CHAPTER 13 | GEORGE GERSHWIN 317
connection between the redirection of her energies away from composing and her
marriage to Seeger, followed by the births of their four children. Crawford later
referred to the period of her life beg inning in 1933 as her time of “composing babies.”
Equally signifi cant, perhaps, was the philosophical shift taking place among
politically radical modernist musicians. Shortly after his marriage to Crawford,
Charles Seeger began to express his disillusionment with the aims of modern-
ism in his columns for the Daily Worker. “Dissonant writers” like his wife, he
wrote in 1933, were a “defeated faction” in their battle with the traditionalists.
At the same time, he and Henry Cowell helped form the Composers’ Collective,
a group that aimed to create a “proletarian music” whose centerpiece would be
“mass songs,” simple songs with propagandistic lyrics, traditional enough to be
suitable for collective singing but lightly spiced with hints of modernism—an
updating of the labor songs described in chapter 9. Although a number of com-
posers tried their hands at mass songs—in 1934 Aaron Copland composed “Into
the Streets May First”—proletarian music never caught on with a larger audience,
leftist or otherwise.
By the mid-1930s Seeger had decided that the music best able to serve the
masses was not modernist, indeed was not classical music in any sense. He redi-
rected his efforts toward the study of folk music, and Ruth Crawford Seeger
joined him in that study. Although that change removed her from the historical
narrative of classical music in the United States, at the same time she and her
family became key fi gures in a different narrative: that of the transformation of
folk music in the mid-twentieth century, a story taken up in the chapter 14.GEORGE GERSHWIN
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn in 1898 to Jewish parents who had emi-
grated from Russia. His boyhood was marked by an interest in athletics and an
indifference to school. Music was seldom heard in the Gershwin household
until around 1910, when the family bought its fi rst piano so that older brother Ira
could learn to play it. But George soon took over the instrument. He progressed
quickly and about 1912 began lessons with a teacher who recognized his talent
and introduced him to the world of classical music. In 1914, however, Gershwin
left high school and went to work for a Tin Pan Alley publishing fi rm. Hired as
a song plugger—a pianist who demonstrated new songs for potential perform-
ers in vaudeville and musical comedy—he spent endless hours at the keyboard,
which improved his playing. Plugging songs also gave the young musician an
excellent education in songwriting, and before long the teenager was trying his
hand at songs of his own.GERSHWIN’S POPULAR SONGS
In 1917 Gershwin found work as a rehearsal pianist on Broadway, where his fl air
for songwriting was noticed. The following year, a prestigious publisher offered
him a weekly salary for the right to publish songs he might compose in the future.
When Al Jolson interpolated Gershwin’s “Swanee” into the musical Sinbad (see
chapter 10), the twenty-one-year-old Gershwin scored his fi rst hit.the Composers’
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