Rich Remsberg - Hard Luck Blues (2010)

The era of the “Great Depression,” roughly the decade of the 1930s, provided an important artistic blueprint for much of the music that would follow through the end of the century. A flagging national economy forced tens of thousands of Americans from their homes and farms and on the road in search of jobs and new beginnings. Music was an important escape for many of America’s dispossessed, and out of the economic turmoil would come important innovations in blues and hillbilly music that would later lead to the development of modern country, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll.

During the depths of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal efforts included the formation of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Headed up by the visionary Roy Stryker, one of the FSA’s purviews was to photographically document the rural American landscape. To this end, the FSA hired such great visual storytellers as Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Marion Post Wolcott, among others, to travel the country between 1935 and 1943, an effort that resulted in some 170,000 photos.

Researcher and photographer Rich Remsberg jumped headfirst into the massive FSA archive with an eye towards putting together a visual representation of the importance of music during the Depression years. Subtitled “roots music photographs from the Great Depression,” Remsberg’s Hard Luck Blues is a wonderful, annotated collection of vintage B&W photos of musicians entertaining on small town streets, open fields, and FSA camps. The photos he’s chosen for the book represent the many faces of music during the 1930s, from blues and jazz to hillbilly and gospel.

These stark photos are presented with informative captions and, when available, the photographer’s own notation. The B&W photos provide a strong portrayal of the brutal economic reality of the era. My main complaint would be the lack of African-American musicians among the roughly 200 photos in Hard Luck Blues. Organized geographically, the book’s sections on the South, Southeast, and Chicago offer the few photos of black musicians, which are sorely underrepresented by the collection. Also, by excluding photos from clubs and elsewhere, Remsberg passed by an opportunity to potentially include more African-American faces.

This oversight notwithstanding, Hard Luck Blues is a fascinating look backwards at the nameless artists that would blues and country music evolve and move past the Depression into a more commercially successful future. (University of Illinois Press, published March 8, 2010)

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