Today Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger, and B. A. Botkin are recognized as vital cultural mediators in the construction of a public memory of American folklore and roots music. During the New Deal, they tried to forge a new role for the federal government in American culture by establishing national folklore institutions that would create an arc between folklore research and the dissemination of that research to a broad audience of culturally minded Americans. They developed what they called a “cultural strategy” that sought to create a place for folklore research within the federal government. But that was only a means to a larger end: the promotion of a new and more expansive vision of American nationality that would be inclusive and democratic rather than exclusive and coercive. It would not only validate folklore as part of the national culture and heritage, but it would also gain respect, understanding, and justice for marginalized and oppressed groups who, in their minds, had created some of the nation's greatest works of art. They could not conceive of folklore research that did not promote a new sense of American identity rooted in intercultural understanding among the citizens of a diverse nation. It was a conception of folklore that rejected chauvinistic and racist myths. Finally, they thought of folklore as art that could create a new consciousness that spoke to the dilemmas of modernity and to the needs of what liberal-leftists called “progressive democracy.”

The key to unlocking the work of Botkin and the Seegers is recognizing that they were artists before they were folklorists: Crawford Seeger composed pieces in the 1920s and early 1930s that are today regarded as major achievements of American modernist music; in his early career Seeger conducted European orchestras and composed classical music; Botkin began his career as a poet. Art, creativity, and imagination, more than scholarship, shaped the contours of their professional identities. As opponents of the genteel tradition and proponents of an American art that would not merely echo Europe, they each tried in their work to address questions about the materials that would constitute the basis for an American modernism. All three expressed concern about the relationship between the artist and tradition, the artist and his or her audience, and the artist and the greater society.