During the 1950s, while blacklisted from the music industry and investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Pete Seeger performed at colleges and universities across the United States. Although these concerts were crucial to his political work during the decade—Seeger repeatedly called them “the most important job I ever did in my life”—they have been neglected in scholarship. This article positions Seeger's campus concerts as crucial sites for demonstrating the democratic potential of folk music. Seeger sought to teach his audiences that folk music was an everyday activity created by people around the world, as well as an inherently participatory genre that could model civic cooperation. The democratic and educational purposes of his concerts marked a change from the labor advocacy of his 1940s work, and reflected ideas that he was then promulgating in his Sing Out! columns and Folkways Records. This essay examines his appearance at Cornell University on December 6, 1954 to illustrate three dimensions of Seeger's conception of democracy: audience participation, pluralistic repertoire, and rejection of the music industry. While illustrating Seeger's political actions, the Cornell concert also surfaces a tension between democratic participation and the class dynamics inherent in performing folk music for collegiate audiences.

According to the New York Times, white rapper Macklemore and his DJ partner Ryan Lewis's “Same Love” was “the first song to explicitly embrace and promote gay marriage that has made it into the Top 40.”1 In 2013, as the Supreme Court of the United States prepared to rule on challenges to the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, the track quickly climbed the charts and became a nationally recognized anthem for marriage equality. Despite this generally positive reception, however, the song does not reflect all queer-identified listeners. Macklemore raps, “If I were gay, I would think hip hop hates me,” an assertion that positions black communities as a significant threat to (white) LGBTQ rights. Much like the backlash against black voters following the 2008 passing of Proposition 8, this claim relies on an invented black pathology that locates homophobia in black American culture specifically rather than American culture at large. This article offers a close reading and contextualization of “Same Love” and demonstrates that, rather than combating homophobia in hip hop, Macklemore's lyrical claims actually bolster his strategic performance as a socially and politically aware white rapper, while erasing queer and trans hip hop artists of color from the discourse.

A small basement in Manhattan's Greenwich Village neighborhood, an area known for its bohemian values, is home to what is now one of jazz's oldest and most significant venues, the Village Vanguard. Although its very name, geography, and twentieth-century countercultural context define the Village Vanguard, a haven for experiment, its unequaled historical significance and current status as a major landmark within worldwide jazz culture have led to a twenty-first-century reality in which the club not only features but also plays an important role in defining the music that constitutes the most widely accepted subgenre of contemporary jazz, an improvisatory, small-group tradition rooted in the philosophical and musical heritage of bebop. Through an examination of performances both at the Vanguard and in other contexts by pianist Fred Hersch, a performer regularly featured at the club, this article argues that the cultural role of the Village Vanguard, both in spite of and because of the way its longtime owner Lorraine Gordon retained mid-twentieth-century appearances and practices, has shifted from its former purpose as a space for avant-garde experiments to become a powerful force in defining mainstream jazz. Hersch tailors his performances to suit the culture of the Vanguard at multiple levels, including his choice of personnel and ensemble type, the repertoire he does and does not play there, and the musical details of his improvisatory practices. Due to the venue's fame and prevalence as a recording space, choices like these by Hersch and other musicians shape the music widely understood to be at the center of the “jazz tradition,” marking a shift in the nature of the Vanguard that parallels changes in both its local and global context over the past half century as Greenwich Village has undergone substantial gentrification and jazz has gained an ever-stronger foothold as an institutionally recognized art music.

Women composers' concerts, arranged by Phyllis Fergus, were held for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1934 and 1936. They featured music by members of the National League of American Pen Women—an organization for writers, artists, and composers—and were part of a substantial agenda proposed by Fergus, its music director and later president, to achieve national recognition for its composer members. Drawing on Fergus's scrapbooks and documentation in the FDR Library and Pen Women's archives, this article explores the events that Fergus helped to organize, including concerts in Miami, Chautauqua, and Chicago, the latter played by members of the Women's Symphony Orchestra. White House appearances by Amy Beach helped emphasize the League's professional status, and the nationalistic tone of its publicity, urging audiences to “Buy American” during the Depression, worked to distract from age-old assertions of women's lack of creativity. However, the musicales for Roosevelt, who received the composers socially rather than as paid professionals, reinforced women's domestic position, and financial restraints limited most League programming to the genres typically associated with female composers. Despite its separation from a male mainstream, the NLAPW was nonetheless a significant force in promoting women's music in the 1930s.