How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression-One Song at a Time
by Sheryl Kaskowitz
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Published Apr 2024
272 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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.
"Kaskowitz offers a spellbinding account of the New Deal's Music Unit, a 1930s government project that aimed to foster solidarity among out-of-work Americans through folk music. Kaskowitz backgrounds the bureaucratic maneuvering and evolving ideology of the Music Unit with a sweeping on-the-ground narrative of the Great Depression's hardest hit regions. It's an exhilarating slice of American history." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A heartening account of music's ability to create cooperation and community and restore dignity and hope. Kaskowitz brings to vivid life the history of the Resettlement Administration's Special Skills Division, which developed art activities on American homesteads." ―Kirkus Reviews
"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. 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. 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." ―Booklist
"In A Chance to Harmonize, Sheryl Kaskowitz vividly illuminates a unique moment in American history, when an agency of FDR's New Deal brought music and hope to struggling homesteaders, and reaped musical riches in return, sewing the seeds of the American Folk revival. The Music Unit's demise provides a telling lesson for our own times: it was shut down after only two years by conservatives in Congress who deemed it 'socialistic.'" ―Susan Quinn, author of Eleanor and Hick
"Who knew that a book about government bureaucracy could create such an incredible adventure story? Sheryl Kaskowitz manages to do just that. Captivatingly written and exhaustively researched, A Chance to Harmonize brilliantly illuminates this critical yet often overlooked moment in American cultural history." ―Mark Davidson, author of Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine
This information about A Chance to Harmonize was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sheryl Kaskowitz, PhD, is the author of God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award for music writing. Her articles have been published in the New York Times, Slate, Bloomberg News, and other outlets. Kaskowitz earned her PhD in music with an ethnomusicology focus from Harvard in 2011 and completed her BA in music at Oberlin. She has served as a lecturer at Brandeis University and Brown University and lives with her family in Berkeley, California.
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