The initial ‘Folk Boom’ began in the mid 1940’s when interest in music soured unprecedented heights. With the introduction of mass media technologies such as the radio, American culture exploded beyond what past generations could foresee. Despite the economic instability the Great Depression brought upon the average individual, nearly all American families owned a radio and, in effect, the radio became the undisputed center of family entertainment. Radio provided the common society with news, radio-plays, and music new to the decade. Even as television boomed, radio stayed relevant. With this thriving enterprise came a new medium for music to flourish and, subsequently, a new obsession with folk music.
The infatuation with folk music in American society began in the early 1900’s, when the Industrial Workers of the World used folk songs during strikes, picket lines, and rallies to spread their message of ‘one big union’. By the 1930’s, communists and socialists alike would use folk music in the 1930’s to address the Great Depression. In the aftermath of World War Two, the world
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12-year-old Jamila Jones, activist and contributor to the historic song, remembers a time when the Highlander Folk School was raided by the police, who shut off all the lights in the building. In the dark silence, Jones decided to begin singing “We Shall Overcome,” and everyone in the building joined her. Jones recalls that, as the activists got louder and louder, the policemen got scared. She explains that, in the face of the oppressors with their billy clubs and power, “a policeman asked me, with a shake, if I would not sing so loud. And that was when I really understood the power of our music”. “We Shall Overcome”, one song alone, was enough to allow fear in the eyes of the armed. Music, though it’s tactics do not echo of war, stood, at the time, more powerful than billy clubs and law