The New Deal’s Forgotten Song Book

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Music for square dance at Skyline Farms, Alabama, 1937
Photo by Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a sprawling New Deal agency created in 1935 to oversee a disparate set of government initiatives, most of which focused on providing help in rural areas. This included an experimental program to build new homestead communities for “displaced populations”—farmers whose land had failed, miners whose mines had shut down and unemployed urban workers willing to try rural life. Almost completely lost to history is the agency’s Music Unit, hidden within the RA’s vaguely named Special Skills Division, which left a trove of recordings documenting the folk music of Depression-era America.


Charles Seeger was a technical advisor to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). He also served as an administrator for the WPA’s Federal Music Project. His children, Pete, Peggy and Mike were renowned American folk singers.
Courtesy, Wikipedia.

The RA’s Music Unit dispatched federal workers as field representatives to lead music activities and record folk songs that were then incorporated into music programs meant to help strengthen ties among the homesteaders. This “social use” of music was intertwined with a larger (and controversial) goal of the RA to foster an ideological shift on the homesteads away from rugged individualism to an emphasis on collective responsibility.

It now seems clear that the lost history of the Music Unit is no accident—the Special Skills Division wanted to keep the Music Unit’s activities below the radar, likely to avoid attention from the RA’s many critics. Any music program within the agency would have been seen as frivolous; one invested in instilling a cooperative mindset among the rural poor could seem downright dangerous.

Between 1936 and 1937, Music Unit staffer Sidney Robertson became the RA’s most prolific folk music collector, recording more than 800 songs on solo collecting

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended the White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County, Virginia, 1933
Courtesy: https://www.archives-wcpl.net

trips through the Appalachians, the Ozarks and Upper Midwest. Sidney was fascinated by labor union protest music and made recordings of left-wing activists in St. Louis and striking millworkers in Tennessee.

She discovered new musical worlds in the immigrant enclaves of Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Polish and Lithuanian in the Midwest and was the first collector to record folk songs of ethnic immigrants and call them “American.” All of this informed her later work directing the WPA’s California Folk Music Project (1938–1940).

Dancers taught by Leonard Kirk, Cumberland Homesteads, Crossville, Tennessee, 1937
Photo: Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration. Courtesy, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The RA was one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching and highly criticized programs. It lasted just two years, from 1935 to 1937, when it became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). At that time, the overall focus of the New Deal had shifted away from the kind of direct relief that the RA had provided and towards the job programs of the Works Progress Administration. But the rich collection of recordings made for the RA, now archived at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, function as sonic equivalents to the FSA’s famous photographs documenting the hardscrabble 1930s—sounds of resilience, joy, protest, pain and humor among Americans struggling through the Great Depression.

WATCH the Living New Deal webinar, “Folk Music and the New Deal: Collecting the Hidden Soundtracks of the Great Depression,” featuring Sheryl Koskowitz and Catherine Kerst.

Sheryl Kaskowitz is the author of A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time (Pegasus, April 2024) and God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (Oxford University Press, 2013). Sheryl earned her PhD in music with an ethnomusicology focus at Harvard University and currently works as a freelance writer, editor and audio producer in Berkeley, California.

Library of Congress Symposium Celebrates the Federal Writers’ Project

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Rewriting America, a symposium held at the American Folkways Center on June 16, 2023. Photo by Susan DeMasi.

The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a unique New Deal program begun in 1935, provided jobs to thousands; published scores of books (including the celebrated WPA American Guide series); kickstarted the careers of such legendary authors as Richard Wright and May Swenson; and collected oral histories from immigrants and formerly enslaved people. In June, a symposium at the Library of Congress (LOC), “Rewriting America: Reconsidering the Federal Writers’ Project 80 Years Later,” celebrated the FWP’s legacy and continued influence.

It’s fitting that the symposium took place at the Library of Congress. When the FWP closed down in 1943 many of its documents were deposited there. Eighty years later, the collection, consisting of thousands of archival boxes and digitized materials, continues to be mined by historians, writers, educators, documentarians, and folklorists.


During its 8-year run, the FWP produced 275 books, 700 pamphlets, and 340 “issuances” (articles, leaflets and radio scripts.). Courtesy, NARA.

Hosted by the American Folklife Center, a special collections division in the LOC, the symposium’s agenda centered around the recently published “Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), edited by Sara Rutkowski. Speakers included some of the book’s contributing authors, as well as other researchers and writers in the field of FWP studies and oral history. Guha Shankar, American Folklife Center program specialist, organized the program along with FWP scholars Rutkowski, Deborah Mutnick, David Taylor, Jerry Hirsch, and Benji de la Piedra.          

William Colbert, Age 93. Alabama

William Colbert, Age 93. Alabama
The FWP’s Slave Narrative Collection documented over 2,300 first-person accounts of former slaves across 17 states. Courtesy, LOC.

Presentations centered on the politics and vision of the FWP; contemporary undertakings that are making use of the LOC’s FWP materials, including new readings of the narratives of enslaved African Americans; research into Asian American and Mexican American FWP writers; an upcoming FWP podcast; and a New York City-based multimedia project about Covid-19, inspired by the original FWP.

With the study of oral history so prominent in FWP studies, an internationally renowned oral historian, Alessandro Portelli, gave the keynote address, which “situated the FWP within the trajectory of the field of oral history and its intersection with current public humanities projects,” said LOC’s Shankar.

There was discussion about pending federal legislation introduced by Representative Ted Lieu (D-California), calling for a 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project. As proposed, the revived FWP would be run by the Department of Labor. As with the original FWP, all works created under the program would be archived at the Library of Congress and made widely available to the public.

American Guides poster

American Guides poster
The FWP’s American Guide Series published histories, automobile travel routes, photographs, maps, and descriptions of the diverse cultures and geography of all 48 states, as well as several cities and territories.
Courtesy, Work Projects Administration Poster Collection – Library of Congress.

The American Folklife Center (AFC) is designated the national center for folklife documentation and research. Its archive encompasses millions of items of ethnographic and historical documentation from the U.S. and around the world.

The symposium was hosted by the AFC, with support from by the American Folklore Society, the Oral History Association, and the Professional Staff Congress: City University of New York.  The Living New Deal contributed copies of its Map and Guide to the New Deal in Washington, DC, featuring 500 New Deal sites and a self-guided walking tour of the National Mall.

For more information about the symposium:

“Re-writing America”: AFC Symposium on the Federal Writers’ Project, by Guha Shankar

Research Guide

Susan Rubenstein DeMasi is the author of the 2016 biography, Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project. She is a visiting scholar in this summer’s National Endowment for the Humanities program, “The New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project,” as well as a contributor to an upcoming book on the literary legacy of the FWP, edited by Sara Rutkowski, for the University of Massachusetts Press. [email protected]

Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

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Like many others, I made the pilgrimage to Casilli Street in San Francisco to interview the American folklorist Archie Green.  As usual, he was sitting in the front window of his home watching the street.

Although we were a generation apart, there were several parallels in our lives – moving to Los Angeles in our youth, graduating from UC Berkeley, love of the outdoors, working as a union carpenter, an admiration for the New Deal.

Archie personified my ideal of the worker/intellectual. His involvement with the New Deal began with a National Youth Administration (NYA) job while a student at UC Berkeley. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—rare for someone with a college education—and worked as a firefighter and road builder along the Klamath River in Northern California. Soon after he began working as a shipwright in San Francisco and was drawn into the city’s lively cultural scene, including the favorite watering hole of New Deal artists—the Black Cat Bar in North Beach.

Later Archie developed an interest in labor folklore and began documenting the culture and traditions of American workers. He gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks that constitute “laborlore.” He not only collected material from laborers but also encouraged workers to preserve their own stories.

Documenting and honoring working-class culture became Archie’s focus for the remainder of his life. After many years lobbying Congress, Archie succeeded in getting a bill passed that established the American Folklife Center within the Library of Congress to preserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate American folk traditions. The Center’s archive, which includes Archie’s work, is open to researchers and the general public.

Author Sean Burns spent considerably more time with Archie that I did. His interviews and research into Archie’s remarkable life for this book make it more than simply a biography. Burns himself calls it  “a discussion of Green’s political and intellectual formation”–what pushed Green into a life of activism. It is a tribute to a man who was deeply committed to cultural pluralism and a path of work, scholarship, and action.

Reviewed by Harvey Smith

Harvey Smith is an advisor to the Living New Deal.

Book Review
Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero

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By Sean Burns
University of Illinois Press, 2011

Archie Green Book Cover

Like many others, I made the pilgrimage to Casilli Street in San Francisco to interview the American folklorist Archie Green.  As usual, he was sitting in the front window of his home watching the street.

Although we were a generation apart, there were several parallels in our lives – moving to Los Angeles in our youth, graduating from UC Berkeley, love of the outdoors, working as a union carpenter, an admiration for the New Deal.

Archie personified my ideal of the worker/intellectual. His involvement with the New Deal began with a National Youth Administration (NYA) job while a student at UC Berkeley. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)—rare for someone with a college education—and worked as a firefighter and road builder along the Klamath River in Northern California. Soon after he began working as a shipwright in San Francisco and was drawn into the city’s lively cultural scene, including the favorite watering hole of New Deal artists—the Black Cat Bar in North Beach.

Later Archie developed an interest in labor folklore and began documenting the culture and traditions of American workers. He gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks that constitute “laborlore.” He not only collected material from laborers but also encouraged workers to preserve their own stories.

Documenting and honoring working-class culture became Archie’s focus for the remainder of his life. After many years lobbying Congress, Archie succeeded in getting a bill passed that established the American Folklife Center within the Library of Congress to preserve, support, revitalize, and disseminate American folk traditions. The Center’s archive, which includes Archie’s work, is open to researchers and the general public.

Author Sean Burns spent considerably more time with Archie that I did. His interviews and research into Archie’s remarkable life for this book make it more than simply a biography. Burns himself calls it  “a discussion of Green’s political and intellectual formation”–what pushed Green into a life of activism. It is a tribute to a man who was deeply committed to cultural pluralism and a path of work, scholarship, and action.

Harvey Smith is an advisor to the Living New Deal.