In this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE, narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains that there would have been on popular American folk music - no Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan - without FDR's Hidden Music Unit and its radical ambition to reinvent American communities in the depths of the 1930s.
Sheryl Kaskowitz is a writer, editor, and audio storyteller based in Berkeley, California. Her new book, A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time, comes out in April 2024 from Pegasus Books. Since earning her PhD from Harvard, Sheryl has written extensively about music in American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the role that music can play in civic life. Her first book, God Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song, was published in 2013 to positive reviews (including pieces in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor) and won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Book Award for music writing. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Slate, Humanities, and The Avid Listener. She appeared in the BBC audio documentary “Government Song Woman” and has been interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” WNYC’s “The Takeaway,” the Washington Post’s “Can He Do That?” podcast, the ABC News podcast “Start Here,” and the public radio news show “The Texas Standard.” Sheryl has received the Anne Firor Scott Mid-Career Fellowship from the Southern Association for Women Historians (2022), a Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2018), a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress (2016), and research grants and awards from the American Musicological Society, Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Music Library Association, and Society for American Music.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.
Episode 2024: Sheryl Kaskowitz on how FDR and his New Deal team saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time