'A Chance to Harmonize' Tells the Story of the U.S. Music Unit

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KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A generation of American folk singers – including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie – owe their inspiration to a little-known New Deal project known as the U.S. Music Unit. Over the course of two years, federal workers recorded amateur musicians at government-owned homesteads as a way to “raise morale, build community, and create hope,” according to music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz. The Music Unit made hundreds of recordings for the Library of Congress before it was shut down on grounds that it was “socialistic.” We talk to Kaskowitz about the people behind the music and hear some songs from archives. Kaskowitz’s new book is “A Chance to Harmonize.” Guests: Sheryl Kaskowitz, author, "A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:33.7	From KQED.
0:50.3	The From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Rachel Myro in for Mina Kim.
0:54.9	Coming up on forum, during the Great Depression, FDR and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to shine a big spotlight on a populist vision of American culture that working class people could get behind in dark and contentious times.
1:09.8	The music in particular would ignite a couple of cultural revolutions.
1:14.6	Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, all owe a debt of gratitude to a little-known New Deal project.
1:23.0	This hour we talked to music scholar Cheryl Kaskowitz, whose new book explores a particularly rich
1:28.9	chapter of American folk music in a chance to harmonize. That's next after this news.
1:37.8	This is Forum. I'm Rachel Myro in for Mina Kim. In the mid-1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration took a number of
1:47.6	radical steps to help Americans suffering from the Great Depression, out-of-work people,
1:53.7	by the millions whose farms and factories had failed hungry children and seniors.
1:59.9	Now, most of us learn in school about the Works
2:02.5	Progress Administration, the WPA, and Social Security. But the federal government also set up
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