Examines how the American Left, especially the Communist Party, used folk music as a political weapon in the thirties and forties in an effort to raise class consciousness among American workers. Following Lenin's dictum that "art belongs to the people," Marxist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere embraced the view that popular (i.e. commercial) and classical music were tools of the ruling class and therefore unworthy and unrepresentative of the cultural orientations of the proletariat. "Authentic" folk music was pitted against "the power of monopoly-produced pseudo-popular art." Denisoff chronicles the struggle of Aunt Mollie Jackson, the Almanac Singers, the Composers' Collective, the labor colleges from the ill-fated "People's Songs Inc." through the so-called Urban Folk Revival of the 1960s. Important background reading for an understanding of the extreme politicization of folk music and the Left's romance with "the folk" that continued to 1965 when purist, die-hard folkniks like Pete Seeger cursed their darling Bob Dylan for "selling out" and defiling the democratic-humanist cause by going electric.