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`New Masses' Magazine 's 1947 Review Of `Peoples Songs' Magazine Revisited

 

In his review of the late 1940s U.S. protest folk music magazine, People's Songs, that was published in the April 29, 1947 issue of New Masses magazine, Sidney Finkelstein wrote the following about the late 1940s U.S. pop music scene and the aims of People's Songs magazine:

"Tin-Pan Alley has sunk to its lowest depths. Not even the occasional inspirations of fresh melody...can be found now. Instead, hack musicians are desperately stealing from...mountain tunes and blues, rearranging and copying their own output of the Twenties and Thirties. The very censorship of words and standardization of tune which the song-publishing industry has forced upon the art has ended up drying up the source out of which even its own fresh material came.

"People's Songs aims at giving popular music back to the people. It does this by bringing to light folk songs of quality, and the fine, meaningful poetry that accompanied them; by encouraging new stanzas of contemporary significance, and new variations on the tunes.

"It aims at making popular music mean something to people, and most important, at restoring their creative participation in the making of music...It should be supported by all who are interested in combatting the slow death that has spread throughout popular music..."