A Chance to Harmonize

“The first full-length study of one of the New Deal’s most ambitious cultural initiatives. A Chance to Harmonize, as well as giving a picaresque account of a remarkable archival project, offers a corrective to the male-dominated narratives of the folk-song field. So much of what we know of American grassroots music, now a cherished part of our national heritage, comes from the efforts of these unheralded pioneers, who worked in the field and on the fly. A Chance to Harmonize, at last, gives them their due.” 

“Kaskowitz offers a spellbinding account of the New Deal’s Music Unit, a 1930s government project that aimed to foster solidarity among out-of-work Americans through folk music. Kaskowitz backgrounds the bureaucratic maneuvering and evolving ideology of the Music Unit with a sweeping on-the-ground narrative of the Great Depression’s hardest hit regions. It’s an exhilarating slice of American history.”

“Kaskowitz tells the fascinating and largely forgotten story of the ‘music unit,’ a New Deal initiative that was both short-lived and under-the-radar. Aficionados of American music will be familiar with the work of Alan Lomax, head of the Archive of American Folk Song, who sent a team to California to record the songs of Dust Bowl refugees living in work camps. Kaskowitz shows us that the music unit was a direct precursor to Lomax and a missing link in the birth of the American folk music revival.”

"Who knew that a book about government bureaucracy could create such an incredible adventure story? Sheryl Kaskowitz manages to do just that. Captivatingly written and exhaustively researched, A Chance to Harmonize brilliantly illuminates this critical yet often overlooked moment in American cultural history."

"In A Chance to Harmonize, Sheryl Kaskowitz vividly illuminates a unique moment in American history, when an agency of FDR’s New Deal brought music and hope to struggling homesteaders, and reaped musical riches in return, sewing the seeds of the American Folk revival. The Music Unit’s demise provides a telling lesson for our own times: it was shut down after only two years by conservatives in Congress who deemed it 'socialistic.’”

“What could be more ambitious, fraught, potentially disastrous, and deeply inspiring than the New Deal’s creation of planned, cooperative homesteads for victims of the Great Depression? The idea that folk music was the key to it all. And yet such was the mission of the Resettlement Administration’s semi-clandestine Music Unit, which Sheryl Kaskowitz rescues from obscurity in this lively, nuanced chronicle. In her skillful telling, the story of the Music Unit—and especially the trials and triumphs of two crucial women, the brilliant Margaret Valiant and the implacable Sidney Robertson—becomes an absorbing, dual meditation on the political uses of music and on the New Deal’s groundbreaking, messy entanglements with American folk culture.”

“In the depths of the Great Depression, the US government embarked on an enigmatic mission to lift the spirits of the nation with music. Sheryl Kaskowitz’s chronicle of the hidden history of the Music Unit and its cross-country search for American folk songs is rich in detail and rife with fascinating characters. A Chance to Harmonize is a deeply sympathetic account of how ordinary Americans, at the worst of times, sought solace and strength in music, and a clarion call for the intangible power of art.”

“A heartening account of music’s ability to create cooperation and community and restore dignity and hope. Kaskowitz brings to vivid life the history of the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division, which developed art activities on American homesteads.”

Praise for Sheryl Kaskowitz

"Probing and insightful...illuminating and thoughtful. An engaging portrait of how the song infiltrated patriotism, business and sports."

"A model of song biography. From the mountains to the prairies to the White House to the ballpark, Kaskowitz's 'surprising history' offers a compelling journey into the complicated and contradictory American soul."

"Shows how [patriotic songs] acquired their powerful symbolism and how they became ways of suppressing dissent... Clips of Smith, Berlin and even Richard Nixon singing the title song add another dimension to Kaskowitz's account of the song, and the way politicians and the American public have used it over the decades are also part of the story."