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MUSIC IN THE 1930s

Searching

American music flourished and expanded during the 1930s, driven by a search for authentic American voices and rhythms. From sophisticated symphonic composers, urban recording executives, rural radio-station operators, and the Smithsonian Institution to the Library of Congress, the general trend among music lovers and producers was to seek out voices of the American people and to adapt their songs or record them directly in an effort to capture what was a disappearing authenticity. Radio had arrived full force in the 1920s, and already the folk of rural America were being introduced to a variety of musical styles that they adapted into their traditional sound. But academic and sociological interests were not the only reason for the search for American music. Commercial interests also drove the search. When the 1930s opened, as many as a third of the poorest rural southerners already owned phonographs. The rural blues had already gained popularity on record and was influencing music nationwide. A huge potential market of record buyers and radio listeners existed in regions far from New York and Chicago, the centers of the music publishing and production industries. So while George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and an entire generation of European-trained composers looked to adapt traditional rural voices into their operas and symphonies, another group, led by Alan and John Lomax, Ralph Peer, David Kapp, Howard Odum, Robert W. Gordon, and John Work, traveled the South and West with recording equipment on board in search of unspoiled native talent. They would find much of it, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi delta to the Texas heartland, and in bringing the sounds back to rural areas would have a huge impact on commercial music of the following decades.

A Growing Audience

Despite the Depression, American music exploded in its reach and inclusiveness during the 1930s. More people could hear more music than at any previous time. The major reason for this increased exposure was technology. The 1920s had seen a broadening of radio broadcasting which took on added importance during the Depression. Phonograph-record sales had peaked in 1927 at 106 million but within five years had fallen to some 6 million. But radio found new listeners. In 1931 the Metropolitan Opera broadcast a performance for the first time. Hillbilly music gained increasing popularity on Chicago's WLS National Barn Dance and Nashville's WSM Grand Ole Opry programs. The amateur hillbilly shows became increasingly professional and began sending out touring groups. Hillbilly music found a greater audience from the Mexican border stations, which were two and three times more powerful than allowed by United States law. Funded by incessant advertising, often for disreputable products, the border stations could be heard in all forty-eight states and in Canada and helped the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, the Callahan Brothers, and cowboy Slim Rinehart reach new audiences. The jukebox became another means of spreading music. In 1933 Prohibition was repealed. As a result, taverns and "juke joints" opened immediately. Within five years more than 250,000 jukeboxes were playing nationwide. Sound became the norm in previously silent motion pictures and became fertile ground for classical composers. But the most concerted broadening of musical education and performance came from the federally sponsored WPA Federal Music Project (FMP). Like other artists, musicians were devastated by the Depression in the early 1930s. Headed by Nikolas Sokoloff, the FMP, founded in 1935, sponsored radio broadcasts and musical-education classes and commissioned work from composers such as George Antheil, William Schuman, and Elliot Carter. The FMP funded an index of American composers from colonial times to the present and sponsored folklorists traveling through the South. Between 1935 and 1939 some seven thousand musicians worked for the FMP in twenty-eight symphonies, ninety small orchestras, sixty-eight brass bands, and thirty-three opera or choral groups. The FMP sponsored African American composers and had a hit with The Swing Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan done to African rhythms in Chicago and New York in 1938 and 1939. Music spread and flourished despite decreased economic activity.

Hillbillies

When the 1930s opened, two distinct hillbilly styles of music had already developed. The traditional style associated with the Southeast and Appalachian Mountains was true folk music and was represented by the legendary Carter Family. A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter recorded from 1927 to 1941 and influenced all folk music that followed. Maybelle Carter's rhythm guitar on songs such as "Wildwood Flower" ranks among the most influential guitar styles in popular-music history. Traditional songs of the sorrows of rural life such as "Can the Circle Be Unbroken?" made the Carters popular, though they never toured widely. They gained their popularity through recordings and especially via radio boomed out from across the Mexican border. The Carter style of music provided the roots of the bluegrass music that followed later in the decade as traditional music began to diversify into new forms. The Monroe Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, and the Callahan Brothers were early bluegrass performers who held to traditional mountain music. Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys became legendary in the 1930s, singing in the Carter Family tradition. Hits such as "The Great Speckled Bird" made Acuffs name synonymous with the Grand Ole Opry, which he joined in 1938. Meanwhile, the other and more popular style of hillbilly music originated with the "Singing Brakeman," Jimmie Rodgers, who from 1927 until his death from tuberculosis in 1933 was the most popular and successful hillbilly entertainer in America. Rodgers is called the "father of country music." He brought a slick professionalism to what had previously been an amateur's calling. His blend of blues music with the traditional hillbilly sounds, and his use of the famous "blue yodel," marked him distinctive. Rodgers influenced contemporaries such as Frank Marvin, Bill Cox, Jimmie Davis, Cliff Carlisle, Wilf Carter, Hank Snow, and Ernest Tubb.

Western Style

The folk and hillbilly music of the 1920s and early 1930s was primarily southeastern in origin. Songs of the South and Appalachia had been discovered and made their way north into cultural centers. The 1930s, however, saw a shift of rural music that would leave its mark in the form of "Western music" that was applied to nearly all country music in the decades that followed. The romantic cowboy image was a growing phenomenon in the 1930s, as the frontier West became the stuff of myth. Inevitably, music reflected that romance. "Singing cowboys" such as Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Roy Rogers, and the Sons of the Pioneers sang hillbilly music in a Texas-Oklahoma drawl while Hollywood promoted the image of the range and the cowboy. Non-westerners such as Rogers (Leonard Slye of Ohio) and Snow (of Nova Scotia) began to dress in flashy cowboy outfits based more on myth than reality. Bostonian Billy Hill wrote some of the decade's most popular "western songs" ("The Last Roundup," "The Call of the Canyon"), Other "western styles" took hold as well, supplanting the term hillbilly, which became more localized, relating to the music of Appalachia. The fact that "western music" was southern blues and hillbilly music in cowboy dress was of no importance. Texas, booming with oil, became the center of western music. Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and taverns sporting jukeboxes sprang up nation-wide. In Texas the traditional values of hillbilly music were inappropriate to the honky-tonk tavern atmosphere. Thus, an edgier, "honky tonk" style developed. Electric guitars appeared in order for bands to be heard above the din of the honky-tonk crowds. Honky-tonk music became contemporary, reflecting social ills, drinking, and loneliness, and did so with a danceable beat. Ultimately, honky tonk, as practiced by such Jimmie Rodgers-inspired performers as Tubb, became the dominant form of country and western music. Meanwhile, a variation called 'Western swing," led by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, developed late in the decade to become a popular style in the 1940s. As the western style dominated, traditional music evolved into bluegrass or mountain style music of the Monroe Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys.

Folk

While commercial interests had begun searching rural America for talent in the 1920s, the academics and sociologists took up the search in the 1930s. In 1933 under the direction of John Lomax, the Library of Congress began its own search-and-record program. Lomax, whose son Alan assisted him and continued his work beyond the decade, recorded folk songs of the rural South. In the late 1920s Harvard-sponsored folklorist Robert W. Gordon embarked on a journey with some one thousand recording cylinders that became the anchor of the Archive of American Folk Song. Hillbilly recordings included George Roark, Bascom Lamar Lumsford, Uncle Alec Dunford, and Jilson Setters. Gordon recognized the impact technology was having on the "pure folk songs" and looked specifically for songs of the preradio era. The WPA Federal Writers' Project also sponsored intellectuals in their search for the music of the common folk, resulting in a curious phenomenon. The music of the folk became increasingly popular in the North and especially when associated with labor unions or with the struggle of the poor, as sung by Woody Guthrie. The protest songs that resulted became a subgenre of the folk tradition. In 1933 John and Alan Lomax found one of the most important folk performers of the decade. Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter was discovered in a Louisiana state penitentiary and made his professional debut at the Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia the following year. Leadbelly's traditional protoblues twelve-string guitar and vocal style of the field shouter made him an immediate success with the white urban audience of the North. Songs such as "Boll Weevil" and "Goodnight, Irene" exemplified Leadbelly's voice from the past and influenced folk music to follow. By decade's end folk music had obtained political protest connotations in the North, leaving the folk of the South with traditional hillbilly, bluegrass, and blues as its own music.

Protest Songs

The Depression defines conditions of the 1930s. Unemployment reached an all-time high. Dust Bowl Oklahomans migrated west looking for work. Labor unions clashed with the forces of capital. The fate of the common workingman became of great interest to the writers and musicians of the northern cultural centers. Inevitably, the music of the decade voiced concerns for social conditions in the form of the protest song. Radical ideas from the North found a home in places such as Harlan County, Kentucky. The hillbilly music of rural areas began to speak to the issues. Aunt Molly Jackson's "Dreadful Memories" spoke of the miners in Kentucky. Slim Smith's "Breadline Blues" and the Martin Brothers' "The North Carolina Textile Strike" spoke directly of contemporary events. Meanwhile, Guthrie wandered around the country performing at union rallies and observing the social conditions of labor and the Okies migrating to California. Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Refugee" and "Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore" exemplified his brand of social criticism. In 1938 Guthrie moved to New York and took the protest music to the city. He became the archetype "folksinger" and along with Harvard-educated Pete Seeger brought the political connotations to the genre. Ledbetter's "Scottsboro Boys" and "Bourgeois Blues" were popular songs, and Florence Reece penned the union standard "Which Side Are You On?" Songs commemorated every major labor conflict, from the Flint, Michigan, strike of 1935 to the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in May of 1937. The "Ballad of the Chicago Steel Massacre" exemplified the genre with its anticapital narrative:

On dark Republic's bloody ground

The Thirtieth day of May

Oh, brothers, let your voices sound

For them that died that day.…

Men and women of the working class

And you little children too

Remember that Memorial Day

And the men that died for you.

Blues

The blues of the 1930s was the song of the lone bluesmen that had emerged from the American South at the end of the previous decade. The female vocalists such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey who had dominated the 1920s gave way to the Delta bluesmen, led by Charlie Patton and his Texas counterparts, as the 1930s opened. Economic conditions were one reason. Due to the Depression and the rise of radio, record sales had plummeted in the late 1920s. The solitary bluesman was the cheapest of all musicians to record, and his records could remain profitable for minimal sales. Another reason was the continued migration of southern blacks to the northern urban centers. The music from home was in demand in urban centers, and the search for new talent continued through the 1930s. Bluesmen such as Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, and Skip James made recordings, but more often they traveled and performed live in the "juke joints" of the South. By decade's end the blues, especially in Chicago, was becoming urbanized and electrified. A variation of the blues was gospel blues—blues guitarists and singers who used music to preach the fire of an evangelist, though more often than not the blues was associated with the difficulties of rural life or sexual relations. The greatest of all the bluesmen was the mysterious Robert Johnson, whose short recording career remains legendary. His "Crossroads Blues," "Preaching Blues," "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day," and "Hell Hound on My Trail" are blues standards and represent the pinnacle of the Delta blues of Mississippi, though in his own lifetime Johnson sold few records. Other blues developments included barrelhouse piano, which evolved into the boogie-woogie craze of the 1940s. Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and Little Brother Montgomery were urban pianists who popularized the barrelhouse style. Blues infused nearly all forms of music in the decade. Gospel would develop from blues origins; jazz remained heavily blues-influenced; and country and honky-tonk music adapted blues to traditional hillbilly music.

Swing

The Jazz Age ended with the stock-market crash of 1929. Thus, when the 1930s opened, jazz was declining in popularity as a whole even while the next stage of its development was proceeding. In terms of a wider public, the tame, quiet, so-called "sweet jazz" exemplified by Guy Lombardo dominated, while the "hot jazz" of Harlem and Kansas City remained a localized phenomenon. Early swing bands, such as the Casa Loma Band, influenced by the black bands of the late 1920s, gradually caught on, leading to the explosion of swing as a phenomenon in 1935 with the popularity of Benny Goodman. Though it was sold as a "new jazz" to the public, swing, which was characterized by members of a large band of ten to twelve playing hot jazz while remaining a cohesive unit, was really ten years old. Fletcher Henderson and Don Redmon provided the musical arrangement in the 1920s, and Henderson had sold his arrangements to Goodman. Swing attempted to apply a field-holler spontaneity to the precision of a large band, and by 1935 the black bands of Chick Webb, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Bennie Moten had already succeeded. Goodman brought the big-band sound to the rest of America and provided the country with a music that would dominate the popular scene for ten years and through World War II. Other bands led by Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Bob Crosby, and especially Glenn Miller dominated the era. While swing was king in the late 1930s, Count Basic was already taking his band in new directions. Drummer Jo Jones and tenor sax player Lester Young began the earliest forays into what would develop as bop in the 1940s. Basie developed a role for the jazz piano in swing arrangements while his band as a unit redefined big band, music with its brass and reeds tossing phrases at one another. Jazz singers flourished during the swing era. Teenage Ella Fitzgerald sang with Webb after 1935 and became a bandleader when Webb died in 1939. Red Norvo employed Mildred Bailey, his wife, and Goodman had Helen Ward. Billie Holiday had begun singing as well, though the dominance of the vocalists was still a few years away.

Gospel

Modern gospel music was born in the 1930s. The Depression had hit urban blacks particularly hard, and their churches became community help centers as well as places of worship. Gospel's origins came from an unlikely source. Thomas (not Tommy) Dorsey, who as "Georgia Tom" in the 1920s had composed songs for Ma Rainey and had coauthored one of the decade's most notoriously risque hit songs ("It's Tight Like That") with Tampa Red, began peddling his gospel compositions after 1927 in Chicago. Singing preachers such as Rev. J. M. Gates, Rev. Moses Doolittle, Rev. H. R. Tomlin, Rev. W. M. Mosely, and evangelist-bluesman Blind Willy Johnson had been a staple of blues music in the late 1920s. Dorsey, however, brought the music into the church. He sold his first gospel compositions at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago in 1930. In 1931 he created the first gospel chorus at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, while also forming the Chicago Gospel Choral Union. The following year, with the organizing help of singer Sallie Martin, Dorsey founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses to promote the music nationwide. In the same year he created the Dorsey House of Music, dedicated solely to publishing and selling black gospel music. Martin was the first of many Dorsey protégés who would become well-known gospel vocalists. Others included Willie Mae Ford Smith, Roberta Martin, Myrtle Scott, the Ward Singers, and Edna Gallman Cooke. In 1932 Chicago's Greater Salem Baptist Church Choir debuted the first superstar of gospel. Mahalia Jackson was a robust, bluesy singer in the field shouter tradition. She recorded "God's Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares" in 1937 but did not record again until the late 1940s when gospel entered its golden age. Dorsey was also a prolific composer, writing such standards as "Precious Lord," "Take My Hand," and "There'll Be Peace in the Valley." Similar developments were occurring in Memphis under the guidance of Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, composer of "Move on Up a Little Higher." His East Trigg Choir had an even stronger blues influence than Dorsey's choirs and is said to have even influenced young Elvis Presley in the late 1940s. Memphis had its own star singer in Queen Candace Anderson. Eventually two gospel styles developed, the all-male "gospel quartets" singing a cappella in harmony and the robed, all-female choruses singing with piano and clapping their hands for rhythm. By 1936 Dorsey could charge admission, and gospel, begun as mere inspirational music, achieved professional status. In 1938 Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang gospel in the secular environment of Calloway's show at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Tharpe also became the first major gospel vocalist to record with a major label.

Opera

The stock-market crash of 1929 hit opera companies in America particularly hard. New York's Metropolitan Opera Company saw an almost immediate 30 percent decline in attendance after the prosperous 1920s. Chicago's great opera company, an equal to the Met in previous decades, declared bankruptcy in January 1932 and would not reopen for twenty years. Companies in San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia were already in decline when the decade opened. By 1932 the Met, in crisis, became the nonprofit Metropolitan Opera Association. Its season was reduced to sixteen weeks. A radio appeal for funds saved the company from financial ruin, and in 1935 the Committee for Saving the Met was formed. But as commercial companies teetered on the edge of ruin, the music flourished. The Met began broadcasting on 25 December 1931, allowing opera to reach more ears than ever before, redefining its audience. Europeans in exile began arriving to influence American music. The Federal Music Project of the WPA was keeping singers and musicians alive while spreading musical forms through educational and performance programs. Most important, however, American composers began to write American opera. The decade's search for native music included classical conductors who tried to deflect criticism that all American classical music was derivative. The Met rarely performed American opera and yet consistently attempted to display the emerging American talent. Joseph Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson premiered in 1931. In 1933 Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones, based on a Eugene O'Neill play, debuted and broke the color line at the Met. Howard Hanson's Merry Mount (1934) was yet another attempt at an American idiom, though it was considered to have failed. Only two operas truly stand out as successes, though contemporary audiences had mixed reactions to both. Virgil Thomson's experimental Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto by Gertrude Stein) debuted with an all-black cast in Hartford in 1934 before moving to New York for six weeks and to Chicago in the fall. Gershwin's Porgy and Bess premiered in Boston in 1935 before moving to New York. Gershwin fused blues, jazz, and southern folk music to create the most American opera of the decade, though it opened to mixed critical response. Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock was not only American, but political opera. The WPA withdrew funding of the controversial prounion piece, but the show, in a now-famous act of defiance, rented a theater and performed the opera anyway, with singers standing in the audience while Blitzstein himself played the piano onstage.

Chicago

Although Chicago jazz had peaked in the 1920s and the city's opera company shut down in January of 1932, Chicago remained a music center for the United States during the 1930s. The National Barn Dance, broadcast weekly on Chicago's WLS, was the most important radio show in the country for hillbilly music. Chicago, not Nashville, was still the center of the hillbilly music industry. Besides the broadcasts, the National Barn Dance was performing the show live and sending out touring groups to promote the show and spread the sound of hillbilly music. Gospel was born in Chicago and remained largely a Chicago phenomenon through the decade while spreading east and to the South. Most important, however, was the city's blues culture. The Delta blues of Mississippi had migrated north to Chicago along with the masses of southern blacks during previous decades. Robert Johnson's blues classic "Sweet Home Chicago" is an example of just how entrenched the blues was becoming in Chicago, and Chicago in the blues. Blues became synonymous with the city, especially a new urban style of blues that developed in the city and would become popular in following decades. The electric guitar entered the blues genre, which began to take on the hard edge identified with the city late in the decade. Of course this brand of blues, known as rhythm and blues, would eventually become the source of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, when white culture caught on to and adapted the rhythm and blues sound. By decade's end the musical center of America had shifted decidedly to New York and toward Nashville, leaving Chicago with a reputation for appreciation of jazz, opera, and hillbilly music but with the blues still all its own.

Classical

American classical music of the 1930s had its foundation in Paris of the 1920s. Nearly every major American composer born around the turn of the century had studied in Paris during the 1920s under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger predicted an explosion of American music in the late 1920s and 1930s. Her students fulfilled her prophecy. Copland, Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Elliot Carter, Blitzstein, and David Diamond were among Boulanger's students who would distinguish the 1930s as the first outstanding decade for American classical music. Ironically, Boulanger's students often found their successes in the American idioms not yet explored in American music. Copland typified the search for an American style of music, applying traditional folk to classical music. He was also among the first composers to widen his market, composing "functional music" for radio, film, ballet, schools, and colleges. He scored his first opera, An Outdoor Overture, for young orchestras in 1938. His ballet Billy the Kid appeared in the same year. Music for Radio was composed for CBS in 1937. He wrote a book, What to Listen for in Music, in 1938 to popularize classical music and continued to influence music in America for decades to come. Other composers who matured in the 1930s included Harris (First Symphony, 1933), Douglas Moore, William Grant Still, Samuel Barber (Adagio for Strings, 1936), Piston, Roger Sessions, Thomson, Hanson, and Randall Thompson. Gershwin, already established as America's premier composer, had a productive decade prior to his sudden death in 1937. His Second Rhapsody appeared in 1932; his Of Thee I Sing won a Pulitzer Prize in 1935; and Porgy and Bess, the most famous American opera of the decade, opened in 1935. Meanwhile, as Americans explored their native music, Europeans, because they were Jewish or because their work was considered decadent by fascist forces, began arriving to live out the war in exile. Among those who came were the pioneering modernists: Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Béla Bartók, Boulanger, Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martino, Arturo Toscanini, Arthur Rubinstein, and Igor Stravinsky. They had a huge impact on American music and musicians in the decades during and after World War II.

Experiments

The experimentation that marked the 1920s declined but carried over into the 1930s as some composers continued to push the definitions of traditional classical music. Taking their inspiration from Schoenberg's experiments, some American composers tried and succeeded to varying degrees with atonal and machine music. Henry Cowell, founder of the quarterly New Music, wrote experimental works such as Synchrony (1930), Two Appositions (1931), and Four Continuations (1934) for strings. George Antheil attempted an abstract music inspired by the paintings of Pablo Picasso. His jazz opera Transatlantic was performed in Frankfurt in 1930 but found no home in America, though his opera Helen Retires was performed at The Juilliard School of Music in 1934 and his Third Symphony (1934) found listeners in America. Atonal and fiercely independent composer Carl Ruggles continued into the 1930s with Sun-Treader (1933) and Evocations (1937). French-born Edgard Varèse was among the most radical experimenters of the decade, and though he completed little work he remained influential. Density 21.5 (1935) was one of his few works from the 1930s, when experimentation fell out of popular favor. Thomson's experiments made him controversial. Like Copland, Thomson scored film and drama as well as symphonies (Second Symphony, 1931). His all-black cast and all-cellophane set for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts remain a highlight of the decade. Thomson was also a critic and writer. Finally, America's most radical experimental composer began his career in the 1930s. John Cage studied under Schoenberg in 1935 but quit shortly after. Cage became interested in percussion, space, and noise. Early works include Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Quartet for Percussion (1935), though Cage became more widely known in the decades to follow.