Mark Davidson
Mark Davidson
Mark Davidson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mark entered UCSC's Cross-Cultural Ph.D. program in Musicology in Fall 2007, the program's inaugural year. He is currently working on his dissertation on government-sponsored folk music collecting during FDR's New Deal with an emphasis on California and the South. Mark’s research interests include 20th-century modernist/ultramodernist music of the U.S. and Europe, folk and popular musics, and cultural studies. In spring of 2009, he completed his master's project on Charles Seeger work with the Resettlement Administration and Sidney Robertson Cowell's California Folk Music Project for the WPA. He received his B.M. from Florida State University in Music History and Literature/Classical Guitar. Mark currently serves as the assistant editor for the Journal of the Society for American Music.
In 1935, at a time when the unemployment rate in the U.S. was well over twenty percent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented the largest jobs recovery act in the history of the United States in the form of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In this second phase of his “New Deal,” FDR sought to combat directly the rampant unemployment that heretofore he had been unable to remedy. Instead of merely providing relief funds as had previous New Deal programs, the WPA was set up to put people back to work by providing government-funded jobs from across a variety of different fields, including public works projects, administrative jobs, and employment in the arts. One of the central endeavors of Roosevelt’s New Deal was documenting the lives of ordinary people from across the nation. Government-sponsored fieldworkers canvassed the country in search of folklore, and some of the most coveted items were “authentic” regional folk songs. These fieldworkers worked largely under the auspices of the WPA arts projects collectively known as Federal Project No. 1, or “Federal One,” which included the Federal Arts Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, and the Historical Records Survey. Folk music collecting was not relegated to any one of these projects, nor was it limited to musicians. With assistance from the recently created Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, folklorists, linguists, writers, and musicians collected thousands of songs from across the nation and in doing so helped define “the folk” as a central characteristic of “American-ness” at one of the most challenging moments in the nation’s history.
This colloquium will focus on four folk music projects in particular:
Sidney Robertson Cowell’s WPA California Folk Music Project (1938–40), Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin’s Migrant Worker Collection in Farm Security Administration camps (1940–41), the statewide folk music recordings made by the Florida Federal Writers’ Project (1939–40), and Herbert Halpert’s Southern States Recording Expedition for the WPA’s Joint Committee on Folk Arts (1939).
For more information on these various New Deal projects, please visit:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/newdeal/afc.html