An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 14 | QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW 359

range of audiences, their music struck a responsive chord, even with listeners

who did not share their political outlook. After the United States entered the

war in December 1941, the Almanacs added anti-Nazi songs to their repertory.

They even auditioned successfully at the Rainbow Room, a swanky nightclub

atop a Rockefeller Center skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, singing these

words to the Appalachian tune “Old Joe Clark”:

Round and round Hitler’s grave

Round and round we go,

We’re going to lay that poor boy down

he won’t get up no more.

I wish I had a bushel

I wish I had a peck

I wish I had old Hitler

With a rope around his neck.

Cecil Sharp and Robert Winslow Gordon had thought of folk music as com-

ing from the past. In contrast, Pete Seeger, the Lomaxes, and the Almanac Sing-

ers approached it as a living force in the present. To Woody Guthrie, performing

in something close to his native vernacular, such categories as folklore and folk

music hardly existed. To urban folk musicians, on the other hand, the labels

marked an identity and a community that they had imagined into being. Folk

music by the middle of the century had become a means not only of expressing

traditions but also of creating them.

In the interwar years, the labels blues, gospel, country, and folk came to embrace

overlapping musical styles, displaying the hybridity characteristic of American

music as a whole. The borders between these styles can be hard to pin down.

What unites them is their position at the collision of contradictory attitudes

toward the creation and ownership of music. On the one hand is a traditionalist

stance that sees music as common property to be freely drawn upon by all musi-

cians; from this point of view, new songs are created by taking bits and pieces of

old songs and reworking them to fi t the expressive needs of the present day. On

the other hand is a stance that sees pieces of music as the intellectual property

of those who create them; from this point of view, it is fi tting that these artistic

statements earn a profi t as they satisfy the public’s expressive needs.

The contrasting goals of these two attitudes have created a tension in

America’s musical culture that has endured for nearly a century. If anything, the

legal stakes surrounding it are higher than ever in the twenty-fi rst century.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW

1. What are the differences between classic blues and country blues?


2. W hat are the similarities and differences between black gospel music, spiri-
   tuals (see chapter 9), and blues? How did those musical relationships affect
   the reception of gospel music in Chicago’s black churches?


3. Of blues, jazz, gospel music, and country music, which styles allowed women
   to rise to prominence and which did not? What might be possible reasons for
   the differences?

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