Defining the Music of America's White Rural Working Class From the 1920s through the 1950s

Abstract

This thesis discusses the recordings of hillbilly and folk music cut by record company agents and folklorists from the 1920s through the 1940s. These years saw the rise of recorded music as mass entertainment in the United States, and therefore are of importance as a watershed moment in the development of American music. The similarities and differences between the group of Artist and Repertoire men that recorded hillbilly music (along with many other varieties of American music) and the group of folklorists who recorded folk music are important in understanding the different ways that Americans have thought about the music of the white working class. This thesis argues that both the hillbilly and folk recordings were parallel attempts to synthesize music of and for the white working class. This paper focuses on the ideas of Alan Lomax, and accesses his letters and documents created for the Library of Congress to discuss his vision for “white folk music” as a cohesive and ongoing musical tradition produced and consumed by white Americans. This vision resembles the place in American society that hillbilly and later country music came to occupy. Given that the two genres were both intended as products of and for the white, rural working class, the most important difference between the recordings is in the reason that they were made. While Lomax had lofty ambitions for his music as a top-down movement propagated by public programs such as the Archive of American Folk Song, the record company agents simply did their best to exploit what they saw as a business opportunity. Although they did not necessarily see some cultural value in their version of the music of the white working class, the record company A&R men laid the groundwork for something similar to Lomax’ vision for “white folk music.”