Close your eyes and think of the Great Depression.
You might see Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” or crowds of unemployed men, but what do you hear?
Most people would say Barbecue Bob’s “We Sure Got Hard Times” or Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”
James Ralph, executive director of the John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts, said most people have the wrong impression.
“When you think about the Great Depression, you think of Yip Harburg’s ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime,’ but why don’t you think of Yip Harburg’s ‘Over the Rainbow?,’” he said.
“This period was a really tough time. The people were not a bunch of weenies bemoaning the Depression; they stood up to it.”
That idea developed into the theme of this year’s Oregon Festival of American Music: “Over the Rainbow.”
The 17th annual festival will feature music from a time when Americans didn’t let anything get them down.
The festival will kick off with a theater production that Ralph said epitomizes the spirit of the time: “The Wizard of Oz.”
“It’s a good morality tale about how you find something within yourself and how to deal with life’s problems,” he said.
“You already have a brain, you already have a heart.”
The festival will also present “Brigadoon,” a 1940s musical set in the Scottish Highlands.
Ralph said “Brigadoon” is a representation of a genre that many people say is silly, fantastic or schmaltzy, but the Shedd Institute doesn’t see it that way.
“It seems like people think the more ugly it is, the more real it is. Post-Arthur Miller, reality TV- it’s all emotional voyeurism and that’s not what this earlier period was like,” Ralph said.
Several period movies, including, “To Have and Have Not,” “Casablanca,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Shall We Dance,” “Stage Door Canteen,” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” will be part of the festival.
The meat and potatoes of the Oregon Festival of American Music, however, is the music.
Ralph said very few people listened to artists like Woody Guthrie during the late 1920s and the 1930s. He said folk music was not part of the center culture.
The festival’s concert series will instead showcase the music of such greats as the Andrews Sisters, Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Jelly Roll Morton, Dorothy Fields and Hoagy Carmichael.
The highlights include a re-creation of New York’s famous Cotton Club, a session dedicated to Fats Waller called Unsaturated Fats and a USO-styled finale concert.
The festival centers around exploring the Great American Songbook, and Ralph said it is an exploration that’s definitely worth your time.
“Most people are listening to the songbook and don’t even know it. Most films you watch are filled with the songbook, but you won’t know who wrote them. That’s what we’re dedicated to doing,” he said.
Ralph said he started the organization, alongside his wife, because they are teachers.
“With everything we do at the Shedd, our goal is to cultivate a broad aesthetic. When we listen to people work out the problem of truth and beauty, it makes us more humane,” he said.
Ralph and the Shedd Institute hope that after experiencing the Oregon Festival of American Music, next time you think about the Great Depression, you’ll hear a different kind of music.
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