Red Emma’s

“I Hear America Singing”: Folk Music and National Identity traces the history of the folk music revival from its origins in the early years of the twentieth century through its end in the late 1960s. By tracing the revival from its establishment during the Depression era through its decline, “I Hear America Singing” illustrates the ideological connections between the Old and New Lefts in the United States, thus challenging the historical view that demarcates the periods of leftist activity during the 1930s-40s and the 1960s into two separate movements. Many early revivalists participated in programs associated with the communist-led Popular Front, primarily because the Party supported the same marginalized Americans that the revivalists championed. Despite the anticommunist crusades of the early Cold War and the demise of the CPUSA as a political agency, revivalists continued their efforts to make constitutional rights applicable to all Americans, which channeled many into the modern phase of the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War movement, and the anti-poverty campaigns that became the hallmarks of the New Left. Rachel Clare Donaldson is an independent scholar and the co-author (with Ronald D. Cohen) of Roots of the Revival: Folk Music in the United States and Great Britain in the 1950s.