A Chance to Harmonize

Starred review from February 26, 2024
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.