ABSTRACT

The bardic tradition was resurrected in the name of social urgency in twentieth-century America. Joe Hill and the Wobblies found that by rewriting commentary to the tune of Salvation Army hymns they could capture the lives and issues of working people as a form of social protest. Where a mainstream culture provided the glamorized and idealized lives of the movie-star-perfect people living in dramatic and exotic situations, the populist artist in the folk traditions sought out a way to celebrate the ordinary, the common person, and their daily battles to survive and overcome. In literature, new voices of women and people of color were strengthened in this greatly expanded notion of citizen-centered authorship and authority. In the visual arts, community muralism, youth arts, media interventions, and countless other riffs on the "Art for the People" idea came into being.