Greil Marcus’ weird old America still
flourished when photographers from a New Deal agency, the Farm Security
Administration, set forth to document everyday life in the 1930s and ‘40s. Edited
by Rich Remsberg, Hard Luck Blues: Roots
Music Photographs from the GreatDepression
(University of Illinois Press) culls the archives to
present a fascinating array of ordinary Americans making music. Many of the
pictures are startling for being so in the moment. You can almost hear the
songs in the body language of the musicians and singers caught on camera.
The variety of subjects is remarkable. Pictured
are marching bands on parade down Main
Street, back country trios sitting on the porch
looking sober as the Carter Family, the music stages of traveling carnivals and
inner city nightclubs along with swing orchestras at road houses and local
folks at the “community sing.”
Some of the images will strike contemporary eyes
as bizarre. African-American convicts in striped prison suits are shown singing
and dancing; white second graders are caught applying cork makeup for “their
Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day Festivities.” Weird America,
indeed.
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