Throughoutthe decade folk music and dance from around the world wascommonly performed and celebrated.The Folk Festival Council of New York City, for example, was formed in 1932, “not only to give the people of our land opportunities to enjoy the contributions of our foreign born groups to the folk arts, but to keep those arts alive as a vital part of our community life.” The council published Folk-News, which covered local events as well as the National Folk Festivals and folk life exhibits at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Moreover, ethnic choruses and dancers appeared at music festivals and pageants sponsored by various organizations, including the Communist Party, which comprised various nationality organizations and an international outlook. For example, the Festival of the American Music League in 1936 included the German Workers Club Chorus and the Ukrainian Workers Chorus, along with composer Aaron Copland playing his own compositions.George Korson, newspaperman and collector of miners’ songs, organized the short-lived Pennsylvania Folk Festival in 1935, which represented the varied nature of the state’s people. The 1936 festival included Chief Strong Fox and his Seneca Indians doing tribal dances, Ukrainian folk dances, gypsy music, French and German folk songs, African-American spirituals, miners’ songs and ballads, sea chanteys, and even Stephen Foster songs. In 1936 Korson organized five regional festivals, leading up to the majorfestival held at Bucknell University’s Memorial Stadium. This was a mammoth affair, again featuring the state’s various cultures, even including Gypsy folk music and the lore of the vanished lumber and river rafting industries. Korson’s wide-ranging, imaginative festival ended in 1938, having run into financial and other difficulties, but it indicated the possibilities of including the country’s mix of musical and folk cultures.While commercial radio programs and Hollywood movies, along with stage shows, the crippled record industry, even folk festivals, created economic possibilities for white performers, African Americans had few such outlets or opportunities. There was one attempt at the allblack Fort Valley State College near Macon, Georgia. Folk music was originally included in a festival designed to teach young people an appreciation of music in 1940, with W. C. Handy as the judge. The next year a separate folk festival was organized, which would soon include guitar, banjo, and harmonica players, string bands, along with singers, doing both secular (blues) and sacred songs. The Library of Congress recorded some of the early festivals, which finally ended in the mid-1950s.Blues performers continued to do some recording, although greatly limited, and performing through the Depression years. Radio and records had become widespread throughout the South by the 1930s, for both whites and blacks, with all sorts of music available, but the recording companies were only interested in what they considered music that was seemingly unique to the African-American population. As Elijah Wald has notably argued, “radio exposed blues players, and rural listeners in general, to other styles. It was a great leveler, allowing someone in a Delta cabin to listen to anything from hillbilly fiddling to opera.” Muddy Waters (aka McKinley Morganfield), first recorded by Alan Lomax and John Work in 1941 on the Stovall plantation, for example, “listed more [Gene] Autry hits in his repertoire than songs by any blues artist.” Wald has been pretty much alone among blues historians in attempting to position the blues within the larger context of popular music. In Escaping the Delta he has made a strong argument that “rural black Delta dwellers were not only aware of all sorts of nonblues, non-Mississippi music, but were doing their best to keep up with the latest developments.” Robert Johnson has become the most famous of the Delta musicians, but it must be noted that he only recorded 29 songs in 1936 and 1937, and died in 1938 not long after his records were barely available. His fame remained local until the 1960s.
Folk Festivals
