand that poverty was imposed from without by discrimination, exploitation, and corruption.