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The period from 1929 to 1945 was a significant one for American music, particularly for the remarkable variety of indigenous music that flourished in the era and for the continued development and popularity of jAZZ. Music reflected the impact of both the Great Depression and World War II on American life as well as the role played by technology, especially radio, in American popular culture. Other important developments included the growing influence of African Americans on the nation’s music and efforts to document and preserve traditional music. New York, Chicago, and New Orleans remained key centers of American music, though a number of other cities, including Kansas City, Memphis, and Nashville, were also important.

Perhaps the most notable patterns in American music in the 1930s involved the development, growing commercialization, and expanded audiences experienced by various forms of traditional and regional music. Much of this music was southern, ranging from African-American blues to white country and “hillbilly” music, and it included significant connections and even fusions among different ethnic, racial, and regional musical traditions, abetted in this era by the radio, phonograph records, and population movement. Reflecting the exigencies of the depression, protest songs also figured significantly in the decade, and gospel music became an important phenomenon in urban as well as rural areas. Though sales of phonographs and phonograph records fell off sharply early in the depression, radio had grown in extent and importance during the 1920s and provided an essential source of the expanding audiences for music in the 1930s.

White country music underwent developments in the 1930s with significant implications for the wartime and postwar periods. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jimmy Rodgers, like some other white country musicians, combined hillbilly with aspects of blues music. The Carter family gave traditional Appalachian folk music wider audiences with their recordings, as did Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys for old-time country music and Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys for bluegrass. The Grand Ole Opry broadcasts of Nashville radio station WSM and the National Barn Dance broadcasts of Chicago’s WLS played key roles in building the popularity of such music.

The 1930s also saw the rise of “western music,” particularly in Texas, with its stringband style and its impact on country music. The Cajun music of southern Louisiana, for example, was influenced by “western swing” music, including that of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. The popular movies of such cowboy singers as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry helped expand audiences for western music. And particularly in Texas, western music also developed what became known as “honky-tonk” music, with a harder sound, including electric guitars, and often with harder-edged lyrics than traditional country music.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, and the criticism of economic and political institutions that it often produced, contributed to a more protest-oriented folk music. Somewhat different from the lamentations of much blues and country music, this protest music was more self-consciously political and paralleled themes of social criticism in other artistic endeavors of the decade. Its best-known artist was WoODY GuTHRlE, but there were others as well, and they sang songs of both rural and urban tribulation and protest. By the 1940s, and the American entry into the war and the return of prosperity, this folk music of social criticism subsided, not to reemerge significantly until the 1950s and especially the 1960s.

One reason that folksingers in the 1960s revival could draw on earlier musicians was the remarkable effort made in the 1930s, particularly by various government agencies, to locate and preserve traditional American music. Two important agencies of the WoRKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION, the Federal Writers’ Project and especially the Federal Music Project, with its field research on regional folk music and its Index of American Composers, sought to identify the indigenous music of America and the American people. The Library of Congress sent John Lomax and his son Alan to the SouTH to locate and record the music of rural southerners, white and black. The Smithsonian Institution conducted similar efforts, as did various academic folklorists and aficionados of traditional music.

These efforts played an important role in helping to document traditional African-American music and musicians. The Lomaxes were instrumental in discovering (in Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary) Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Leadbelly,” who was more a singer of traditional black folk songs and “shouts” than of the blues with which he is also identified. The Lomaxes and others also helped to bring recognition to some of the black bluesmen of the 1930s and 1940s. Alan Lomax recorded McKinley Morgan-field—later known as Muddy Waters—singing Delta blues on Stovall’s Plantation in Mississippi in the early 1940s. Part of the wartime and postwar black migration north, Mor-ganfield moved to Chicago in 1943 and, as Muddy Waters, began using an electric guitar. With Little Walter, How-lin’ Wolf, and others, Waters developed the Chicago urban blues so important in the postwar era.

But many of the black blues singers of the 1930s did not have to be discovered by northern folklorists coming South. The radio and phonograph were already giving traditional bluesmen, including Charley Patton, Son House, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, significant audiences. Radio and phonograph recordings also helped spread the music of such “boogie-woogie” blues pianists as Little Brother Montgomery, Jimmy Yancey, and Memphis Slim, who developed great popularity in northern cities. As blues singers and musicians migrated from the rural South to the urban North, they also influenced other genres from gospel to jazz and “swing” music, including the rhythmic, flowing Kansas City jazz popularized by Count Basie’s band.

The most important development in jazz in this era was the emergence of the “Swing Era” BIG BANDS that dominated jazz, and much popular music, from the mid-1930s to just after World War II. Louis Armstrong and his “Hot Fives” and “Hot Sevens” recordings of the 1920s had revolutionized jazz and laid foundations for the Swing Era to follow. Early in the depression decade, jazz suffered from the general economic collapse, but especially with the rise to stardom of Benny Goodman in 1935, jazz gained not only a new direction but a new popularity throughout the nation. Such black bands as those of DuKE Ellington pioneered swing music, but with Goodman and other white bandleaders such as Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Glen Miller, jazz attained widespread new popularity.

A telling indication of the new stature of jazz and of the recognition of the importance of African-American music came from two landmark performances at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1938: One was Benny Goodman’s nowlegendary January jazz concert; the other was a December performance of traditional African-American music. And in 1943, Duke Ellington gave the first of what ultimately became nine Carnegie Hall concerts.

Other important developments marked jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Duke Ellington, as composer as well as

Louis Armstrong (l) with Bing Crosby (Getty Images)

Pianist and bandleader, produced remarkable music based in African-American and jazz traditions but taking it to a new and different level. Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and others made individual singers more important than before, a factor contributing to the demise of the big bands after World War II. And as big bands and their swing music began to dissolve after the war because of changing tastes and economic difficulties, “bebop,” a harder-driving, less danceable jazz by smaller combos popularized by such artists as saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, began to reshape jazz in the postwar era.

Jazz as well as black and white traditional music also affected classical and other more “serious” music in the era—though such compositions by Duke Ellington as his 1943 concerto Black, Brown and Beige were serious music by any reckoning. George Gershwin worked jazz and African-American elements into his music, most famously in his 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The composer Aaron Copland sometimes drew on jazz and African-American music, and in Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944) on traditional white music as well.

Among the other significant developments in American classical music in the era were efforts to bring it to larger audiences. On Christmas Day, 1931, New York’s Metropolitan Opera broadcast live on the radio, beginning the Saturday broadcasts of the “Met” that put opera in millions of American homes. In addition to its work documenting and preserving American music, the Federal Music Project of the New Deal gave employment and income to professional musicians (perhaps two-thirds of whom were unemployed by 1933), provided musical education and instruction, and helped stage live performances of classical as well as popular music. While opera companies struggled and sometimes failed in the 1930s, the efforts of the Federal Music Project helped the number of symphony orchestras to increase significantly late in the decade.

A number of emigres and exiles from Nazi-dominated Europe came to the United States in this era, with important consequences for American classical music. These artists included the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, the Polish pianist Arthur Rubenstein, and such composers as the Russian Igor Stravinsky, the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg, the Hungarian Bela Bartok, and the German Kurt Weill. With others, they brought additional vitality to American classical music in a way paralleling the impact of European expatriates on other aspects of American intellectual and artistic life. Yet even some of them, Stravinsky, for example, with his Ebony Concerto of the mid-1940s, also worked jazz and other indigenous American music into their compositions. The American John Cage, briefly a student of Schoenberg’s, pursued decidedly untraditional music with his development of radical percussive compositions in the 1930s and 1940s.

American musical theater in the 1920s and 1930s was part of what became known as the “golden age” of the American musical, with talents such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers leading the way. While the subject matter of musicals varied, they also reflected some of music’s broader themes in the era and included such socially conscious productions in the 1930s as Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing (1931), a satire of the U. S. government that became the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, shows such as Richard Rodgers’s Oklahoma! (1943) celebrating folk patterns, and such war-related musicals as Berlin’s This Is the Army (1942) and Rodgers’s South Pacific (1948).

The war had other effects on popular music. A number of snappy, chauvinistic anti-Japanese and anti-German songs were produced, but never really caught on. Rather, the big sellers were such patriotic standards as Kate Smith’s version of “God Bless America,” danceable songs such as “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B,” and sentimental ballads such as 1944’s most popular song, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” With patriotism supplanting protest even among those who had produced or sung music of social criticism in the 1930s, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” became a hit during the war. The Andrews Sisters and other musical artists also visited overseas bases as part of the efforts of the United Service Organizations (USO) to lift morale. The best-selling record of the war years was Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” which reflected the sentimental focus on home characteristic of the war years. Much of this wartime music was evanescent, but such popular standards as “White Christmas,” would have been hits in any era.

The really significant musical impact of World War II lay in how it continued or redirected many of the patterns of the 1930s, thus setting the stage for the postwar era. The big bands perhaps gained their peak of popularity, despite wartime restrictions and demands. (Glenn Miller was killed in an airplane crash on his way to entertain troops.) The frenzied reaction to Frank Sinatra (“Sinatra-mania”) reflected not only the emergence of the first true “teen idol” but also the growing importance of individual singers at the expense of the big bands and thus heralded the postwar decline of the big bands. By the end of the war, swing was giving way to bebop and big bands to smaller ensembles in more intimate settings. Blues singers, with other African Americans, continued their migration North, and particularly in Chicago developed electrified urban blues, based importantly on Delta blues and other rural traditions. Gospel music had increasing commercial success. White country music continued to grow in popularity, abetted by Grand Ole Opry tours and broadcasts. As rural whites moved toward cities and joined the armed forces, country music gained in popularity and geographic reach; honky-tonk emerged as the dominant strain of country music; and by the late 1940s Hank Williams had become a major national star. Based especially on such strands of African-American music as blues, jazz, and boogie-woogie, “rhythm and blues” began to emerge as important popular music. Rather than simply being “race” music aimed at black audiences, R&B became much more generally popular in the postwar era and contributed powerfully to the emergence of the rock ’n’ roll that came to dominate American popular music.

See also art and architecture; Federal Art Project; Federal Theatre Project; literature.

Further reading: Laura Browder and David McLean, “The Arts,” in American Decades, 1930-1939, ed. Victor Bondi (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995); Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Richard Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a ’War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Putnam’s, 1970); Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Bill C. Malone, Country Music, U. S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); John Warthen Struble, The History of American Classical Music (New York: Facts On File, 1995); Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds. “Music” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

Myrdal, Gunnar (1898-1987) scholar The Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal is best known in the United States for his enormously important 1,500-page study of American race relations—An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944. Myrdal’s work provided one of the first in-depth examinations of America’s racial system that kept its black citizens poor, uneducated, and deprived of most CiViL RIGHTS. It played a major role in opening the eyes of white Americans to the plight and dissatisfaction of African Americans and in making civil rights a priority of many whites in the 1940s and 1950s. Its findings also contributed to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Born on December 6, 1898, in a small Swedish village, Gunnar Myrdal became one of his country’s leading intellectuals and was active in Swedish politics before the Carnegie Corporation commissioned him in 1938 to head a study of what was called the “American Negro problem.” Upon completing his research in 1942, he returned to Sweden and was elected to the Swedish Senate. Later he served as the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and left that post to conduct an important study of the economic conditions in Asia. In 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic science jointly with Austrian professor Frederich von Hayek for work relating economic analysis to social and cultural conditions. His wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982.

An American Dilemma was a highly ambitious project, involving historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, and others—all creating a formidable body of work that led to one inescapable conclusion: The treatment of African Americans amounted to virtually a total denial of the fundamental principles upon which the United States had been founded. Myrdal’s striking analysis of the history and consequences of slavery, white racism, and racial discrimination and segregation made a compelling case for immediate correction if America was to live up to its promise. The study became highly influential—and was a best seller—at a time when the majority of white Americans supported racial segregation and turned a blind eye to the violence that supported it. Its impact was all the more remarkable considering that it came out during the tensions of World War II. “I know of no other country where such a thing could have happened,” Myrdal later remarked.

In conducting his study, Myrdal became one of the first scholars to connect racial conditions to repressive violence. He initiated his research by traveling by car through the South, meeting with white and black leaders. His African-American colleague, Ralph Bunche, was forced to pose as his chauffeur in order to avoid the wrath of affronted whites. Research lasted from 1939 through 1942. In addition to providing an incisive exploration of all facets of the African-American experience, including family life, religion, and culture, An American Dilemma examined racial prejudice and its effects on the black community and its institutions. It described a broad pattern of lynching, riots, and individual acts of violence, perpetrated with the help or acquiescence of law enforcement, that amounted to little more that racial terrorism. The “dilemma” referred to in the title involved the tension between the high-minded idealism of the American creed of “liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody” and the racial prejudice that resulted in proscription, harassment, humiliation, and violence that characterized race relations. The true test of American greatness, Myrdal argued, would come in how it confronted and solved this dilemma.

Myrdal intended his study to force whites to see the sizable nature of the problem they had created, and through a systematic, detailed presentation of the facts, impel them to correct it. He placed the onus for the plight of black America squarely on the shoulders of whites. He called it the “principle of cumulation,” which meant the inferior status of blacks forced upon them by whites, first by slavery and then by segregation, created a self-perpetuating cycle of low status that confirmed white prejudice and encouraged the status quo. Only by raising blacks to fully assimilated members of society could this problem be resolved. Myrdal hoped that a careful though passionate exploration of the facts offered in conjunction with the ongoing war against tyranny in World War II would convince whites to change their attitudes and practices. In this approach, he revealed a pronounced faith in the inherent integrity of the American system and in the essential goodness and strength of character of the American people—to which, ultimately, he made his appeal.

See also RACE and racial conflict.

Further reading: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944); David W Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of an American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

—Howard Smead