The Federal Music Project (FMP), was one of several programs under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) aimed at finding employment for thousands of Americans in the arts. The FMP primarily produced symphonic and orchestral music, however, the project also employed musicians and researchers involved in regional and marginalized forms of music such as Western, Creole, Mexican Orquesta típica and so called “Negro spirituals.” 

The WNYC and Municipal Archives contain several FMP recordings of African American choral groups singing spirituals and other traditional songs. Through the cracks and pops come expressive vocal arrangements and breakout solo performances. Click on the listen button to hear a mixtape, featuring highlights from these recordings. This is just a cross section of the variety of genres, intricate harmonies and emotional intensity that set these songs apart from other FMP productions.

Though the program created a platform for marginalized performers, they were subjected to the same discrimination typical of Jim Crow America. Music groups were segregated along racial and ethnic lines despite playing to large, integrated audiences. Most were subjected to discriminatory practices, such as unequal wage classifications and performing stereotypical music associated with the idealized antebellum south and minstrelsy.

The spiritual, originally used as a form of slave resistance, echoes the singers' contemporary struggles. The announcer introduces Sit Down Servant, by the Juanita Hall Choir (Program No. 4), as "...the story of an old colored woman who's not allowed to sit down in this world, but looks forward to her golden chair in the next."

Since most of the arrangements hail from the spiritual tradition, Christian faith is the predominant subject matter. An unusual exception, however, is an arrangement of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, by the Los Angeles Colored Chorus (Program No. 79), in which the performers sing a harmonic backdrop for a spoken word recitation of the famous monologue.

An unidentified Los Angeles based choral group.

(New Deal Network/National Archives and Records Administration)

The recordings frequently invoke modern forms of popular music such as swing and blues. These genres are most apparent in Program No. 79 in which the standard Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is reinterpreted as a "swing spiritual" in The Chariots' Done Come and Swing Low. This program contains another swing spiritual Someone Stole Gabriel's Horn and finishes with W.C. Handy's St. Louis Blues.

Announcers, speaking as if to an all-white audience, emphasize the otherness of each group when introducing a song. In a recording of the Negro Melody Singers (Program No. 4) the announcer suggests, “You may never have witnessed the Negro folk dance but the lively music of Shortenin’ Bread will give you a vivid picture of the gaiety of such a dance!” The intention seems to be ethnographic study, evident on Program No. 16, as the Negro Melody Singers perform a series of vendor street cries heard in neighborhoods across the east coast. In Program No. 52 the announcer describes the song Dark Water as a "modern spiritual with negroid characteristics", espousing essentialist attitudes towards African Americans at this time. 

In spite of the WPA’s tokenism of marginalized artists, the Federal Music Project helped propel the careers of some performers, most notably the musical theater actress Juanita Hall. Furthermore, historian, David Woolner points out that the WPA,

“…hired and featured the work of hundreds of African American artists; and from the New Deal’s educational programs, which taught over 1 million illiterate blacks to read and write and which increased the number of African American children attending primary school.” (African Americans and the New Deal: A Look Back in History)

In his book Sounds of the New Deal, Peter Gough sums up the conflicted legacy that these recordings leave:

“These events—and the growing Anglo fascination with jazz, blues, and the spirituals—did not directly translate into improved economic situations for black people living in the United States. African Americans suffered disproportionately during the Great Depression, as black unemployment remained nearly twice as high as that of whites. Yet, the decades-long upsurge in violence against African Americans dropped significantly by the mid-1930s and into the 1940s, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had expanded alarmingly during the 1910s and 1920s, also began to wane. Further, while the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement failed to eradicate negative racial stereotypes, there did emerge during the 1930s a growing public awareness of African Americans and an increased interest in their culture—though often predicated on romanticized notions of the Old South of the nineteenth century.”

Track List

1. Way Over in Beulah Land - Juanita Hall Choir
2. Raise a Ruckus Tonight - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
3. Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
4. To Be or Not To Be - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
5. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel - Negro Melody Singers
6. In That Great Gettin' Up Morning - Negro Art Singers
7. Steal Away - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
8. Hallelujah Chorus (Handel's Messiah) - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
9. This Train and Same Train - Negro Melody Singers
10. Dark Water - Los Angeles Negro Choir
11. The Chariots' Done Come and Swing Low - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
12. Joe Brown's Coal Mine - Negro melody Singers
13. Little David - Los Angeles Negro Choir
14. Street vendor cries - Negro Melody Singers
15. Scandalize My Name - Juanita Hall Choir
16. Sit Down Servant - Juanita Hall Choir
17. Four and Twenty Elders - Los Angeles Negro Choir
18. Someone Stole Gabriel's Horn - Los Angeles Colored Chorus
19. Go Down Moses - Los Angeles Negro Choir
20. I Been in the Storm So Long - Negro Melody Singers
21. Poor Mourner's Got a Home at Last - Los Angeles Negro Choir
22. St. Louis Blues - Los Angeles Colored Chorus