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A Chance to Harmonize
Click for more information  Ebook
2024
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Publishers Weekly Review
Musicologist Kaskowitz (God Bless America) offers a spellbinding account of the New Deal's Music Agency, a 1930s government project that aimed to foster solidarity among out-of-work Americans through folk music. Housed under the Resettlement Administration, which established cooperative homesteads across rural America for the unemployed, the unit was led by musicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete), who deployed musician-agents (many of them women) to the homesteads. Along with their official morale-boosting work, these musicians recorded over 800 folk songs, which are kept today in the Library of Congress. Shut down after only two years, when conservative congressmen went after the entire Resettlement Administration, the Music Agency had been so careful to stay under the radar from the start--its agents marked their documents "confidential" to avoid scrutiny--that the project was inadvertently hidden from the historical record despite what Kaskowitz argues was its outsize impact on American culture: it bolstered spirits and succeeded, according to the author, in promoting solidarity, while also laying the groundwork for the coming folk music revival. Kaskowitz backgrounds the bureaucratic maneuvering and evolving ideology of the Music Agency--agents believed folk music could "bind the homesteaders into harmonious social units" and be a vehicle for leftist political awakening--with a sweeping on-the-ground narrative of the Great Depression's hardest hit regions. It's an exhilarating slice of American history. (Apr.)
Booklist Review
Kaskowitz tells the fascinating and largely forgotten story of the "music unit," a New Deal initiative that was both short-lived and under-the-radar. The unit was created to lift the spirits of residents who had been resettled into government homesteads after their livelihoods had evaporated during the Great Depression. Aficionados of American music will be familiar with the work of Alan Lomax, head of the Archive of American Folk Song, who sent a team to California to record the songs of Dust Bowl refugees living in work camps. A footnote in Lomax's collection cites an "amateur folklorist" named Margaret Valiant, but Valiant was no amateur. Not only had she preceded Lomax's team in documenting traditional folk songs, she was also a valued government employee and a star of the music unit, traveling the country establishing instrument lessons, leading group sing-a-longs, and directing ambitious community musicals. Kaskowitz shows us that the music unit was a direct precursor to Lomax and a missing link in the birth of the American folk music revival.
Kirkus Review
The history of a little-known New Deal program that brought robust musical life to rural resettlement towns in America during the Great Depression, seeding the folk-music revival to come. Kaskowitz, an American music scholar and author of God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, brings to vivid life the history of the Resettlement Administration's Special Skills Division, which developed art activities on American homesteads. The goal of the RA's Music Unit was to use the power of music to improve morale and create a stronger sense of community in these rural resettlement towns. Kaskowitz tells the compelling story by chronicling the efforts of three federal workers: musicologist Charles Seeger, music instructor Margaret Valiant, and folk-music collector Sidney Robertson. Their shared enterprise stemmed from a belief that American folk songs needed to be "preserved" and "captured" for history, but they were also highly interested in the social use of music, which could encourage camaraderie and collectivism among the rural poor. Kaskowitz makes the Music Unit's ties to the New Deal and its aims explicit: Franklin Roosevelt signed off on the purchase of expensive recoding equipment, and Eleanor Roosevelt attended a musical pageant staged at Penderlea Homesteads in North Carolina. The author does not shy away from pointing out the "musical color line" that endured in the resettlements' musical life, acknowledging minstrel-show elements in Southern communities' revues, but her research makes a persuasive case that the Music Unit's attention to American folk music, including Indigenous and ethnic immigrant music, was "a kind of prequel to the origin story for the folk revival" to come. Readers can enhance their experience with the book by listening to some of the recordings mentioned, offered on tracks organized by chapter on the author's website. A heartening account of music's ability to create cooperation and community and restore dignity and hope. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
The remarkable story of a hidden New Deal program that tried to change America and end the Great Depression using folk music, laying the groundwork for the folk revival and having a lasting impact on American culture.

In 1934, the Great Depression had destroyed the US economy, leaving residents poverty-stricken. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt urged President Roosevelt to take radical action to help those hit hardest--Appalachian miners and mill workers stranded after factories closed, city dwellers with no hope of getting work, farmers whose land had failed. They set up government homesteads in rural areas across the country, an experiment in cooperative living where people could start over. To boost morale and encourage the homesteaders to find community in their own traditions, the administration brought in artists to lead group activities--including folk music.

As part of a music unit led by Charles Seeger (father of Pete), staffer Sidney Robertson traveled the country to record hundreds of folk songs. Music leaders, most notably Margaret Valiant, were sent to homesteads to use the collected songs to foster community and cooperation. Working almost entirely (and purposely) under the radar, the music unit would collect more than 800 songs and operate for nearly two years, until they were shut down under fire from a conservative coalition in Congress that deemed the entire homestead enterprise dangerously "socialistic."

Despite its early demise, the music unit proved that music can provide hope and a sense of belonging even in the darkest times. It also laid the groundwork for the folk revival that followed, seeing the rise of artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Bob Dylan.

Award-winning author and Harvard-trained American music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz has had the unique opportunity to listen to the music unit's entire collection of recordings and examine a trove of archival materials, some of which have never been made available to the public.

A Chance To Harmonize reveals this untold story and will delight readers with the revelation of a new and previously undiscovered chapter in American cultural history.
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