Reviewed by: Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West by Peter Gough Steven Garabedian Peter Gough, Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2015. 304pp. Cloth, $50. In Sounds of the New Deal, historian Peter Gough helps to address a research gap long unwarranted. The Federal Music Project, he relates, was the most successful of the Federal One cultural projects [End Page 268] of the New Deal. Moreover, he contends, the fmp geographic section, encompassing the western states of California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon, and Nevada, proved the embodiment of the Roosevelts’ New Deal vision of a diverse America of inclusivity and egalitarianism. The fmp was launched—along with the associated Federal Theatre, Arts, and Writers’ Projects—in 1935 as part of the cultural apparatus of the Works Progress Administration. Reorganized as the wpa Music Program in 1939, the project continued until termination in 1943. In those eight years, the project employed thousands, supported the completion and performance of thousands of compositions, staged multiple successful original musicals, brought music teachers to underprivileged communities, and enabled some of the first concerted national efforts to document and promote American folk music. It operated throughout most of the United States and reached millions. As one of Gough’s first historical speakers tells us, “If President Roosevelt had done nothing else but establish the Federal Music Project, that alone would be sufficient to account him great” (1). This being so, how is it that the fmp has received the least recognition and scholarly investigation of all of the wpa cultural programs? How is it, in fact, as Gough states, that the fmp is sometimes forgotten altogether? Gough answers these questions with care and conviction, filling a scholarly void and correcting some longstanding misperceptions. It has been twenty years since Kenneth Bindas’s All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The wpa’s Federal Music Project and American Society, until now the standard book-length treatment of the subject. Bindas confined his study to the years 1935 to 1939 (before fmp’s reorganization as the wpa Music Program), but Gough does more than simply extend coverage: he brings together New Deal cultural history with contemporary western studies. Gough concludes not only that the fmp has been undervalued, but that the fmp in the West, particularly, had a defining impact on the program, the region, and the nation. He asserts a “clear line of influence” from the advances in multiculturalism forged in the fmp’s western states to the intellectual ferment of the “new western history” (192). The Federal Music Project, he shows, made a national cause out of the celebration of racial, ethnic, and regional differences in America. [End Page 269] Today, he argues, more inclusive attitudes valuing cultural pluralism can trace their lineage to the fmp in the West. Gough’s monograph is concise but rich in detail. Accessible and at points enlivened with some of the insider drama of personnel and personality, the book will resonate with interdisciplinary readers and specialists. Key passages and some explanatory notes deal with historiography, but overall Gough’s synthesis of secondary source literature is kept behind the scenes. The book’s strength is its thorough and informed primary research. In doing the real ground-level work of historical recovery, Gough has drawn on far-flung archival records, including fmp monthly state reports and internal correspondence, local newspaper items, and participant oral histories. He has also conducted interviews of his own and credits the late Pete Seeger as indispensible. Though clearly partial to its achievement, Gough does explore the fmp’s limitations. Its focus was on “high art,” with ethnic and roots music valued only crudely. Once the pluralist spirit of the age coalesced, the fmp was transformed in its race and class populism. Still, Gough shows, social inequalities did not disappear. If women and African Americans, especially, were given opportunities long overdue through the program, they did not escape persistent double standards and stereotyping within and in response to fmp productions. The contributions of and contradictions facing musicians of color and women in the period make fertile...