[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, and I'm glad that you're spending part of your Friday with us. We're going to talk now about some forgotten history. Years before the folk revival movement of the 1960s, a lesser-known New Deal Era program recorded some music which, in a way, inspired the next generation of folk musicians. The US Music Unit was formed in the aftermath of the Great Depression with a goal of using music as a social function to help uplift hurting Americans. The staff of the Music Unit traveled around the country, recording songs, and putting on shows. Overall, the unit recorded over 800 songs like this one.

[MUSIC - Margaret Valiant: Old Blue]

Kousha Navidar: That was the song, Old Blue, was recorded by the Music Unit sometime between 1938 and 1939. Musicologist Sheryl Kaskowitz has written a book uncovering the history of this Music Unit. It's called A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression―One Song at a Time. Kaskowitz will be at the Roosevelt Reading Festival tomorrow at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, but now, we're lucky that she's with me in studio. Hey, Sheryl, welcome to WNYC.

Sheryl: Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: It's a pleasure to have you here. I'm so excited to talk about this music, this archive that you've unearthed. I want to talk about the beginning, the origins of it. The story of the Music Unit begins with the stories of three important people. There's Charles Seeger, or Charlie as he was known, there's Ruth Crawford, and Margaret Valiant. Can you just tell us about them, how they met, how that led to the genesis of the Music Unit?

Sheryl: Yes, absolutely. It starts here in New York, not far from your studios, West 8th Street. The artist Thomas Benton had these jam sessions. He had a band called the Harmonica Rascals, and he recruited some of his art students, including the Pollock Brothers, some Charles Pollock, who becomes a character in my book. His little brother is a little better known, Jackson Pollock. Charles Seeger, it was where he discovered American folk music. He really hadn't known about it before. He was a musicologist and a composer, an avant-garde composer.

He and his wife, Ruth Crawford-Seeger, went to these and discovered his recordings and the music that the Harmonica Rascals played. Another friend of theirs named Margaret Valiant, who was from the South, so it wasn't new for her, but she also came to these sessions. In my book, I talk about how that was the birthplace of the Music Unit.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, and it's founded as part of the New Deal. Before we get there, I want to learn more about the department in which the Music Unit was held. It was the Resettlement Administration, or the RA, right? What was the RA's deal within the New Deal?

Sheryl: Yes, exactly. I think a lot of people assume that arts in the New Deal is coming from the WPA. That's what most people are familiar with, but this was something completely different. The Resettlement Administration was this huge agency that was responsible for all of the things dealing with the rural poor, but it did so much more than that. One of the things was it created government-built homesteads where they invited people from what they called stranded populations to come and just start over on these new homesteads in these rural areas outside of cities.

The idea was let's create something new. They even talked about it as experimental and radical at the time because the idea behind it was from probably the more progressive thread of thinking during the New Deal, which was, let's form cooperatives.

Kousha Navidar: These created the communities in which they would go visit the music or how did the homesteads help form the Music Unit?

Sheryl: Right. What happened was they started building these homesteads-

Kousha Navidar: The homesteads.

Sheryl: -and people would apply to go and live there, start over. They were coming from cities. They were coming from mining towns, farms where their farms had failed, and morale was incredibly low because it was just starting out. Their houses weren't built and it's hard to start a community from scratch. Literally, the people running these homesteads said, "We need music."

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Sheryl: That's where it came from. It wasn't about hiring musicians to give them work. It was really using music. It was this idea of a social use of music to form community.

Kousha Navidar: Is that why it was founded within the Resettlement Administration because that's where the demand was?

Sheryl: Exactly, yes. Their job was to go out to these homesteads and help lead music activities. There was painting. There were other arts as well.

Kousha Navidar: Was it hard to bring the Music Unit from idea into reality? Was there a lot of political backlash to it or was it kind of, "Oh, this seems like a great thing. Let's just all put the money into it to make it happen"?

Sheryl: The Music Unit stayed very much under the radar on purpose because the Resettlement Administration in general was-- You can imagine that conservatives in Congress and elsewhere were not big fans of this idea. Even just, they would call it government overreach. This cooperative idea was definitely too close to socialism. The Music Unit just stayed quiet, a lot of them.

Kousha Navidar: Ironically. [laughs] Sorry, I just got to point that out. Sorry.

Sheryl: Absolutely. Of course. A lot of the correspondents that I found at the Library of Congress was marked confidential, sometimes very confidential.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow.

Sheryl: They were sending these representatives out to these homesteads. The connection to, here in New York and Thomas Benton, was Charles Seeger had met Charles Pollock, who was one of the painters who had been hired by the Resettlement Administration. That's how Charles Seeger ended up in charge of the Music Unit and how he discovered folk music and decided that that was the music that they needed to have.

Kousha Navidar: How did that choice happen? Because I'm not even sure. What was the reputation of folk music back then? Was it taken seriously? Was it respected? Why was Charles like, "Oh, yes, the folk is the one that we should go with"?

Sheryl: It was on the rise, I would say. During the 1930s, there was an increased interest in the folk in the New Deal in terms of government. It went all the way up. FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt loved folk music. It was seen as this expression of the people.

Kousha Navidar: Is it that it was the expression of the people that Charles thought it should be folk music that folks are hearing versus a classical quintet or something?

Sheryl: Yes, and also, I think his idea was it needed to be the music of the people from those communities. That's where the recording came into play because-- Again, not to say that all of these ideas were necessarily rock solid in terms of thinking and the way that folk music actually works, but his thinking was we need to go out and find out what music is being sung and performed in these communities, record it, and then bring those recordings back for the field representatives to play on the homesteads.

Kousha Navidar: Geographically, where did they focus?

Sheryl: It was Appalachians in the South.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. It's just as much as a social function. You include a quote in your book attributed to Charlie Seeger about the vision for the unit, which in part it reads, "To regard music as a social function." Why was this an important distinction for the music group? What did it represent about the mission of the group?

Sheryl: Well, I think that it is what connects the Music Unit's work directly to the ideological focus of the resettlement administration which was towards cooperatives. The head of the resettlement administration was named-- There are some great names in my book and there are some--

Kousha Navidar: There are.

Sheryl: Yes. [chuckles]

Kousha Navidar: Yes, there are some great names.

Sheryl: Rexford G. Tugwell, he started as a Columbia economics professor, and he was one of the most progressive members of the administration. He was slammed as Rex the Red because he really believed that the way out, not only was through cooperatives in terms of cooperative farming and cooperative factories, but also changing-- it was like an ideological shift away from rugged individualism, and towards more of a community focus that he felt was needed in order to get out of the Great Depression.

The music was specifically focused on helping people feel like a part of a community. For Charles Seeger, some of it came very literally. He made song sheets with lyrics about cooperating, and I think the idea was to get people to play music together, sing together.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Sheryl Kaskowitz, who's an author and musicologist. She has a new book out. It's called A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression―One Song at a Time. Tomorrow, if you're interested in hearing more, Kaskowitz will be participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at the FDR Library in Hyde Park. Sheryl, you had mentioned a couple minutes ago about the recordings and the choice to go out, and hear what the communities, what these homesteads, what kind of music they were actually making, and they collected 800 songs in total.

That's such a big number. I imagine that there were so many songs that you listened to. We heard a clip in the beginning. I'd love to play another clip as an example right now, and listeners just heads up, these are old recordings, so you might hear some fuzz in the background. Here's the clip. This is Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad.

[MUSIC - Margaret Valiant: Going Down the Road Feeling Bad]

Kousha Navidar: What kind of music were they recording on? Sorry, what kind of recording equipment were they recording the music on? I flipped the words in my head.

Sheryl: The equipment is maybe hard for us to imagine now what it meant to record then. It was about 150 pounds. It was this big brown case with a handle on the side of it, so they could call it portable, and it flipped open and it was a disc-cutting machine. These were aluminum discs. They were also hauling around the aluminum discs, which weighed another 100-plus pounds. Finding a place where the electricity was running on the right current and was strong enough in these areas.

This is where Sidney Robertson came into the story. She was the one who recorded a lot of this music. Though that recording you just played was actually recorded by Margaret Valiant. She was the one who went out to the FSA migrant camps in California, and that was recorded at Shafter camp.

Kousha Navidar: You brought up Sidney Robertson. We have an example of a recording that she made as well, so let's listen to that. This is Rock-A-Bye-Baby. It was recorded in St. Louis in 1936. Let's listen to it.

[MUSIC - Sidney Robertson: Rock-A-Bye-Baby]

Kousha Navidar: As soon as that started, both of us just smiled really wide, which I love. That's such a beautiful recording. What was it about Sidney Robertson that made her unique?

Sheryl: That's one of my favorite recordings that I found, and those recordings in particular, Sidney Robertson actually came to the Music Unit. She had been at the Henry Street Settlement House here in New York, and one of her interests was in labor union music and how labor organizers used music. She took a special side trip away from the homesteads to St. Louis and found this group of activists who were using music at their protests, so they had held a sit-in in St. Louis.

She was just fearless, and she was really interested in, not necessarily finding the performers in a group, but how was music being used, what everyday songs she was looking for. Play songs. These were protest songs which she actually had to be even quieter about.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting because for all the good the music did-- You bring up protest songs. You point out that racism and segregation existed within the program, like a lot of the New Deal overall. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sheryl: Oh, yes. Well, that was something that I definitely needed to grapple with, to tell this story, and I think that's true of the New Deal and this era and American History in general. Because even though at the top, they had said that all of their programs, they wanted them to be available to all. They allowed each local community to make decisions for itself based on their own social customs, I think is the words that they used. In the Jim Crow South, the homesteads were all white. At least the ones that the Music Unit worked in.

There were a couple that were-- There were a handful in other parts of the country that were not segregated, and there were a few that were set aside for Black families to go to, but for the Music Unit, it was definitely within the confines of that segregation.

Kousha Navidar: We got a text from a listener just now that I want to get your reaction to. It's on this topic. It says, "It was also deliberately slyly integrating Black music into white." What do you think about that?

Sheryl: Oh, that is really interesting, and I think true in a lot of ways about the history of music in the US. What's interesting about the Music Unit and their focus on-- They really were trying-- romanticized is the wrong word, but that's coming to mind about white folk music from Appalachia, which was not true. That music came just as much from Black traditions as white traditions, but I think they had this idea that their focus was on white music. Now, we can look, and see all of the ways that you can't actually segregate music in the way that they hope to.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, and now eventually, the Music Unit gets shut down. Can you give a quick synopsis of what happened there?

Sheryl: Yes. What happened was Rexford G. Tugwell decided to resign. He felt like because he had become-- They called him the Whipping Boy for the New Deal. The Resettlement Administration became part of the Department of Agriculture, and all of these arts-related programs were shut down. It became the Farm Security Administration, which a lot of people know from the photographs.

Kousha Navidar: To what extent did the labor unrest at the time have to do something with the shutdown?

Sheryl: Well, it's a complicated question because the New Deal supported labor unions, but I think that there was a growing coalition, even though in 1936, the Democrats had a huge majority. There was a growing coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans who were pushing back against a lot of the most, say, radical ideas from the New Deal.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. The Music Unit shuts down, but folk music doesn't go away. It rises and the American folk revival scene towards the middle of the 20th century, it is so famous in music history. Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, these are names that we know so well. I'm wondering, to what extent did the legacy of the US Music Unit influence this revival? Did these musicians know that these recordings existed?

Sheryl: Yes, because, as people have probably figured out, and if you didn't know already, Charles Seeger was Pete Seeger's father. He was a teenager at this time. Alan Lomax is well known as someone who helped to collect these songs that became part of the folk revival. He was part of this scene. John Lomax actually helped train Sidney Robertson to go out and record music, so John Lomax being Alan Lomax's father. I see it as a prehistory, and they did have these recordings at the Seeger household. Pete Seeger talks about listening to them.

Yes, and Mike Seeger has also recorded some of these songs. What I say is the fingerprints are all over the folk revival if you know where to look.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, so you think Pete Seeger became what he became because he was able to listen to his dad's work in part?

Sheryl: Yes, absolutely. Part of the lore of the folk revival is that Pete Seeker got his first five-string banjo at the Mountain Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. The reason he was there is because Charles Seeger took him there on a work trip. It was like they had an all-Music Unit meeting there.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wow.

Sheryl: Yes. Even if these recordings weren't widely known, all of this was known to both Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax. They knew about these early recordings. The song sheets that Charles Seeger made, they match exactly some of the recordings that Pete Seeger later did.

Kousha Navidar: I'm wondering for you, since we're talking about Pete Seeger listening to these albums growing up, for you, you take on this huge undertaking to unearth all of these archival recordings. How did it feel for you when you were listening to-- I don't know if you listened to 800 of them, but I'm sure you listened to a lot of them. How did it feel for you?

Sheryl: It was pretty amazing. I sat at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress next to a reel-to-reel machine where all of these recordings had been transferred. I had already read a lot about them, and what's amazing is Sidney, especially Sidney Robertson, wrote these epic reports, explaining all of the backstory of the people she was recording. I had a sense of what I was going to be hearing, but it's such an amazing record over time. Even the sound, the scratchy sound, if you imagine that that's an aluminum disc that they recorded in 1936.

It isn't a wide range. She was able to break free a little bit of the segregation of the time. Later on, she went and recorded ethnic immigrants in the upper Midwest. Okay, did I listen to all 13 verses of Barbara Allen? No, I didn't. Well, I might have just spaced out, they were playing. It felt like such a gift to be able to do that.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. I understand that you're looking for any descendants that might have access to these recordings. If there's someone out there listening who might have a story for you, how can they get in touch with you very quickly?

Sheryl: Yes. If they go on my website, SherylKaskowitz.com, there's contact there. Also, if people are interested, some of the digital recordings are available on my website, too.

Kousha Navidar: All right. I've been speaking with Sheryl Kaskowitz, author and musicologist. Her book is called A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression―One Song at a Time. Tomorrow, if you're interested in hearing more, Kaskowitz will be participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York. Go check it out. This is All Of It. We are going to be right back. Sheryl, first, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us.

Sheryl: Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Folks, we're going to be back in a second. We're going to talk about a lot more. Stay with us. When we come back, we're going to talk about sandwiches in New York. That's right after the news. See you then.

 

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