Event Courses and Workshops Government Song Woman: Sidney Robertson, Folk Music Collecting, and FDR's New Deal

The authors of two new books, Sheryl Kaskowitz, "A Chance to Harmonize" and Catherine Hiebert Kerst, "California Gold", return to the Library of Congress to discuss the remarkable New Deal folk song collecting career of Sidney Robertson, whose recordings are held in the American Folklife Center.

In her work recording songs for the federal government during the mid- to late-1930s, Robertson captured a diverse and multifaceted soundscape of the Great Depression. This story has never before been fully told. The conversation will be moderated by American Folklife Center's  Director Nicole Saylor and will include a selection of the songs from the collections.

Sheryl Kaskowitz is the author of "A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time" (Pegasus, 2024). A Harvard-trained scholar of American music, she began the research for her book as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2016.

Catherine Hiebert Kerst is the author of California Gold: Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project (University of California Press/Library of Congress, 2024). She is a folklorist, cultural researcher, and writer who worked for many years as Folklife Specialist and Archivist in the American Folklife Center and served as the Archive’s point person for Robertson’s ethnographic corpus.

Nicole Saylor is the director of the American Folklife Center. Before joining the Library of Congress, she conducted research on Sidney Robertson's folk song collecting in the Upper Midwest.

This event will also be available as a Zoom webinar. We ask that both in-person attendees and those who plan to attend on Zoom register for the event on Zoom at this link.

This event is not ticketed so attendees should enter the Thomas Jefferson Building on the street level at the West Front Carriage Entrance and use the center door marked "For staff and event attendees"

This event is sponsored by The John W. Kluge Center and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress