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This chapter deconstructs Cajuns’, and Cajun music’s, folk categorization. It analyzes three separate interpretations of folk culture as espoused by influential public intellectuals. Alan and John Lomax’s famed ethnographic folklore excursions through the American South, with a focus on the individuals and cultural contexts that informed the Depression era Cajun musical landscape, open the chapter. The first Cajun musicians to perform on a national stage at Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival are also included in this study as an example of Cajun music’s attachment to contemporary trends in the public consumption of folklore and the genre’s attachment to the American national project. William Owens’ little know field excursions are then used to demonstrate the perpetuation of Cajun music’ folk categorization.

Folk music performance and collecting entered the waning year of the 1930s with somewhat renewed vigor but with reduced federal government support. Of increasing importance, a group of professional musicians, including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, and Josh White, emerged to capture a popular interest in folk music, particularly in New York City. Alan Lomax’s CBS programs brought a variety of folk performers into homes and schools throughout the country, and the music’s connection to the Communist Party and organized labor continued as the country edged closer to war. At the same time anti-communism was on the rise.

Into 1938 and 1939, folk music took on more popular dimensions. The voice of the “people,” expressed through music as well as plays, art, nightclub skits, stage musicals, literature, poetry, movies, radio shows, photography, and dance, became increasingly prevalent. Nonetheless, various New Deal programs began to shrink as the country’s political conservatives–northern Republicans allied with southern Democrats–marshalled their forces. Alan Lomax continued to play a creative, vital role, particularly with his radio shows.

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1959 to 1960. Topics covered include Alan Lomax's efforts to capture the complex nature of popular music in 1959; the Kingston Trio's continued popularity; Britain's flourishing folk music scene despite the decline of skiffle; increasing popularity of folk music in America as its boundaries disappeared in the flood of new recordings, books, magazines, newsletters, radio programs, and TV shows; the release of the New Lost City Ramblers's album The New Lost City Ramblers; and the folk revival's musical and activist political connections in the South, personified by Guy Carawan's work at Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, and then Knoxville, Tennessee, even before songs became a vital part of the developing civil rights movement.

As the New Deal quickened in 1935, the federal government increasingly emphasized job creation along with the promotion of the arts through the Works Progress Administration. Alan and John Lomax at the Library of Congress were particularly active in collecting and promoting folk music, including Lead Belly. Pete Seeger began his folk career, part of the radical interest in folk songs.

This chapter discusses the events pertaining to the 1941 Fisk-Library of Congress recording sessions, a project that came about from a study proposed by John Wesley Work III with respect to the 1940 fire incident in Natchez, Mississippi. Work's idea was pitched to the Library of Congress and eventually approved by Alan Lomax. Work and Lomax arrived in Clarksdale and came across Muddy Waters and Son House, possibly by asking for the names of the leading blues musicians. The recording proceeded with House performing five songs, four of them together with his band—Willie Brown on guitar, Leroy Williams on harp, and Fiddlin' Joe Martin on mandolin. Lomax returned to Mississippi the following year and recorded with House once more, spawning ten more tracks. That same year, House headed north and spent the next twenty-one years of his life in musical exile.

Folk music’s exposure, publications, and left-wing ties increased through 1937. The Popular Front, with its focus on the folk arts, melded with the New Deal’s cultural programs. John and Alan Lomax, in particular, continued with their field work, joined by numerous others. Woody Guthrie emerged as the dust bowl bard. Greenwich Village in New York City became a magnet for vernacular performers.

This chapter discusses the folk music scene from 1950 to 1953. It begins by describing the formation and rise of the Weavers into one of the most popular musical groups in the U.S. by early 1951. Their song “On Top of Old Smoky,” landed on the charts in April, reached number 2 for two months, and remained for a total of twenty-three weeks. The group also began appearing at the country's most lavish nightclubs, including Ciro's in Hollywood. The remainder of the chapter details Alan Lomax's move to England where he began an energetic broadcasting, collecting, performing, and traveling career as well as other happenings in the folk music scene.

The depression’s early years gave way to an upsurge of confidence and an artistic renaissance. This was bolstered by the coming era of the common man, when vernacular culture, including music, gained a renewed vigor spurred by the increasing popularity of the Communist and Socialist Parties, as well as the expanding labor unions. John and Alan Lomax were particularly active in collecting and promoting folk music.

From 1930 to 1970, a second folk music revival took hold in the United States and Europe, determined to capture and preserve for posterity US and European vernacular music. Critical to this collection of folklorists, academics, political activists, and entrepreneurs was the history and impact of African American music on folklore and culture. Big Bill, quite familiar with the types of country and Delta blues the folk music revival craved stood happy to oblige. Soon, one of the most sophisticated and urbane performers of the age began performing alone accompanied by his guitar for folk audiences from New York to Chicago. Within this community, Broonzy found a culture and environment willing and able to support his transitioning career from black pop star to folk music darling. Along the way, he would meet more individuals who could aid in his career reinvention and he both accepted and rejected their expectations of him and his music.

Beginning in 1950, Broonzy would tour Europe and the United Kingdom for much of the 1950s while new generations in Britatin, Holland, France, Belgium, and more began discovering and rediscovering African American music from the pre-war period. Big Bill became one of the first African American blues artists to tour there, quickly becoming a fan favorite, especially in England. A subculture of continental Europeans from the period developed a lively community of jazz enthusiasts whose record collections and academic writings connected these post-war devotees across borders and languages. Central to their fascinations and curiosities was the juxtaposition between Bebop and traditional, New Orleans jazz. Many traditionalists loathed Bebop and through Big Bill, discovered the blues impact on but delineation from the music they loved so much. In the UK, the folk music revival spread, thanks in large part to Alan Lomax, and Lomax, by this point a good friend, found in Big Bill a treasure who could highlight his and the revival’s pretensions on black blues. In effect, Broonzy began navigating these audiences, essentially reinvigorating his career and building celebrity across the Atlantic.

This chapter describes the folk music scene from 1957 to 1958. It discusses the emergence of the Kingston Trio that energized the folk revival; folk festivals and recordings; the continued popularity of skiffle in Great Britain; magazines the covered the folk music scene, including Sing Out! and Caravan; and Alan Lomax's return to the United States after seven years of folk-song collecting across Europe. According to Greenwich Village musician Dave Van Ronk, “the last years of the 1950s were a great time to be in the Village.” “It was not too crazy yet, but there was an exhilarating sense of something big right around the corner. As for the folk scene, it was beginning to look as if it might have a future, and me with it.” What was happening in Greenwich Village was rapidly spreading around the country. Folk music, broadly defined, appeared to have a bright future, while spanning the Atlantic Ocean.

Since 1955, when a Belgian jazz writer helped scribe the first book investigating Big Bill’s life and music, dozens of artists, scholars, journalists, and enthusiasts have left a long trail of written work dedicated to Broonzy and his past. Well into the twenty-first century, this trend continues. These brokers of Broonzy’s life, music, and public memory have shaped and reshaped his story reflecting each respective generation’s own understandings of race, celebrity, blues music, and the black experience in the United States, among other themes. In a sense, Broonzy has become a cipher for unlocking important questions about authenticity, folklore, black identity, music history, and more to a large field of predominately white authors. For nearly sixty-five years, Big Bill and his history pop up along a long trajectory of studies that have viewed him as an object of intrigue and mystery rather than how he wanted to be remembered. Big Bill was an African American, pre-war, pop music celebrity who built and reached the height of that celebrity recording and performing for black audiences. Unearthing his vague, working class past has prevented history from accepting Big Bill for what he was—an agent of black modernity.

Throughout the twentieth century, folk music has had many definitions and incarnations in the United States and Great Britain. The public has been most aware of its commercial substance and appeal, with the focus on recording artists and their repertoires, but there has been so much more, including a political agenda, folklore theories, grassroots styles, regional promoters, and discussions on what musical forms—blues, hillbilly, gospel, Anglo-Saxon, pop, singer-songwriters, instrumental and/or vocal, international—should be included. These contrasting and conflicting interpretations were particularly evident during the 1950s. This chapter begins by focusing on Alan Lomax (1915–2002), one of the most active folk music collectors, radio promoters, and organizers during the 1940s. Lomax had a major influence on folk music in both the United States and Great Britain, tying together what had come before and what would follow. The chapter then discusses folk festivals and performers; British folk music, musicians, and trans-Atlantic musical connections; and Carl Sandburg's publication of the The American Songbag in 1927.

A hybrid revival genre like electric folk illustrates the difficulty of a strict separation of art, folk, and popular music. This is also corroborated by a deeper analysis of the relationship between electric folk and traditional English music. This chapter starts out with a picture of traditional music as depicted by the collectors of the First Revival, Cecil Sharp in particular, whose definition was also adapted by the International Folk Music Council in 1954. Issues discussed here include: the ideal of a “pure” English folk music tradition, the separation of traditional music from popular/commercial music, the disappearance of the tradition, exclusiveness of oral transmission, the ideal of unaccompanied singing, editorial changes and notational aspects. Discussing several modern controversial perspectives on the relationship of traditional and popular music, including Dave Harker, Karl Dallas, Alan Lomax, and Simon Frith, the chapter argues for more a flexible application of the various concepts.

During World War II, both the discourse about music and composers’ idiomatic choices engaged anew with the historical and national underpinning of American music. Three strategies shaped this contextualization of musical practice and composition. The first consisted of the debate about a “usable past,” which could include the appropriation of European repertoire from Johann Sebastian Bach to Richard Wagner, as well as the resuscitation of earlier American music, especially that of William Billings. The second instrumentalized folk music for both musical practice—in particular in Sing Out, Sweet Land!, a Broadway production by Walter Kerr and Elie Siegmeister—and composition. A well-known example of the latter is Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. The third approach led to a number of strategies for Americanizing European opera and for employing it for “racial uplift” in the activities of the National Negro Opera Company. These were not new issues in the history of American music, but the war intensified and crystallized the debates because of the country’s heightened need for national delineation.

This chapter analyses the social practice of singing while working—sung work—and of the meaning of the singing within that social practice. The chapter argues that sung work is a new entity. The singing and the work do not just occur simultaneously; they “coinhere” to create something new, the creation of this new entity by the singing workers often being a protest against the conditions under which they are working. Examples are taken from the recordings that Alan Lomax made of prisoners singing while working in the Parchman Prison in Louisiana. The chapter closes with some general reflections on the enhancement function of art—art enhancing the activities of ordinary life and one art enhancing a work of another art.