Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Workers Music League was formed in 1931 [1] as an extension of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians that was mentioned in the post for 7 July 2019. Norman Cazden remembered a group of classical composers formed a subgroup, the Composer’s Collective of New York, because many of the members of the larger organization lacked the "musical expertise" required to "talk on technical matters." [2]
The Collective’s initial interest was piqued by Hanns Eisler. Like them, the Austrian composer had been influenced by Arnold Schönberg. Unlike them, he had made successful forays into popular political theater with Bertold Brecht [3] using "rhythms and extended harmonies such as ‘blue notes’" [4] in Communist East Berlin during the Weimar period. Their "Solidarity Song" [5] was so popular in 1932, the year the Collective was organized, [6] that it was sung at sports events. [7]
While the Communist Party was promoting proletarian music created by professional musicians, unaffiliated organizers in the South were using Protestant camp meeting traditions to engage members. Harry Leland Mitchell organized the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) as a mixed-race movement in 1934. [8] Joshua Youngblood wrote:
"From the union’s beginning, both white and black leaders worked tirelessly on its behalf. Ministers and preachers of both races overwhelmingly dominated the leadership of the STFU." [9]
Union leaders discovered the only buildings owned by African Americans were churches. [10] By 1935, SFTU organizers were instructed to emulate prayer meetings. Speakers could then move seamlessly from labor to theology if they suspected the approach of white vigilantes. [11]
"J. W. Washington of Earl, Arkansas, described a meeting his local had with the union lawyer in January 1936. The meeting opened with prayer and the singing of a spiritual: ‘We had just begun to get in the [middle] of a big time. We first sung two verses of I Shall Not be Moved that song I do believe sprang from our lips with the voice of god [sic].’ The meeting was then interrupted as the union members were attacked and the song took on a greater meaning." [12]
Lee Hays remembered in the late 1930s at "meetings way out in the back woods or in the heart of the dismal cotton country," Claude Williams "would sing a song like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’—prepared to break into the old hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [13]
Williams was raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church by sharecroppers in northwestern Tennessee. [14] The denomination was a direct descendant of the 1801 Cane Ridge Revival. [15] It was formed in 1810 by churches that were expelled by the Presbyterian Church for promoting Arminianism over Calvinism and for elevating religious experiences by their ministers over seminary educations. [16] Congregations also offended the Scots body by singing hymns, as well as psalms. [17]
His first pastorate after leaving Vanderbilt in 1930 was Paris, Arkansas. Williams expanded the church’s outreach by creating a recreation center for adolescents, [18] and supported the Logan County coal miners in their strike against local operators. [19] Two who joined him at this time were Hays and Zilphia Johnson. [20] Hays’ father was a Methodist minister assigned to Logan County where he died in 1927. [21] Johnson’s father’s maternal grandfather had been part of the original migration of Cumberland Presbyterians to Arkansas from Kentucky in the 1820s. [22]
The Paris church removed Williams, who then was sent to Fort Smith in 1935. [23] Zilphia went to the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. [24] Soon after her arrival, she married its director. Myles Horton was a Cumberland Presbyterian [25] whose parents were sharecroppers and factory workers in the western Tennessee River valley. [26]
At Highlander, Zilphia trained students to be song leaders, [27] and showed them how to modify existing songs to fit particular circumstances. [28] Each year she published a collection of labor songs from the school. [29] She didn’t include tunes. Chelsea Hodge suggested that eliminated barriers for people who couldn’t read music. [30] Equally important, it drew upon familiar psalm and early hymn singing traditions that used a few melodies with many texts. [31]
In 1938, Zilphia began editing Labor Songs for the Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [32] To obtain material, she asked union locals in all parts of the country to send her songs, along with explanations for how they were used. [33] Her concern was not what workers ought to sing, but what had been proven to work.
Zilphia didn’t just teach; like others at Highlander, she worked directly with union organization drives and strikes. In 1936, she worked with textile workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. [34] She later told farm union leaders in Montana that she organized a parade of unity on Washington’s Birthday. They began
"marching two by two, with the children and the band. They marched past the mill and 400 machine gun bullets were fired into the midst of the group. A woman was shot in the leg on the right and in the ankle on the left, on the left of me. And I looked around and the police were all disappeared…well, in about five minutes, a few of us stood up at the mill gates and sang, "We shall not be moved, just a like a tree that’s planted by the water." And in ten minutes, [the workers] began to come out again from behind the barns and garages and the little stores that were around in this small town, and they stood there, and they were not moved and sang, and that’s what won their organization. [35]
End Notes
1. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
2. Norman Cazden. June 1976. Quoted by David Dunaway. "Unsung Songs of Protest: the Composers’ Collective of New York." New York Folklore 5:1–20:1979. 1–2. Requoted by Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." Masters thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 3.
3. Margaret R. Jackson. "Workers, Unite!: The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926-1932." PhD Diss. Florida State University School of Music, Fall 2003. 8.
4. Jackson. 27.
5. Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler. "Solidaritätslied." For the film Kuhle Wampe. Prometheus Film, 14 May 1932.
6. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. No page numbers in online edition. The Collective was the result of a seminar led by Cowell, Jacob Schaefer, and Leo Charles to pursue "the specific goal of creating an American version of the successful proletarian music by European composers and writers such as Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Bertoldt Brecht."
7. Wikipedia. "Solidaritätslied."
8. Joshua C. Youngblood. "Realistic Religion and Radical Prophets: The STFU, the Social Gospel, and the American Left in the 1930s." Masters thesis. The Florida State University, Spring 2004. 5. A number of more thorough histories exist of the union. I am using this one for its treatment of religion and Claude Williams.
9. Youngblood. 3.
10. Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless. "Of the Least and the Most: The African American Rural Church." In African American Life in the Rural South, 1900 – 1950. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 61. Cited by Youngblood. 24.
11. Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. "New Methods of Organization for the S.T.F.U." 1935. Union papers in University of North Carolina Library. Cited by Youngblood. 25.
12. J. W. Washington. Letter to Harry Leland Mitchell. 19 January 1936. STFU Papers. Quoted by Youngblood. 32.
13. Lee Hays. "The Singing Preacher." People’s Songs Bulletin, February and March 1948. 11, 13, 44. Reprinted in Hays. "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!" 67–70. Edited by Robert S. Koppelman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 70.
14. William H. Pruden III. "Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 9 April 2018.
15. Cane Ridge was mentioned briefly in the post for 2 November 2017.
16. Wikipedia. "Cumberland Presbyterian Church."
17. B. W. McDonnold. History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Nashville: Board of Publication of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1899. 41.
18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 27.
19. Pruden.
20. I am using Zilphia’s first name throughout to avoid confusion. She often is identified as the daughter of the mine owner. In fact, her father was a mine prospector [36] who moved the family between Idaho and Arkansas several times during her childhood. Chelsea Hodge said when they returned the last time, her father "owned a small interest in a coal mine." [37]
21. Willens. 3. Hays was 13-years-old. They were living in Booneville about 16 miles from Paris.
22. Wikipedia, "Zilphia Horton," named her parents. Her parents’ entries on Find a Grave did not mention their children, probably because they were buried elsewhere. The Grave data placed them in the right part of Arkansas at the right time.
Charles Robin Rauch. "Robert Guy Johnson" [Zilphia’s father] Find a Grave website. 26 May 2011
Bea Smith Daniel. "Ida May Cox Johnson" [Zilphia’s father’s mother/her grandmother]. Find a Grave website. 8 October 2008.
Bea Smith Daniel. "Rev Anderson Buchanan Cox" [Zilphia’s father’s mother’s father/her great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 30 September 2008. Updated by Bill Hunt.
Bill Hunt. "Coleman Cox" [Cox’s father/Zilphia’s great-great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 25 October 2010. Cox was converted at a revival that preceded Cane Ridge.
23. Pruden.
24. The Highland Folk School was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
25. Franklin and Betty J. Parker. "Myles Horton (1905-90), Educator and Social Activist of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; With Addendum." Highlander website. 20 January 2013.
26. Bill Ayers and Therese Quinn. "Myles Horton (1905–1990)." Education Encyclopedia website.
27. Hays said he learned to be a song leader from Zilphia at Highlander. [38]
28. Chelsea Hodge. "‘A Song Workers Everywhere Sing:’ Zilphia Horton and the Creation of Labor’s Musical Canon." Master’s thesis. University of Arkansas. May 2014. 38.
29. Hodge. 25.
30. Hodge. 27.
31. Psalm singing was mentioned briefly in the post for 23 August 2017.
32. Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939.
33. Hodge. 25–26.
34. Zilphia Horton. Letter to Myles Horton. 1936. Myles Horton Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Cited by Hodge 34–35.
35. Zilphia Horton. Speech to Montana Farmers’ Union School, 1952. Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection in Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Quoted by Hodge. 51.
36. Hodge. 9.
37. Hodge. 7.
38. Lee Hays. People’s Songs, January 1947. 11. Cited by Hodge. 31–32. Willens repeated the story, with the added detail the incident occurred at a miner’s meeting. [39]
39. Willens. 94–95.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Folk Music Revival - Unions
Topic: Folk Music Revival
Josef Stalin ordered followers to abandon working through existing United States labor unions in 1928, after his agents were expelled from the American Federation of Labor in 1924 and the United Mine Workers in 1926. He told them, instead, to form rival unions. [1]
In 1929, the party’s National Textile Workers’ Union sent Fred Beal to Charlotte, North Carolina, where workers were protesting longer hours for less pay. [2] The brutality of mill owners in Gastonia drew national attention after men opened fire on a truck load of protestors on September 14. Margaret Larkin began publicizing the murdered Ella May in November as a genuine folk singer who used topical songs to rouse workers. [3]
This was the period when Stalin had forbidden the use of folk music. Larkin was not a Communist, but had been involved with textile-union activities in Passaic, New Jersey. [4] Her knowledge of folk music went back to her childhood in Las Vegas, New Mexico. [5] The railroad town had both Spanish-speakers, whose families had been in the area for hundreds of years, and ranchers, who had relocated from Texas.
Larkin already was singing folk songs to a guitar accompaniment when she was a student at the University of Kansas in the early 1920s. [6] While many wanted to see the cowboy as the prototype of the singing laborer, she did not believe the songs she published in 1931 in Singing Cowboy [7] were work songs. Instead, she noticed only some men sang around Las Vegas, and it seemed to be a matter of personal preference. [8]
Most of the research on Wiggins has focused on the circumstances of her death, rather than her early life. Larkin implied her parents were mountaineers in the tradition of those met by Cecil Sharp. [9] She described them as "hill people" who raised yams, cabbages, beans, corn, apples, and hogs. [10]
Mary Frederickson said she was born near Bryson City, North Carolina. [11] More recently, Elizabeth Olmstead said May was born in Sevierville, Tennessee in 1900. [12] Both towns were county seats in the Smokey Mountains, so May could have been born in a rural area, but raised in a town where she learned to read and write. [13]
If both statements were partly true, her father may have left a North Carolina mountain farm to work on building the railroad that was completed in Sevierville in 1910. [14] Larkin said her father went to a logging camp in 1910, when the family lacked the money to buy clothing. [15]
No one has mentioned anyone in May’s family who was a traditional singer. [16] It seems likely she gained her skills as a performer during her adolescence spent in logging camps. One man, who knew her then, told Larkin: "she had a fine, ringing voice, and nobody else could sing ‘Little Mary Fagan,’ ‘Lord Lovel’ and ‘Sweet William’ with such plaintive sweetness as she." [17]
The image of the folk-song-singing union activist was formed by the time Theodore Dreiser headed a commission investigating violence in Harlan County coal fields. [18] His group sent Molly Jackson on a tour in 1931 to publicize problems in Kentucky. [19] While she wasn’t known to have been active in the strike, she had been a midwife who dealt with the consequences of poverty. [20]
Archie Green noticed the first verses of her "Poor Miner’s Farewell" were traditional, and the rest were polemical. [21] He hypothesized she had created the first from lines and images already familiar to her, and added the other verses after she had gone to New York City for Dreiser. [22]
The perception of the folk-singing union was circumscribed by the view, discussed in the post for 12 May 2019, that the only true folk lived in the rural south, either in the Appalachian mountains or as African-American sharecroppers. Serge Denisoff noted the songs written by Maurice Sugar for the United Auto Workers sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in 1937 were dismissed because he was a lawyer. [23]
Songs sung during strikes or labor organizing campaigns were the performed or public parts of existing traditions shared by the workers. The narrow perception of the folk blinded labor organizers and journalists to the fact less-isolated groups of people had shared repertoires they could use to produce ephemeral songs for specific occasions.
The Flint strike made this difference between public and private traditions clear because those on strike were hidden in buildings, while the individuals seen by journalists were often the wives of strikers who were publicizing union activity by their presence.
Perhaps the most important exterior event occurred on 1 February 1937 when the women staged a shadow challenge to an unoccupied plant to divert the attention of GM’s security forces while men took control of a separate, more important building. [24] Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who had been at Gastonia, [25] said the women stood in front of the gate, holding hands, and sang "We Shall Not Be Moved." [26]
Later, the women said, while they had seen many songs on sheets provided by union organizers, [27] but the only ones they sang much were Sugar’s "Soup Song," "Solidarity Forever," and "Hold the Fort." [28] The last was a gospel song written in 1870 by Philip Paul Bliss that was inspired by an incident in the Civil War. [29]
Inside the factory buildings, the UAW supervised workers to make sure no damage was done to company property that would justify the governor sending in the National Guard. [30] Sugar remembered:
"singing was part of the organized recreation of the workers, and they frequently improvised bands [. . .] lots of hillbilly stuff . . . and lots of parodies." [31]
Part of the Flint tradition may have gone back to the community singing movement of World War I. George Oscar Brown remembered he was contracted to develop a music association to support the war effort. He said he began with public meetings that tended to attract women. After a few Sunday sessions, they brought their families. [32]
Brown then was let into General Motors plants during the noon breaks [33] He recalled:
"In some of our shops there will be 600 or 800 men gathered together, in others 200 or 300. In Buick No. 11, [34] where there are 2,500 men working under one roof, on one floor approximately 1,200 take part in the ‘sing.’ It is not possible to get to each shop very often, there are so many places to go, and it is not possible to give noon-hour every day." [35]
The University of Michigan music professor added:
"They would welcome us every day if they could have us. Whereas, other public speakers and evangelists are rather frowned upon both by the men and the employers, we have absolute entree to every factory in the city. It is a great inspiration to stand with a great group of these working men and see how eager they are to sing." [36]
The ethnic backgrounds of the singers seems to have been mixed. Germans were less inclined to settle in the Flint area in the 1850s than in other parts of the country, since it had little good farm land. [37] Brown emphasized the difficulties he encountered teaching songs to people during World War I who did not speak English. [38] However, JoEllen Vinyard said most of Flint’s factory workers after World War I were "Michigan-born white Protestant Americans or moved from Ohio, Indiana, and neighboring states." [39]
Photographs reproduced by Timothy Lynch, showed this variety of cultures. The musical instruments in one included a fiddle, an accordion, and an harmonica. [40] Another showed one accordion and one harmonica. [41] These instruments would have been found in lumber camps, on Great Lakes freighters, and other isolated places with all-male workforces. Sugar was part of this world: his Jewish parents had fled Russian-controlled Lithuania for the lumber county in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. [42]
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration to bring some stability to industrial competition. It included provisions for recognizing unions. [43] In 1934, Louis Adamac said the automotive companies responded by recruiting labor from Kentucky and other parts of the South they believed would be less interested in union activities. [44]
Lynch’s photographs showed the auto companies miscalculated: Southerners would unionize when times were bad. There also were four guitars and one banjo in the first photograph; the second showed two guitars and one man clogging. These instruments and the dance most likely were brought from the South. All the men in the pictures were white.
End Notes:
1. Wikipedia. "Wikipedia Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
2. R. Veto. "Beal, Fred Erwin." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Margaret Larkin. "The Story of Ella May." New Masses 5:1–2: November 1929. She usually is called Ella Mae Wiggins. Wiggins was her married name, but she had reverted to May by the time she was in Gastonia.
4. Wikipedia. "Margaret Larkin." She married a Communist in 1937, years after she wrote about Wiggins.
5. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. 12.
6. Myra Hull. "Cowboy Ballads." Kansas Historical Quarterly 8:35– 60:1939. 60, note 5.
7. Margaret Larkin. Singing Cowboy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
8. Scott B. Spencer. "Margaret Larkin." 60–61 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 60.
9. Cecil Sharp was discussed in the posts for 6 February 2019, 7 April 2019, and 12 May 2019.
10. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Her parents were James Emanual Mays and Lucretia Catherine Maples.
11. Mary E. Frederickson. "Wiggins, Ella May." NC Pedia website. 1996.
12. Elizabeth Olmstead. "Ella May Wiggins." Find a Grave website. 11 October 2006.
13. Larkin, Ella May. 1.
14. Wikipedia. "Sevierville, Tennessee."
15. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Kristina Horton, May’s great-granddaughter suggested, instead, when the railroad arrived so did commercial lumbering that made it impossible for small farmers to sell timber for the cash needed to supplement their subsistence agriculture. [45]
16. Horton said May’s father, James May, was Dutch. [46] Frederickson indicated May’s mother, Elizabeth, was Cherokee. [47]
17. Larkin, Ella May. 1. "Lord Lovel" was Child 75. "Sweet William" was Child 74. "Little Mary Phagan" was written about a 1913 murder in Georgia, and recorded in 1925. [48]
18. "Theodore Dreiser." University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book and Manuscript Library website.
19. Wikipedia. "Aunt Molly Jackson."
20. "Aunt Molly Jackson." University of Virginia website. Its source was her stepbrother, Jim Garland. Welcome the Traveler Home. Edited by Julia S. Ardery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
21. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 31. Jackson first learned old ballads from her great-grandmother. [49]
22. Green. 33.
23. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 50–51.
24. Timothy P. Lynch. "‘Sit down! Sit down!’: Songs of the General Motors Strike, 1936-1937." Michigan Historical Review 22:1–47:Fall 1996. 41–42.
25. Vorse wrote a novel about May and Gastonia called Strike! New York: Horace Liveright, 1930.
26. Mary Heaton Vorse. Labor’s New Millions. New York: Modern Age Books, 1938. 77. Quoted by Lynch, 41–42.
27. Outside organizers brought the Rebel Song Book published in 1935 by the Rand School Press. [50] The New York publisher supported socialism, including Fabians and Norman Thomas. [51]
28. Lynch. 38. His source was the papers of Henry Kraus in the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.
29. Dwight Lyman Moody. The Gospel Awakening. Edited by L. T. Remlap. Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1883. 35. Both Bliss and the Civil War commander, Daniel Webster Whittle, appeared at Moody’s revivals. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer provide more details on how the song was adapted for secular uses. [52]
30. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."
31. Maurice Sugar. Letter to Denisoff, 10 December 1965. Quoted by Denisoff. 51.
32. George Oscar Brown. "Community Music in Flint, Michigan." School Music 19:32–44:May 1918. 34, 36.
33. Brown. 38.
34. The sit-down strike was in a different plant, one managed by the Fisher Body division and known as Fisher Plant #1. [53]
35. Brown. 38.
36. Brown. 38.
37. Allison Rosbury. "The Origins of Genesee County Part 2: Early Settlement Patterns." My City Mag website. 1 December 2015.
38. Brown. 34.
39. JoEllen Vinyard. Right in Michigan’s Grassroots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 33.
40. Lynch. 4.
41. Lynch. 24.
42. Wikipedia. "Maurice Sugar." Its source was Christopher H. Johnson. Maurice Sugar. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
43. Wikipedia. "National Recovery Administration."
44. Louis Adamic. "The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit." The Nation 140:177:13 February 1934.
45. Kristina Horton. Martyr of Loray Mill. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2015. Her source was Jo Lynn Haessly. "Mill Mother’s Laments: Ella May, Working Woman’s Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strikes." MA thesis. University of North Carolina, 1987.
46. Horton. 30. Most of Horton’s information on May’s early life was drawn from Larkin. Dutch may have been Deutsch (German).
47. Frederickson.
48. "Mary Phagan." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5. The first record issued was by Rosa Lee Carson. Two other 1925 recordings, one by Vernon Dalhart and one by Charlie Oaks, were released in 1927.
49. Wikipedia, Jackson.
50. Lynch. 37.
51. Wikipedia. "Rand School of Social Science."
52. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 37. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.
53. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."
Josef Stalin ordered followers to abandon working through existing United States labor unions in 1928, after his agents were expelled from the American Federation of Labor in 1924 and the United Mine Workers in 1926. He told them, instead, to form rival unions. [1]
In 1929, the party’s National Textile Workers’ Union sent Fred Beal to Charlotte, North Carolina, where workers were protesting longer hours for less pay. [2] The brutality of mill owners in Gastonia drew national attention after men opened fire on a truck load of protestors on September 14. Margaret Larkin began publicizing the murdered Ella May in November as a genuine folk singer who used topical songs to rouse workers. [3]
This was the period when Stalin had forbidden the use of folk music. Larkin was not a Communist, but had been involved with textile-union activities in Passaic, New Jersey. [4] Her knowledge of folk music went back to her childhood in Las Vegas, New Mexico. [5] The railroad town had both Spanish-speakers, whose families had been in the area for hundreds of years, and ranchers, who had relocated from Texas.
Larkin already was singing folk songs to a guitar accompaniment when she was a student at the University of Kansas in the early 1920s. [6] While many wanted to see the cowboy as the prototype of the singing laborer, she did not believe the songs she published in 1931 in Singing Cowboy [7] were work songs. Instead, she noticed only some men sang around Las Vegas, and it seemed to be a matter of personal preference. [8]
Most of the research on Wiggins has focused on the circumstances of her death, rather than her early life. Larkin implied her parents were mountaineers in the tradition of those met by Cecil Sharp. [9] She described them as "hill people" who raised yams, cabbages, beans, corn, apples, and hogs. [10]
Mary Frederickson said she was born near Bryson City, North Carolina. [11] More recently, Elizabeth Olmstead said May was born in Sevierville, Tennessee in 1900. [12] Both towns were county seats in the Smokey Mountains, so May could have been born in a rural area, but raised in a town where she learned to read and write. [13]
If both statements were partly true, her father may have left a North Carolina mountain farm to work on building the railroad that was completed in Sevierville in 1910. [14] Larkin said her father went to a logging camp in 1910, when the family lacked the money to buy clothing. [15]
No one has mentioned anyone in May’s family who was a traditional singer. [16] It seems likely she gained her skills as a performer during her adolescence spent in logging camps. One man, who knew her then, told Larkin: "she had a fine, ringing voice, and nobody else could sing ‘Little Mary Fagan,’ ‘Lord Lovel’ and ‘Sweet William’ with such plaintive sweetness as she." [17]
The image of the folk-song-singing union activist was formed by the time Theodore Dreiser headed a commission investigating violence in Harlan County coal fields. [18] His group sent Molly Jackson on a tour in 1931 to publicize problems in Kentucky. [19] While she wasn’t known to have been active in the strike, she had been a midwife who dealt with the consequences of poverty. [20]
Archie Green noticed the first verses of her "Poor Miner’s Farewell" were traditional, and the rest were polemical. [21] He hypothesized she had created the first from lines and images already familiar to her, and added the other verses after she had gone to New York City for Dreiser. [22]
The perception of the folk-singing union was circumscribed by the view, discussed in the post for 12 May 2019, that the only true folk lived in the rural south, either in the Appalachian mountains or as African-American sharecroppers. Serge Denisoff noted the songs written by Maurice Sugar for the United Auto Workers sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in 1937 were dismissed because he was a lawyer. [23]
Songs sung during strikes or labor organizing campaigns were the performed or public parts of existing traditions shared by the workers. The narrow perception of the folk blinded labor organizers and journalists to the fact less-isolated groups of people had shared repertoires they could use to produce ephemeral songs for specific occasions.
The Flint strike made this difference between public and private traditions clear because those on strike were hidden in buildings, while the individuals seen by journalists were often the wives of strikers who were publicizing union activity by their presence.
Perhaps the most important exterior event occurred on 1 February 1937 when the women staged a shadow challenge to an unoccupied plant to divert the attention of GM’s security forces while men took control of a separate, more important building. [24] Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who had been at Gastonia, [25] said the women stood in front of the gate, holding hands, and sang "We Shall Not Be Moved." [26]
Later, the women said, while they had seen many songs on sheets provided by union organizers, [27] but the only ones they sang much were Sugar’s "Soup Song," "Solidarity Forever," and "Hold the Fort." [28] The last was a gospel song written in 1870 by Philip Paul Bliss that was inspired by an incident in the Civil War. [29]
Inside the factory buildings, the UAW supervised workers to make sure no damage was done to company property that would justify the governor sending in the National Guard. [30] Sugar remembered:
"singing was part of the organized recreation of the workers, and they frequently improvised bands [. . .] lots of hillbilly stuff . . . and lots of parodies." [31]
Part of the Flint tradition may have gone back to the community singing movement of World War I. George Oscar Brown remembered he was contracted to develop a music association to support the war effort. He said he began with public meetings that tended to attract women. After a few Sunday sessions, they brought their families. [32]
Brown then was let into General Motors plants during the noon breaks [33] He recalled:
"In some of our shops there will be 600 or 800 men gathered together, in others 200 or 300. In Buick No. 11, [34] where there are 2,500 men working under one roof, on one floor approximately 1,200 take part in the ‘sing.’ It is not possible to get to each shop very often, there are so many places to go, and it is not possible to give noon-hour every day." [35]
The University of Michigan music professor added:
"They would welcome us every day if they could have us. Whereas, other public speakers and evangelists are rather frowned upon both by the men and the employers, we have absolute entree to every factory in the city. It is a great inspiration to stand with a great group of these working men and see how eager they are to sing." [36]
The ethnic backgrounds of the singers seems to have been mixed. Germans were less inclined to settle in the Flint area in the 1850s than in other parts of the country, since it had little good farm land. [37] Brown emphasized the difficulties he encountered teaching songs to people during World War I who did not speak English. [38] However, JoEllen Vinyard said most of Flint’s factory workers after World War I were "Michigan-born white Protestant Americans or moved from Ohio, Indiana, and neighboring states." [39]
Photographs reproduced by Timothy Lynch, showed this variety of cultures. The musical instruments in one included a fiddle, an accordion, and an harmonica. [40] Another showed one accordion and one harmonica. [41] These instruments would have been found in lumber camps, on Great Lakes freighters, and other isolated places with all-male workforces. Sugar was part of this world: his Jewish parents had fled Russian-controlled Lithuania for the lumber county in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. [42]
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration to bring some stability to industrial competition. It included provisions for recognizing unions. [43] In 1934, Louis Adamac said the automotive companies responded by recruiting labor from Kentucky and other parts of the South they believed would be less interested in union activities. [44]
Lynch’s photographs showed the auto companies miscalculated: Southerners would unionize when times were bad. There also were four guitars and one banjo in the first photograph; the second showed two guitars and one man clogging. These instruments and the dance most likely were brought from the South. All the men in the pictures were white.
End Notes:
1. Wikipedia. "Wikipedia Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
2. R. Veto. "Beal, Fred Erwin." NC Pedia website. 1979.
3. Margaret Larkin. "The Story of Ella May." New Masses 5:1–2: November 1929. She usually is called Ella Mae Wiggins. Wiggins was her married name, but she had reverted to May by the time she was in Gastonia.
4. Wikipedia. "Margaret Larkin." She married a Communist in 1937, years after she wrote about Wiggins.
5. Carl Sandburg. The American Songbag. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. 12.
6. Myra Hull. "Cowboy Ballads." Kansas Historical Quarterly 8:35– 60:1939. 60, note 5.
7. Margaret Larkin. Singing Cowboy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
8. Scott B. Spencer. "Margaret Larkin." 60–61 in The Ballad Collectors of North America. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 60.
9. Cecil Sharp was discussed in the posts for 6 February 2019, 7 April 2019, and 12 May 2019.
10. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Her parents were James Emanual Mays and Lucretia Catherine Maples.
11. Mary E. Frederickson. "Wiggins, Ella May." NC Pedia website. 1996.
12. Elizabeth Olmstead. "Ella May Wiggins." Find a Grave website. 11 October 2006.
13. Larkin, Ella May. 1.
14. Wikipedia. "Sevierville, Tennessee."
15. Larkin, Ella May. 1. Kristina Horton, May’s great-granddaughter suggested, instead, when the railroad arrived so did commercial lumbering that made it impossible for small farmers to sell timber for the cash needed to supplement their subsistence agriculture. [45]
16. Horton said May’s father, James May, was Dutch. [46] Frederickson indicated May’s mother, Elizabeth, was Cherokee. [47]
17. Larkin, Ella May. 1. "Lord Lovel" was Child 75. "Sweet William" was Child 74. "Little Mary Phagan" was written about a 1913 murder in Georgia, and recorded in 1925. [48]
18. "Theodore Dreiser." University of Pennsylvania, Rare Book and Manuscript Library website.
19. Wikipedia. "Aunt Molly Jackson."
20. "Aunt Molly Jackson." University of Virginia website. Its source was her stepbrother, Jim Garland. Welcome the Traveler Home. Edited by Julia S. Ardery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
21. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 31. Jackson first learned old ballads from her great-grandmother. [49]
22. Green. 33.
23. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 50–51.
24. Timothy P. Lynch. "‘Sit down! Sit down!’: Songs of the General Motors Strike, 1936-1937." Michigan Historical Review 22:1–47:Fall 1996. 41–42.
25. Vorse wrote a novel about May and Gastonia called Strike! New York: Horace Liveright, 1930.
26. Mary Heaton Vorse. Labor’s New Millions. New York: Modern Age Books, 1938. 77. Quoted by Lynch, 41–42.
27. Outside organizers brought the Rebel Song Book published in 1935 by the Rand School Press. [50] The New York publisher supported socialism, including Fabians and Norman Thomas. [51]
28. Lynch. 38. His source was the papers of Henry Kraus in the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.
29. Dwight Lyman Moody. The Gospel Awakening. Edited by L. T. Remlap. Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1883. 35. Both Bliss and the Civil War commander, Daniel Webster Whittle, appeared at Moody’s revivals. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer provide more details on how the song was adapted for secular uses. [52]
30. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."
31. Maurice Sugar. Letter to Denisoff, 10 December 1965. Quoted by Denisoff. 51.
32. George Oscar Brown. "Community Music in Flint, Michigan." School Music 19:32–44:May 1918. 34, 36.
33. Brown. 38.
34. The sit-down strike was in a different plant, one managed by the Fisher Body division and known as Fisher Plant #1. [53]
35. Brown. 38.
36. Brown. 38.
37. Allison Rosbury. "The Origins of Genesee County Part 2: Early Settlement Patterns." My City Mag website. 1 December 2015.
38. Brown. 34.
39. JoEllen Vinyard. Right in Michigan’s Grassroots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 33.
40. Lynch. 4.
41. Lynch. 24.
42. Wikipedia. "Maurice Sugar." Its source was Christopher H. Johnson. Maurice Sugar. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
43. Wikipedia. "National Recovery Administration."
44. Louis Adamic. "The Hill-Billies Come to Detroit." The Nation 140:177:13 February 1934.
45. Kristina Horton. Martyr of Loray Mill. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2015. Her source was Jo Lynn Haessly. "Mill Mother’s Laments: Ella May, Working Woman’s Militancy, and the 1929 Gaston County Strikes." MA thesis. University of North Carolina, 1987.
46. Horton. 30. Most of Horton’s information on May’s early life was drawn from Larkin. Dutch may have been Deutsch (German).
47. Frederickson.
48. "Mary Phagan." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5. The first record issued was by Rosa Lee Carson. Two other 1925 recordings, one by Vernon Dalhart and one by Charlie Oaks, were released in 1927.
49. Wikipedia, Jackson.
50. Lynch. 37.
51. Wikipedia. "Rand School of Social Science."
52. Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 37. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.
53. Wikipedia. "Flint Sit-Down Strike."
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Folk Revival - Indigenous Communists
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Folk Revival - Soviet Union
Topic: Folk Music Revival
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]
These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]
The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]
Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]
Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]
The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]
Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.
Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]
Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]
World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]
In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]
The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]
Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]
At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]
Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]
The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.
End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.
2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.
6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.
7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."
8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."
9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.
10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."
11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.
12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]
13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]
14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.
16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.
17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.
18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.
22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.
24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.
25. Prokofieva.
26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."
28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.
29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.
30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.
33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.
34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]
35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.
36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.
37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."
41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]
42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.
Peter the Great was the first Russian monarch to recognize his empire needed a distinct identity. [1] Marina Ritzarev said, when historians researched the origins of Rus’ leaders, they discovered the early princes were Varangians, and suppressed the facts. In place of Vikings, the people, especially those in the vicinity of Moscow, were accorded the status of progenitors. [2]
These were the folk whose music was used by Mikhail Glinka [3] a few years after Nicholas I implemented his policy of Official Nationality. [4] Collections, like one made by Nikolai Lvov in 1790, [5] were intended to emphasize "kindred, rather than alien characteristics." [6] The music reflected the aesthetics of an audience no more than one generation removed from rural villages. [7]
The nature of the urban population began to change with the introduction of textile manufacturing. Old Believers, who had been banished in 1667 during the reign of Alexis I, [8] were operating cotton, silk, and woolen mills in Moscow in 1832. [9] The Bremen-born Ludwig Knoop opened his first mill in Moscow in 1840. His operations expanded after the United Kingdom lifted its ban on the export of tools used by textile factories in 1842. [10]
Rural society changed when Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861. They still were forced to stay on the land and operate through commune leaders, but they no longer were subject to arbitrary demands by estate owners who took the profits from their initiatives [11] to finance lifestyles that proved the nobles’ loyalty to the tsar by imitating his court. [12]
Even before 1861, Mily Balakirev was changing the definition of national music from that of the peasants to that which made Russia different from Prussia, England, and France. [13] In 1862, the disciple of Glinka went to the Caucasus to collection folk music. [14] One work song from his home province of Nizhny Novgorod became famous in 1902 when it was recorded by Feodor Chaliapin [15] as the "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." [16]
The interest in music from remote areas of the Empire increased in 1884 when the Russian Geographic Society organized a Folk Song Commission. It sent its first collecting expedition to the Archangel area in 1886. [17] Balakirev was on the organization’s board. [18]
Just a few years before, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated, and his son Alexander III condoned anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland and Ukraine. [19] He demanded everyone speak Russian and convert to the Russian Orthodox church. [20] Anyone who was a little bit liberal became suspect.
Evgenia Lineva and her husband fled to London in 1890, then resettled in New York. The student of Glinka organized Ukrainian and Russian immigrants in a choir that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 in peasant costumes. They were accompanied by an orchestra and featured male dancers. [21]
Alexander III died in 1894, and his son, Nicholas II, allowed the Linevas to return in 1896. [22] She spent some time with the Musico-Ethnographic Commission that had been organized at the University of Moscow in 1901. [23] Chaliapin took Mitrofan Pyatnitsky to a meeting, and the latter began collecting in his home province of Voronezh. He eventually brought singers from the village to perform for the commission. [24]
World War I ended folk song collecting. Members of Pyatnitsky’s group were drafted, and, after the Revolution, disagreed with one another and dispersed. He formed a new choir with people who had moved to Moscow from "remote villages." [25] This coincided with the formation of "thousands of choruses" by workers’ clubs who sang political words to "old popular tunes and folk songs." [26]
In 1928, Josef Stalin implemented his First Five-Year Plan to industrialize the country. To free individuals to work in factories, he appropriated farm land, destroyed the largest landowners, and settled the rest on collective farms. [27]
The same year, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians was formed to weed out "the anti-proletarian and the counter-revolutionary elements" in contemporary music. [28] In 1930, the All-Russian Choir Conference "voted to liquidate peasant choruses, deeming them ‘alien, harmful, corrupting to the class consciousness of participants and listeners.’" [29] Peasant music programming on radio stopped in 1929, and traditional music was banned in 1930. [30]
Pyatnitsky had died in 1927 and bequeathed his choir to his nephew. [31] The choir survived the general purge because it was too popular. Still, the choir modified its repertoire to fit Soviet requirements after a member of the Proletarian Musicians association [32] joined the group in 1931. [33]
At the end of five years, the Central Committee of the Communist Party abolished the existing artistic organizations, and replaced them with creative unions. [34] The new musicians’ group was dominated by conservatory-trained men who decreed any professional musician must be able to read music notation and be familiar with the classics. [35]
Two years later, in 1934, Maxim Gorky exhorted attendees of the First Congress of Soviet Writers to use folklore motifs to create socialist realism. [36] Choirs again were encouraged, [37] and amateurs were expected "involve themselves in the creation of art, thus demonstrating that each individual was fully self-actualized and active in the work of building the ideal society." [38] Textual content was controlled by bringing the best singers and writers to Moscow for indoctrination. [39]
The Pyatnitsky peasant chorus became the Pyatnitsky Russian Folk or Popular Choir in 1936. [40] Singers were trained to read music, and the improvisational element that Pyatnitsky had encouraged was restricted to a few soloists. [41] An orchestra and dance troop was added in 1938. [42] In seeking to reach the mass audience defined by the Communist Party, it recapitulated Lineova’s evolution in the Unites States in 1893.
End Notes
1. Marina Ritzarev. "‘A Singing Peasant’: An Historical Look at National Identity in Russian Music." Le Web Pédagogique website. 2014. 3. This article was based on "The Conflict between Nationalistic and Pluralistic Traditions in Russian Musical Narratives." International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Haifa University. August 1998.
2. Ritzarev. 4.
3. Glinka was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
4. Peter the Great was discussed in the post for 30 June 2019.
5. Ivan Pratsch. Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. Saint Petersburg: 1790. Prach was the arranger. Lvov’s name was added on later editions.
6. Richard Taruskin. "M. I. Glinka and the State." 25–47 in Defining Russia Musically. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 16.
7. Richard Taruskin. "N. A. Lvov and the Folk." 3-24 in Defining Russia Musically. 20. Lvov and Pratsch collected "their material wherever they encountered it, chiefly in St. Petersburg and the city’s immediate vicinity — and not only from the urbanized peasants (servants and laborers) who might have been expected to retain some vestige of rural traditions, but from their own friends and acquaintances."
8. Wikipedia. "Old Believers."
9. Danila Raskov and Vadim Kufenko. "The Role of Old Believers’ Enterprises: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century Moscow Textile Industry." 7 May 2014. Carl von Ossietzky Universtät, Evangelisches Studienwerk website. 14.
10. Wikipedia. "Ludwig Knoop."
11. Andrei Markevich and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "The Economic Effects of the Abolition of Serfdom: Evidence from the Russian Empire." 27 January 2017. Moscow’s New Economic School website.
12. Markevich. 19. For instance, Balakirev’s first exposure to music came from performances staged by Alexander Ulybyshev, a local noble who maintained a private orchestra. [43]
13. Composers like Rimsky-Korsikov and Borodin pursued Balakirev’s ideas in their own ways. Balakirev later advised Tchaikovsky. [44]
14. Wikipedia. "Mily Balakirev."
15. Chaliapin was an operatic basso.
16. Wikipedia. "The Song of the Volga Boatmen." Nizhny Novgorod was not in the Caucasus.
17. Barbara Krader. "Folk Music Archive of the Moscow Conservatory, With a Brief History of Russian Field Recording." Indiana University website. 13. Based on I. K. Sviridova. Kabinet narodnoi muzyki. Moscow: Izd-vo Muzyka, 1966.
18. Krader. 13. This was the more conservative Balakirev who returned to public life after a period of isolation and depression [45] that began after Russia was defeated lost in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. [46]
19. Wikipedia. "Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire."
20. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
21. Norman E. Saul. The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. 44–45.
22. Saul. 46.
23. Krader. 14.
24. Elena Prokofieva. "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky - Peasant Choirmaster." The Third Age website. John Freedman brought this to my attention in "Mitrofan Pyatnitsky Bust and Monument, Voronezh." Russian Landmarks website. 25 June 2015.
25. Prokofieva.
26. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
27. Wikipedia. "First Five-year Plan."
28. "RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), Ideological Platform." 1929. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1937). 1052–1055. Reprinted on Michigan State University, Soviet History website. Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov was more hostile to modern forms of music like jazz and compositions by Shostakovich.
29. Susannah Lockwood Smith. "Soviet Arts Policy, Folk Music, and National Identity: The Piatnitskii State Russian Folk Choir, 1927-45." Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota, 1997. 66. Cited by Pauline Fairclough. Classics for the Masses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. No page numbers in on-line edition.
30. Smith. 129.
31. Prokofieva. The nephew was Pyotr Mikhailovich Kazmin.
32. Wikipedia. "Vladimir Grigoryevich Zakharov." It said 1932.
33. Wikipedia. "Pyatnitsky Choir." It said 1931, as did Marina Frolova-Walker. Stalin’s Music Prize. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 184.
34. Kiril Tomoff. Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 13. It was the Decree on the Reformation of Literary and Artistic Organizations. [47]
35. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. 2012. 116.
36. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" 21 September 2000. Semantic Scholar website. 3–4. Gorky’s speech is better than any of its precis. It’s available on the Marxist.org website. Its source was Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977. 25–69.
37. Olson. 3.
38. Smith. 160. Cited by Olson. 11.
39. Stites. 72.
40. Smith. 127–128. Cited by Olson. 14. The Russian word was "narodnyi."
41. Smith. 123. Cited by Olson. 14–15. he did not rehearse his peasant chorus. Instead he told them to "sing it, as you sing on your bench and in a round dance." [48]
42. Frolova-Walker. 184.
43. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
44. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
45. Wikipedia, Balakirev.
46. Wikipedia. "Franco-Prussian War."
47. Wikipedia. "Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians."
48. Prokofieva.
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