Ruth Crawford Seeger is a pivotal but little-known figure of American music in the 20th Century. Judith Tick’s biography is a suitable monument to Crawford’s life and work.
A pianist, composer, teacher and folklorist, Crawford straddled the worlds of modernist avant garde music and folk music. Struck down by cancer in middle age, her contributions to American music were also limited by attitudes toward women, family and work that had barely begun to change by the time of her death. One of the leading figures in both the folk revival and modernist music, she saw both as antidotes to the sweetness and sentimentality of Romantic and Victorian popular music, and also to what she saw as the retrogression of the neo-Classical movement.
Crawford’s legacy today is best recognized through her step-son Pete Seeger and her children Michael and Peggy Seeger, all giants in the American and English folk revival movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Tick’s work is a welcome expansion of that legacy that sheds light on Crawford’s true stature as a music pioneer in her own right.
The daughter and granddaughter of Methodist ministers, Crawford was a budding poet and pianist as a teenager in the 1910s, at a time when the piano’s popularity was booming in the U.S. Attending the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago on a scholarship beginning in 1921, she confounded family and societal expectations that she become a “lady piano player” and teacher, by developing her gift for composition.
She fell in with the avant garde crowd in Chicago of the 1920s, including Carl Sandburg and the California composer and pianist Henry Cowell. Both were to be her lifelong champions and supporters. Like many of her age in those years, she dabbled in Eastern religion, philosophy and theosophy, and may have even flirted briefly with lesbianism.
Following her mother’s death in 1929, she was accepted by the fledgling MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she spent a summer composing and testing her wings as an adult and artist. Then she moved to New York, where she became involved in top-level salons and gatherings of new musicians and artists including Aaron Copland.
Among her new acquaintances was Charles Seeger, a noted musicologist and theoretician 15 years her senior who was exploring new musical idioms, including his own concept of “dissonant counterpoint.” Crawford became Seeger’s pupil and his assistant in production of a book, spending the summer of 1930 at his family home, where the two fell in love — in spite of Seeger’s married (though estranged) status.
Crawford left in September 1930 for a stint in Berlin and other European musical centers as the first woman ever to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for composing. She created a number of minor pieces and one major work, her “String Quartet 1931,” which remains a notable work of modernist dissonant music. She also came away angered by European assumptions of cultural superiority over American artists.
Some of the early chapters in this book are tough going, especially those that analyze Crawford’s musical ideas. But they’re important to the story as a whole, although much of the technical detail can be skimmed over without losing the flow.
Things pick up when Crawford and the newly divorced Seeger were married in 1932, just as the Depression was beginning to have an impact on the arts and artists in America. Like many artists and intellectuals during the period, they followed a path to Socialism — Charles writing a column for the Daily Worker newspaper, Ruth setting proletarian declamations to music. She started but was never able to complete a symphonic work, but continued to create dissonant pieces.
Within five years, the Seegers had three children, with a fourth soon to follow. They lived hand-to-mouth for some time after Charles lost his teaching job at Juilliard. They were rescued, and their lives changed forever, when he got a position in one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. The little-remembered Resettlement Administration established “colonies” for rural refugees of the Depression, mostly in the South (Johnny Cash grew up in one in Arkansas). Charles Seeger was among the artists and musicians hired to both document the arts and lives of these rural poor, and to be “artists in residence” in the colonies.
It was through their work with this agency and its successors that Seeger and Crawford came to understand that the art and culture of the folk is not something old and dying, but living and continually growing. It then became their mission to transmit this new knowledge to their compatriots in the intelligentsia. That was her work over the next two decades, beginning with a selection of folk songs set to simple piano arrangements for students in 1937.
She went on to work with John and Alan Lomax and on her own to produce several critically acclaimed and popular anthologies of American folk songs, particularly for children. She spent hundreds of hours transcribing the songs from field recordings in the Library of Congress, collected by the Lomaxes and others. She traveled, lectured, taught, and appeared on television.
Tick gives a good sense of Crawford’s impact on American arts and education, which “shifted the paradigm of traditional music away from Romanticism to modernity.” This is the kernel of Crawford’s story, that of an avant garde modernist who came to see folk music as complex and modernist rather than simple and old. She and her compatriots thus enabled in a very real sense the urban folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
Nearly every American child of the Postwar Baby Boom was taught American folk songs in school as part of their heritage. Most of them were chosen by Ruth Crawford: “Home on the Range,” “Cotton-Eye Joe,” “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Shenandoah,” “Sweet Betsy From Pike,” “John Henry,” “Boll Weevil,” and on and on. And she successfully fought to keep the songs from being “cleaned up” for children.
Ruth Crawford Seeger’s most public legacy is in the lives and work of her step-son, Pete, and her own children Mike and Peggy. Judith Tick’s meticulous and vibrant biography should set the record straight, and give Crawford her rightful place in the folk pantheon.
Oxford University Press, 1997
