Conference Agenda

In October of 1939, CBS launched the expensive and ambitious educational broadcast Folk Music of America. Hosted by Alan Lomax and broadcast during school hours, the show introduced children to varied folk musics of America through live performances of folk music, carefully scripted conversations with performers, and twenty newly commissioned settings of folk songs by living American composers. The award-winning show not only imagined a new kind of listening pedagogy, but also characterized itself as an exercise in training democratic citizens: Lomax’s Instructor’s Guide announced that “As one European nation after another has, in recent years, rejected democracy or compromised it, throughout America there has come the realization that our refuge and strength lies in the cultivation of our democratic traditions. This tradition…is nowhere better exemplified than at its musical core—American folk music.”

This paper examines how Folk Music of America sought to generate a listening pedagogy that was not only democratizing—as much broadcast radio education claimed to be—but explicitly invested in Dewey’s model of democracy as a social practice. In Democracy and Education, John Dewey not only claims that democratic population requires an educated populace, but also that democracy is “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living.” Building upon Jonathan Stone’s work on participatory democracy in one of the series' episodes, I examine how Lomax’s listening pedagogy encouraged his audiences to imagine a “mode of associated living” that emphasized racial, class, and gender diversity throughout the series. This work extends beyond Lomax’s explicit interest in Black American folk song. I argue that the most striking episodes quietly integrate Anglo American and African American music, such as an episode on play-party songs that aired more than a decade ahead of Brown v. Board. Lomax models a listening practice that encourages the “freer interaction among social groups” that represent Dewey’s democratic ideal. Further, commissions of concert works by a diverse group of Black American and female composers were central to this goal, for they allowed children to imagine transcending the limited roles to which society consigned them, as archival letters from listeners attest.