William G. Roy

The research question is: Given the common historical roots of White and Black American folk music and given the self-conscious leftist movement of the 1930s and 40s to popularize racially diverse folk music, why did the "folk music revival" of the 1960s emerge as basically a White genre?

This question intersects three sociological literatures. 1. The sociology of culture has addressed the question of the relationship between social boundaries and the classification of artistic boundaries (Bourdieu, 1984; DiMaggio, 1982; DiMaggio, 1987; DiMaggio, 1997; Griswold, 1987a; Griswold, 1987b; Halle, 1993; Peterson and Simkus, 1992). This study examines an anomalous case in which a genre is constructed by people self consciously adopting "someone else's" music. 2. There is a growing literature on how social movements create cultural as well as political or economic change (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991; Social Movements and Culture, 1995) which this study can deepen by addressing their failures and unintended consequences. 3. Finally, the project will contribute to the growing literature on the social construction of race, most notably the social construction of whiteness (Ferrante and Brown, 1998; Hale, 1998; Marx, 1998; Haney Lopez, 1996; Ignatiev, 1995; Omi and Winant, 1994) by showing how the construction of cultural categories intended to decrease the social distance between blacks and whites resulted in a racially coded white musical genre that derived its cultural authenticity from racially coded black music (Cruz, 1999).

In the 1950s folk music drowned in the McCarthyist deluge that swept over the organized left, only to revive late in the decade as a depoliticized and racially White genre (Cantwell, 1998). But as the New Left emerged in the 1960s, folk music and protest music was again linked to protest music. So the student movement was simultaneously promoting the construction of a new genre of folk music, which in the end was very White, and at the same advocating racial integration in the political and economic realm. How do we explain the "whitening" of folk music by movement committed to racial justice? To what extent did folk music blossom in the late 50s and early 60s because activists in the old and new left compromised on their racial commitment or because the powers of racial division permeated so deeply into all social institutions that their best efforts were futile? What role do social movements play in the construction and interpretation of popular musical genres?

The underlying assumption of this analysis is the principle that cultural objects and cultural forms reflect and constitute boundaries between social groups (Griswold, 1987a; Griswold, 1987b; DiMaggio, 1987). Although I focus on music, similar principles apply to literature, art, architecture, and other cultural forms. Not only do different audiences have preferences for different artistic and musical genres, but those genres often help constitute boundaries between groups. High and low art are perhaps the clearest example. Not only is classical music preferred more by upper class audience, but the consumption of such culture signals upper class status, creating a social boundary between upper and lower class groups (Bourdieu, 1984; Levine, 1988). Similarly, cultural genres create boundaries between racial, gender, age, national, sexual orientation and other groups

The construction of a genre often involves a social group "discovering" "their" art, music, or literature, linking group identity with the creation and consumption of group specific culture. Folk music, however, complicates the connection between group identity and group culture because it is constituted by the appropriation by one group, usually a dominant group, of some one else's music. "The folk" are always some "other." Who then creates the genre of folk music, for what purpose, and who embraces it as "our" music and what does this anomalous case tell us about the relationship between group boundaries and genre construction?

My tentative answer involves several factors. 1. The most obvious, and perhaps least interesting is that the commercial record industry imposed its racialized categories of music on the rest of society. Commercial record companies since the "Race records" of the 1920s had actively segregated their market along racial lines. 2. The suppression of the American left by McCarthyism literally drove folk music off the charts, just as groups like the Weavers were becoming widely popular. Had there been more continuity in the popularity of the genre, it would have been more difficult to forget its political roots. 3. Even though the Civil Rights movement was a catalyst for the folk music revival, the political movements of the 1960s, although organized around several cultural activities, did not develop any organizations to control the production and distribution of music, leaving the institutional production of culture to commercial interests. 4. As the music of the "other," folk music appeals primarily people who embrace marginalization. African-Americans generally did not identify themselves as "the folk," and did not welcome their anointed role as authenticating white culture.

Four tasks are necessary: 1. Review the literature on social movements, especially movements before 1960, on the social construction of race, and on the sociology of musical genres. I am pretty much up to speed on the first two, but need to invest serious time in the third. 2. Document the extent of racialization in indigenous music from the 20s through the 60s, including music labeled folk music as well as allied genres like blues, country & western, and protest music. Initially this will be done by examining with quantitative methods who performs together, performs the same songs, and appears on records together. I have already received permission to analyze the "Folk Song Index" which has data on over 10,000 singers and 25,000 songs. The only data I would need to add is the race of the singers, which the Index's compiler has agreed to research (for compensation). Analysis will use network techniques (which I have used previously) to examine patterns of affinity, distance and clustering of performers, songs, performance venues, and record companies. 3. Interview participants in political movements and folk music or their children, including both the famous (Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, son of Woody Guthrie and a folk singer in his own right) and the more anonymous (family members of Moe Asch, creator of Folkways Records, Irwin Silber, a radical folklorist (for whom I once worked). Given that many of these folks are elderly, it should be done soon (See Appendix 2). 4. Archival research on the records of movement organizations (old and new left) and folk music recording collectors and companies (See Appendix 3).

The project will result in a book tentatively entitled Reds, Whites and Blues: Social Movements, Race, and American Folk Music, 1900-1970, which would bridge academic and trade book audiences, along with academic research articles, and hopefully, popular magazine articles.

REFERENCES CITED

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Edited by Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cantwell, Robert. 1998. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cruz, Jon. 1999. Culture on the Margins : The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art." Media, Culture, and Society 4:303-22.

---. 1987. "Classification in Art." American Sociological Review 52:440-55.

---. 1997. "Culture and Cognition." Annual Review of Sociology (Palo Alto, CA) 23:263-87, edited by J. Hagan and K. Cook. Annual Reviews, Inc.

Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park: Pennsylvania State University.

Ferrante, Joan and Prince Brown, Jr. 1998. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. New York: Longman.

Griswold, Wendy. 1987a. "The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies." American Journal of Sociology 92 (March):1077-117.

---. 1987b. "A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture." Pp. 1-36 in Sociological Methodology, 1987, edited by C. C. Clogg. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. 1998. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books.

Halle, David. 1993. Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haney Lopez, Ian F. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.

Ignatiev, Noel. 1995. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.

Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Oliver, Paul. 1984. Songsters and Saints: Traditions on Race Records. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Second Edition. New York: Routledge.

Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peterson, Richard A. and Albert Simkus. 1992. "How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups." Pp. 152-86 in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, edited by M. Lamont and M. Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.