Seeger headed the Federal Music Project (FMP) of the Works Project Administration (WPA) from 1937 to 1941. He promoted increased recording of traditional singers for the Archive of American Folk-Song, and publication of the valuable Check-List of Recorded Music in the English Language in the Archive of American Folksong. In 1938 he joined with Ben Botkin, folklore editor for the FWP (succeeding John Lomax), in forming a Joint Committee on Folk Arts in order to better promote folk music collecting and scholarship, although it was short-lived because of cutbacks in federal programs. The Seeger and Lomax families were particularly close, with Ruth Crawford Seeger doing the musical transcriptions for the Lomaxes’ Our Singing Country. Pete Seeger, the son of Charles and his first wife Constance, a budding banjo player and a Harvard College dropout, briefly worked for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1939, organizing the collections while learning numerous traditional folksongs, an invaluable education that he would soon put to good use.
Despite general economic hardships, historian Bill Malone has noted that “the most remarkable fact of country music’s history during the Great Depression is that the music not only survived but expanded.” While the record industry was limping along, traditional country musicians found work on the proliferating radio shows, particularly in the South, Midwest, and on the West Coast. “The typical hillbilly musician of that decade was an itinerant entertainer, moving from station to station, seeking sponsors and working a territory until it provided no further dividends.” Some became major stars, such as Gene Autry, but most sustained a modest career, if not more, on radio programs such as the National Barn Dance (WLS in Chicago), the Grand Ole Opry (WSM in Nashville), the Old-Fashioned Barn Dance (KMOX, Saint Louis), the Crazy Barn Dance (WBT, Charlotte), the Renfro Valley Barn Dance (WHAS in Louisville), and the Boone County Jamboree (WLW in Cincinnati).
The Coon Creek Girls, Bradley Kincaid, Karl Davis and Harty Taylor, Bill and Charlie Monroe, the Blue Sky Boys, Roy Acuff, and dozens of others became established performers. The very popular Carter Family also appeared on a few powerful stations located just across the border in Mexico. While most of the hillbilly radio shows were located in the South, they could often be heard throughout the country. Economic hardships, compounded by fierce dust storms, uprooted many from the Midwest, who relocated to California and established a thriving country music market. Singing movie cowboys proliferated, led by Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and the Sons of the Pioneers, as the film industry catered to country/western music fans throughout the country.
Professional musicians competed for audience attention on records, radio programs, and concert stages, but many others,withlesscommercial potential,nonethelessmanaged to appear at the numerous folk festivals and amateur shows. “On a local scale, in thousands of schoolhouses throughout the Southeast, rural white southerners continued to gather and listen to the performances of musicians often raised in nearby communities,” historian Jeffrey Lange has written. Festivals were another outlet for budding performers. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a flamboyant lawyer, traditional musician, and folk song collector, initiated the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1930, which he directed until the 1970s. Attracting dancers and musicians from Western North Carolina, the festival initially featured unaccompanied ballad singers, as well as banjo players and fiddlers. Fiddle and banjo contests and conventions had been held in North Carolina since 1905, often in schoolhouses; the Union Grove Fiddlers’ Convention began in 1924. Such indoor conventions somewhat declined following World War II.
The Strong Grip of Censorship: Regulation and Enframing of the Folk Music Artists
