Smithsonian Folkways: American Roots

Framed by the Depression and the Civil Rights movement, the golden age of American folk music was marked by idealist dreams and harsh realities. From Woody Guthrie to Martin Luther King Jr., whose speeches are nothing if not folk treasures, the message was the same: this land is our land. That was the essence when Pete Seeger sang "We Shall Overcome" as much as when Rev. Gary Davis referenced Samson and Delilah in "If I Had My Way." And even the old hill tunes from Clarence Ashley helped fuel the emerging concept of a diverse America.

Hero gangsters, murder fantasies — rap has nothing on folk music, whether it was Woody Guthrie lionizing "Pretty Boy Floyd" or Jean Ritchie singing of "Pretty Polly." But in today's hip-hop you rarely get the kind of social force of such union-organizing songs as "Joe Hill's Last Will" or the Baptist fire of the shape-note "Streets of Gold." And the migrant farm workers tragedy heard in Barbara Dane's version of the Woody Guthrie song "Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" seems as relevant as ever.

What would Phil Ochs think of salacious television programming today? He saw it coming back in the '60s when he sang "Talking Pay T.V." The best of the folk and blues collected by Folkways and now overseen by the Smithsonian somehow managed to be both topical and timeless, whether a clip of poet Langston Hughes or Brownie McGhee turning what we now call Homeland Security into boogie-woogie jive with "National Defense Blues" — as the defense industry steals his woman by giving her a job!

The 2,168 albums released by tiny New York-based Folkways Records between 1948 and 1987 map the roots and tendrils of American folk music of all cultural variations. Traditions from Europe and Africa and Latin America intertwined in the Appalachians and the Delta, from the Oklahoma dustbowl to the New York island — Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" could be the Folkways anthem. But it was a living art in the ballads and activism of Guthrie and Pete Seeger, the Jim Crow challenges of Leadbelly and Josh White, and in the catalog's great influence on generations of musicians from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Lucinda Williams (who recorded for Folkways). The songs contained in our playlist — running from folk to blues to hymns and spirituals — are as inspiring today as when they were first recorded.