This chapter situates the documentary movement of the 1930s and its preoccupation with the folk within the larger history of American modernism. I show how “the culture concept” emerged within the overlapping fields of anthropology and folklore to guide the practice of ethnography and its “study of modernity’s others” in the age of US imperialism and world war. For some Black and Native ethnographers, the folk offered an avenue for staking a claim of history, contribution, and modern belonging. New Deal documentary projects repurposed the folk as stalwart protagonists of the past, the backstory to a centralized narrative of national culture and its constituent parts. By contrast, many documentary books destabilized representations of the folk, producing a more self-reflexive account of social relations of power. While some texts anticipated the Cold War turn to the plight of the individual, others took aim at the racial fault lines of American exceptionalism.

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

This chapter focuses on the writing of Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, specifically their representations of the folk and folk culture in the 1930s. In addition, it charts the development of their work from the 1920s into the 1940s and World War II. Both writers critiqued the practices and discourses of contemporary ethnography and their assertion of the disappearance of the folk and their culture in the face of modernization, a perspective largely adopted by the politics of the New Deal and the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). Both writers confirmed the continued relevance and adaptability of Black culture and its place within both the African Diaspora and the national project of the United States so that their work for the FWP produced a counternarrative to its perspective. This chapter argues that a focus on the work of Brown – himself a self-identified leftist – and Hurston demonstrates that the writing of this period does not break down along strictly oppositional lines but is expansive, dialogic, and malleable.

The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.

Musical Romanticism and nationalism are both concepts closely tied to the idea of ‘the folk’. This chapter considers the twisting and turning relationships in music between Romanticism, nationalism, and the folk. It treats first the origin of the concepts. Next it takes up the importance of music as a folk ‘language of nature’, and the effect of German musical hegemony during the nineteenth century in spurring different configurations of ‘national’ and ‘folk’ music. It also looks at the realities that complicate many Romantic claims about national music, such as the presence and contributions of ethnic minorities. The chapter argues that Romantic musical nationalism in music is ultimately a series of reception tropes, and summarises five key approaches. It concludes with a study of a single piece, Smetana’s The Moldau, to show how these different tropes can converge and play off each other.

Music haunts Seamus Heaney’s poetry and criticism. The word music and its siblings – song, chorus, rhythm, note, etc. – appear throughout his work. Again and again, Heaney urges us to pay attention to words, to feel how they sound, to believe what we hear. The textbook distinction between sound and sense does little to elucidate Heaney’s poetry, where so often the sense is the sound, and vice versa: Gweebara, omphalos, rasp, nick, squelch. What gives music such force in Heaney’s work is its ability to coordinate a range of concerns. It troubles the primarily discursive function of language; it posits the body as an instrument of knowing; and it summons the powerful figure of Irish folk tradition. In short, music allows Heaney to reckon both with what it means to be a lyric poet, and what it means to be an Irish poet.

This chapter examines Hurston’s early dramatic works during the period popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that a more comprehensive reading of the Harlem Renaissance must include Hurston’s early career in playwriting and that Hurston’s early plays – Meet the Mamma, Spears, The First One, and Color Struck – reflect key concerns of the Harlem Renaissance period. Within this context and combined with the fairly recent discovery of her plays, a fuller view of Hurston’s efforts becomes possible. Given the role of ritual and vernacular folk idioms that would come to dominate her creative writing and her social science career, Hurston’s early plays can be interpreted as testing ground for the theories of culture she would later develop in her novels and essays.