by a “Russian,” and for a time the merits of “God Bless America” became a topic of vehement editorial-page debate. But the song’s critics were soon shouted down (what could be more patriotic, Berlin’s defenders argued, than an immigrant’s paean of praise to his adopted “home sweet home”?); and Berlin dealt the crackpots a killer blow by announcing that every cent of the song’s royalties would be donated to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.
It wasn’t just the specter of world war that prompted the overwhelming response to “God Bless America.” In the 1930s, the perennial American tension between progress and nostalgia was especially acute. The country was on the one hand in thrall to the modernity celebrated in, and embodied by, Tin Pan Alley’s sleek, cosmopolitan songs. The census revealed that America was now an urban nation, and millions of new American city dwellers, émigrés from rural America and from overseas, reveled in the excitement of urban life. The increased cultural and political stature of cities, the impact of mass production and consumption, of progressive religious instruction in churches and scientific teaching in public schools, of radio, motion pictures, and other high-tech mass media—all these contributed to an atmosphere of bracing modernity, to the feeling that the nation was speeding headlong into a science-fiction future of limitless possibility and sophistication.
But the Depression made plain that technological revolution offered no guarantee of the good life. New urbanites confronted the anomie of city life, discovering that the fruits of modern, big-city individualism came at the expense of connection—the sense of security and stability that in the past had been provided by ancestral and communal ties. Even Tin Pan Alley’s inveterate New Yorkers registered this discontent; song after classic song features noirish, Hopperesque scenes of solitude and urban isolation, lonesome narrators pining for “someone to watch over me,” stupefied by longing “In the roaring traffic’s boom / In the silence of my lonely room.”
As the thirties wore on, Americans felt increasing dissatisfaction with urban modernity—a sense that the country’s best essence lay in its preindustrial past. Depictions of small-town simplicity and a utopian yesteryear became staples of popular culture. In WPA murals and Popular Front posters, farmers reaped the plenty of pastures bathed in golden light; small-town Regular Joes, good-hearted and full of American horse sense, strode through Thornton Wilder’s theatrical smash Our Town (1938) and Frank Capra’s films; Norman Rockwell’s sentimental Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations depicted the wholesome procession along Main Street, USA. Commercial advertising was rife with images of nineteenth-century domestic harmony and agrarian life—Currier and Ives enlisted to sell breakfast cereal. Folkish imagery even penetrated such “high art” as the symphonic works of Aaron Copeland and the choreography of Martha Graham.
This pastoral nostalgia dovetailed with another popular preoccupation: rifling the back pages of history to discover the Truly American. Certainly, American historical self-consciousness was nothing new. But in the 1930s, with the trauma of the Depression and the menace of Nazism and other foreign ideologies deepening Americans’ need for psychic reassurance, the quest to recover an organic national character became something of a crusade. The search for the “American way of life”—a phrase that, the cultural historian Warren Susman points out, first came into common use in the 1930s, along with such other telltale terms as “the American dream” and “the grass roots”—linked scholarly works like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study in National Character and Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England with grandiose projects like the Rockefeller-funded restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. The same impulse guided the efforts of so-called folk revivalists to document and preserve the country’s indigenous song traditions. It was during the 1930s that John and Alan Lomax crisscrossed the rural United States, from New England to Appalachia to the Deep South, making thousands of recordings of ballads and blues and field hollers—the “authentic” music of the American folk.
Though these songs were absorbed into left-wing movements like the Popular Front, the ideology of the folk revival was as much aesthetic as political: behind its cult of authenticity was disdain for the artifice and schmaltz of Tin Pan Alley pop. The movement’s torchbearer, Woody Guthrie, championed “people’s ballads” as the earthy alternative to the Hit Parade’s “sissy-voiced” crooners. When Guthrie wrote his most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land” (original title: “God Blessed America”), in response to Berlin’s anthem, he was replying not just to the tune’s jingoism but to the grandiose production values and bloated emotionalism of Kate Smith’s ubiquitous recording. Guthrie and his fellow acoustic-guitar-wielding folkies stood for grit, homespun verities, unflinching realism; at the bottom of his “This Land Is Your Land” lyric sheet, Guthrie noted: “All you can write is what you see.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
