Reds, Whites, and Blues: Social Movements, Folk Music, and Race in the United States

Abstract

In Reds, Whites, and Blues William G. Roy focuses on two interrelated tasks. The first compares the place of music in two familiar twentieth-century social movements; the second traces the creation and evolution of folk music as a genre. Race, the third topic in the title, plays an important but tertiary role. Roy is a sociologist of social movements with a long personal interest in music. In keeping with recent sociological attention to how social movements affect and reflect culture, Roy compares the role of folk music in the Old Left (particularly in the American Communist party during the 1920s and 1930s) with the place of folk songs in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Moving beyond familiar concerns with how social movements are created to what they do, Roy focuses on how social movements use culture (music or another art form) to achieve their goals. With their “vanguard” mentality and their image as a revolutionary elite leading the masses, members of the Old Left generally adopted the persona of performers in front of a passive audience that was to be educated in matters of politics and taste. Folk music, preferably with political lyrics, was merely a propaganda weapon used by the Popular Front after 1935 in place of classical music and revolutionary choruses. In contrast, civil rights movement activists drew on the tradition of group singing in southern black churches and colleges, and they generally performed music collectively to build solidarity and identity. Music was a process, not an object, and the context (marches, protests, meetings) mattered more than the content. After 1965, as the movement was taken over by northern, urban, secular youths, music was no longer important.