A Sound Archive

Those of us who have done research on the history of the Communist left in the United States, on the culture of the 1930s, or on the history of southern chain gangs, have almost certainly come across a small 1936 songbook of two dozen “Negro Songs of Protest” compiled by Lawrence Gellert. Graced with a striking cover illustration by Lawrence’s more famous brother, the Communist artist Hugo Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest remains a quintessential example of Popular Front culture and a radical complement to the much-better-known material collected by Alan Lomax across the South during the same period and deposited at the Library of Congress. But, as Steven Garabedian’s book A Sound History proposes, the Gellert story is even far more complicated—and interesting—than it might seem at first glance. Gellert and his fieldwork, Garabedian shows, experienced a “trajectory of celebration to defamation” (p. ix). During the 1930s, the African American protest songs Gellert collected across the South made a signal contribution to what Michael Denning has called “the cultural front,” exposing radicals to a taste of Black vernacular culture aligned with the politics of the moment.1 During the Cold War years, however, Gellert’s association with the Communist Party (CP) and its publications—his brother Hugo was an editor at the New Masses, and some of Gellert’s material initially appeared in its pages—made his work suspect. Now what had been lauded as an amazing feat of recovery of a buried folk expression was derided as “an example of white leftwing propaganda...rather than Black vernacular creativity and resistance” (p. 9). The CP, once the alleged champion of African American rights, most famously in its global campaign to free the “Scottsboro Boys,” came to be regarded during the Cold War as preying on Black discontent for its own nefarious ends. Gellert’s once-laudable efforts to collect and disseminate an authentic protest culture located among the most oppressed group of African Americans living under Jim Crow was now dismissed as manipulative, at best, and outright fakery at worst.