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A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time
Pegasus Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
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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 the mid-1930s, President Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors launched a radical experiment to help Americans suffering from the economic devastation of the Great Depression—Appalachian miners and other workers stranded after factories closed, city dwellers with no hope of getting work, farmers whose land had failed. With enthusiastic support from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 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, Joan Baez, 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 extensive 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.
Praise for A Chance to Harmonize
“The first full-length study of one of the New Deal’s most ambitious cultural initiatives.” —Wall Street Journal
“A spellbinding account . . . An exhilarating slice of American history.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vivid . . . Compelling . . . A heartening account of music’s ability to create cooperation and community and restore dignity and hope.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A scholar of American music reveals reveals the rich history of the New Deal’s Music Unit, a cultural initiative aimed at preserving American folk music and fostering camaraderie in rural America during the 1930s.”
—New York Times Book Review
“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
“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
“An absorbing, dual meditation on the political uses of music and on the New Deal’s groundbreaking, messy entanglements with American folk culture.” —Scott Borchert, author of Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America, winner of the New Deal Book Award
“A deeply sympathetic account of how ordinary Americans, at the worst of times, sought solace and strength in music, and a clarion call for the intangible power of art.” —Melissa L. Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography