Book Review
Published by Down Home Radio Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
http://www.downhomeradioshow.com/category/reviews/

This book began as the doctoral dissertation of historian and folklorist Richard Reuss. After his untimely death in 1986, his wife and fellow folklorist gathered the manuscript, polishing and refining it while remaining true to its original conception. She relates in her preface how the book was originally set for publication by Wayne State University in the 1970's but was deemed too controversial and withdrawn. "The work," writes Judith Reuss, "remained unpublished through the 1970s, while nevertheless being widely read and cited in academic publications, becoming something of an underground classic." The title is self explanatory. At first, it might even seem to be a subject already well covered by a host of other books. Closer inspection, however, reveals a depth of research that provides readers with conversations, correspondence and archival materials hitherto unavailable from any source. Reuss personally contacted a wide range of people and scoured many publications: from Charles Seeger to the People's World (organ of the Communist Party USA) in the course of years of research. Ever the dutiful scholar, his work provides an insiders view of the social milieu into which, for example, Alan Lomax brought Leadbelly, while refraining from partisanship in the rancorous debates that began many years ago and, in some circles, continue to this day.

Anyone interested in that peculiarly American phenomenon, Folk Music, and its rise to popularity must read this book. It is a revelation. In his opening remarks, Reuss gives an overview of the copious literature that has dealt with the subject, carefully situating his effort so that the reader knows where it is coming from. This is not simply a matter of integrity or modesty. It is for two reasons crucial to understanding the book itself. First, "who are the folk and what is their music?" remain hotly contested questions in the study of folklore and musicology. Second, political conflict, particularly in the United States, has long been tightly woven with popular art, above all, music. One cannot grasp the historical development of either without studying the interaction between them. At least one cannot hope to grasp how it came to be that the most widely known exponents of American Folk Music are Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Who are the folk and what is their music? As a member of humanity and a musician I've often felt uncomfortable with scholarly inquiry into people and music. Theirs is the eye to categorize and dissect. It's like I'm a butterfly being brought back to the museum where I'll be tastefully displayed under glass: colorful, exotic and dead. What Reuss does in this rare and vital book is to identify the fundamental character of the designation: "folk". For "folk" is, above all, a political category. Who is a member or citizen of a given community? Who will decide? "We the people", are the folk are we not? Yet, shrouded in the mists of legend, cloaked in the idylls of romance, the folk are also non-existent. They might as well be the Hobbit! When scholars construct theories about the Negro or the peasant or, for that matter, the coal miner or auto worker, they are more often than not giving a scientific gloss to the fantastic or imaginary. There are no real people here, only figments conjured up by incantation, devoid of actual humanity.

The stubborn persistence of such idealization is a product of the foundation of folklore studies itself. The Brothers Grimm and all subsequent folklorists have made it their task to define authenticity in a certain way. In an attempt to construct national identities (German, in their case) they sought to differentiate the creative expressions of the uneducated or uncivilized masses from those that have "suffered" acculturation by bourgeois norms. Das Volk, in the words of Johann Gottfried von Herder, was the organic nation, arising out of a primordial past, bound together by language and certainly not artificially constructed to serve any class or State, King or peasant. It's no accident that this began during and after the French Revolution. In fact its true inspiration was Jean Jacques Rousseau whose influence is difficult to overestimate. Crucial to his argument was that "man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains", because nature is virtuous and civilization corrupts. This is also the core of the attraction of folk music. A longing to return to the bosom of nature, harmonious with the land and with one's fellows unsullied by the mystique of money and servitude to industrial production.

That we are still within Rousseau's horizon cannot be in doubt. Neither can the fact that the rural idyll of which he waxed so eloquent did not exist. For Rousseau it was utopia and he knew it. The revolution he was calling for was a return to a time before the aristocrat or financier dictated to the artisan or peasant, before masses were huddled in squalid cities full of pestilence, crime and unrewarded toil. Little wonder that in the wake of the the revolutions he inspired many educated men would go in search of the "noble savage" who was, in fact, all around them. What this quest overlooked, however, was that an inexorable migration had already begun, first from the country to the city then from Europe and Africa to America. This process radically transformed the "folk" even as traces of ancient customs remained, in some cases thriving to this day. Consequently, there never was a folk nor could there be since the great mass of humanity could only be one of two things-slaves or free citizens. If the former then they were certainly not noble even if savage. If the latter, then they had to be included in deciding how society is governed. It is not coincidental, then, that music would follow the divergent paths of the different people who made it. There were people making ancient songs on crude instruments alongside people making highly sophisticated music on the latest innovation. This did, in the main, correspond to whether they lived in town or country and who their audiences were. Nevertheless, the origin of the category of the "folk" was political struggle. The quest it launched for the pristine purity of pre-industrial life could not escape this fact.
This background is necessary to appreciate Reuss' achievement. While his book covers the era 1927 to 1957 it begins with an event in 1963, a fascinating account of a congressional hearing at which a Senator, Kenneth Keating, presented a speech called "Mine Enemy-The Folk Singer". Coming as it did after the McCarthy era the speech was designed to mock the extremes to which radical rightists were going to purge America of the communist menace. It was effective in two ways: it exposed the silliness of the claims and it roughly appoximated the foreign origin of America's music: "Mr. President," he began, "it will come as a shock to many Senators, but according to a resolution of a certain Los Angeles civic organization the Communists have developed a new secret weapon to ensnare and capture youthful minds in America-folk music." Keating went on, "To be sure, I was perfectly aware of certain un-American influences in it, like Elizabethan balladry, English Protestant hymns and spirituals, and with respect to jazz and in some cases the Negro spiritual, native African rhythms. But in my naivete I had never considered these un-American influences to be of a sinister nature, and simply passed them off as part and parcel of the melting pot tradition..." This sets the stage. The book then takes us through a thorough examination of the crucial components, musical and political, of what, in fact, was the manufacture of a form: not merely music of the folk but Folk Music. While blues, jazz, celtic traditional, sea chanteys and many other idioms might be viewed as generic in that they formed spontaneously or without conscious direction and then became widely popular, Folk Music, like Bluegrass, was actually invented. It is a label used to differentiate it from other styles-and it means AMERICAN Folk Music. What is fascinating about this is that that does not make it any less authentic-even in the Rousseauian or Grimms Brothers sense. But it does indicate that the stakes are higher than what might be on the hit parade at any given moment!

This is where the exhaustive research, including many interviews conducted by the author, makes an invaluable contribution even if it were separated from Reuss' interpretive insights. I read the book wishing I had the entire transcripts of some of these interviews because they're most intriguing in their own right. Not only do they lend credibility to Reuss' conclusions, they provide the flesh and blood of intense struggles thereby humanizing them. On the one hand, Reuss lays a foundation by first, establishing the connection between politics and folklore. On the other, he uses that foundation to open inquiry into an area very few have seriously looked. This includes Marxism and folklore, its 19th century components as well as its development in the wake of the Russian Revolution. By doing so Reuss fairly but firmly demolishes the position taken by R. Serge Denisoff's Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left. That book, which might, due to it title, appear to be about the same subject and precedes Reuss' by 30 years, is not altogether useless-but it is misleading. It uses few, if any primary sources, depending entirely on song texts, articles and other books and it has an axe to grind. In fact, if Senator Keating had read it before he made his sarcastic remarks he might not have made them. Denisoff's work is not so crude as an openly red-baiting smear but it does leave the reader with the impression that this was something of a conspiracy, albeit one we might generously allow had altruistic motives. The problem with that, as Reuss proves, is it's not true. American Folk Music was not a commie plot. In fact, if the commies had plotted better they might never have chosen to elevate folk music to its status as Proletarian Music, thereby helping to create-almost by accident-American Folk Music. In fact, as Reuss shows, it was initially against stiff resistance in the Comintern and among American intellectuals that folk music was even listened to. It was most often derided as melancholy, sentimental, trivial and banal. Besides, the future was in the city and the revolution needed something NEW, not OLD. It was the quest for the Real Proletarian Music that led to the discovery of the music of the actual proletariat. These folk, who were the bearers of old musical traditions, were being brutally oppressed in the fields, the mines and the textile mills of the southern United States. Theirs was no rural idyll. The music they created to inspire themselves in struggle did originate, a long time ago and a long way away-the British Isles and Africa. Yet it lived, authentically, in the communities formed in America which were discovered by revolutionaries fighting capitalism. The truth is, above all, a story of some great musicians emerging from or joining with a lot of struggling workers, particularly in the South, sharing wholeheartedly in their suffering and struggle and learning to love the richness and diversity of their music. Fortunately, Reuss documents this so well his conclusions are beyond reproach. Certainly, it invalidates any claims one could make of there being some "true", "authentic" folk music somewhere outside of actual life and that its politicization was due to the devious Seegers and Guthries exploiting it for their hidden agenda.

This helps explain a lot of things long shrouded in mystery and deliberate obfuscation. When you read Pete Seeger talking about the questions facing him and his fellow musicians you catch a glimpse: "I remember being continually intrigued by the problem of how a person is going to be an artist and make a living at the same time. Do you teach and then be an artist on the side? Do you work in a factory and be an artist on the side? Do you prostitute your art to make a living by it as, say, an advertising man, or work for Hollywood or radio? Do you try and do both?...I assumed that if I was going to be an artist, and be an honest artist, that I would always be broke." If this sounds familiar to any artist, then or now, it's because it's what artists have to face. When placed in the context of a thirty year struggle to organize miners, textile workers, autoworkers, and many others, culminating in the Civil Rights Movement that was gathering force when this books' timeframe ends, it is impossible to dismiss as the whining of a privileged do-gooder, slumming it with the downtrodden. More importantly, it reveals that Folk Music, with all its anti-commercial pretension, was being made by professional musicians and was already a commodity. Folkloristic fantasy only obscures the fact that it had long been so which explains the vain search of musicians of a radical stripe for the holy grail: a music that could not be coopted. Of course, Seeger went on to enjoy considerable success with the Weavers. But this only complicated everything since dedicated anti-capitalists found themselves in the clutches of the music industry. The mechanisms of co-optation were already being exposed by theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno but in the context of WWII, Korea and the McCarthy period, this seemed far less significant than old fashioned class struggle, bosses vs. workers, or as became more prevalent in the 50s, the fight against red-baiting and blacklisting. Untangling this devilishly complex web is a tough task.

What Reuss does to accomplish it is ask the right questions. By taking us step by step through musical and historical developments he carefully avoids the pitfalls that most other books on this subject fall into. For example, there are as many, if not more, little known figures as there are famous ones. We come to learn the contributions made by countless individuals some of whom were organizers, some of whom were musicians, some of whom were both. What's noteworthy about this is that it gives us a picture of how the debates current then unfolded and what people did in their spare time, how the city and the country were different and changing and how questions of what was on the charts and what was honest music remain unchanged from that day to this. Some conversation sounds archaic and hard to believe in its boneheadedness-like the adoption of Comintern policies first against, then for, supporting US entry into World War II. Simultaneously, there were the widely popular Hootenannies that became a staple of urban folkie life then and since. One thing that's not even in the book but is illuminated by it is Bob Dylan's difficult relation to the New Left in the Sixties. On the one hand Dylan had loose leftist sympathies, on the other he wanted an audience. Who provided the audience was a pivotal question. This point is subtly made in reference to the many musical figures (and other artists) who for a time entered the milieu of left-wing politics only to move on either out of fear of damage to their careers or because the audience was no longer as big as one they could accrue on their own. Such observations are embedded in a critical account of the evolving fortunes of the Communist Party. While Reuss remains refreshingly non-partisan he is nonetheless engaged as a seeker of truth. This enables him to see what the Communist Party itself could not-at least with the benefit of hindsight. He is able to accurately portray how stubborn ideological commitments cut two ways. On the one hand, they provided a powerful impulse to endure great hardship in the face of deadly adversaries, on the other, they prevented an accurate assessment of the success or failure of policies and campaigns often leading to demoralizing results. Thus, the book traces the decline of the Communist Party in numbers and influence at precisely the moment when the popularity of Folk Music was on the ascendant, even reaching the top of the charts.
Some of the factors contributing to this are well known. But others have been buried or ignored and two Reuss highlights are among the most important to any understanding of this period: First, the conscious and often successful attempt to build solidarity between white and black working people. This grew into an enduring legacy in music and politics. Not since the crushing of Reconstruction had there been such a widespread attempt to organize, together, America's racially divided populace. This helps explain the evolution of the Labor Movement into the Civil Rights Movement, also how and why song played such an important role in both. How folklorists like Lawrence Gellerts, the Lomaxes and others were involved in this effort is revealing and salutary. So, too, towering figures like Paul Robeson and WEB DuBois. It led to, among other things, the "discovery" and embrace of Robert Johnson and delta blues by the next generation. Especially important for younger readers now is just how deeply were the races divided and how deeply went the scars. If subsequently Folk Music became the province of white people it's not simply a matter of taste. Of course one can trace divergent musical roots. But the fact is, even decades later it was still uncommon for white and black musicians to play together in the same band!
Secondly, Reuss carefully explains the international aspects of this. Largely, this concerns the influence of the Soviets and the Germans. But in no way did the evolution of American Folk Music take place apart from the rest of the world. After all, the main contributors to it came from Europe and Africa in the first place. The Soviet influence was mainly by way of theories and policies they expounded at different times, the Germans in the persons of Hans Eisler, Berthold Brecht, and others fleeing the Nazis after 1933. Dynamic interactions with serious consequences not only for an isolated New York intelligentsia but for millions of ordinary people were the result. Space does not permit going into this in the depth it deserves but it has to be noted since it is one more dimension lending greater credibility and usefulness to this book. I must confess my frustration when confronted by aficionados claiming to know all about folk music who fail to connect the dots. It may be that Bill Munroe invented Bluegrass without ever hearing of Aunt Molly Jackson or Florence Reese. It may be that Bascom Lamar Lunsford who gave Pete Seeger his first banjo was an anti-communist who'd chased down draft dodgers in WW I but that's the world as it is-wildly contradictory-not as some would wish it to be.

Ultimately, Reuss can be thanked for taking a historian's "nothing is sacred" approach to uncover the heroic, the tragic and the farcical in the praxis of the American Left. He is not cynical or dismissive but he is also indifferent to the intoxication of belief-left or right. Simultaneously, what music lovers might hold sacred, namely the emotional power and timeless beauty of the music itself, is put in a perspective that can allow us to finally appreciate it as music while remaining fully aware of how it came to be.