Influence On The Arts
The crisis was documented by photographers, musicians, and authors. Many were hired by various U.S. federal agencies during the Great Depression. The Farm Security Administration hired numerous photographers to document the crisis. This helped the careers of many notable artists, including Dorothea Lange. She captured iconic images of the storms and migrant families, the most famous of which was a photograph entitled Migrant Mother, which depicted a gaunt-looking woman, Florence Owens Thompson, holding her three children. This picture captured the horrors of the Dust Bowl and caused more people to be aware of the crisis of the country.
The work of independent artists, such as American novelist John Steinbeck's novels Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the music of folk singer Woody Guthrie, was also influenced by the crises of the Dust Bowl and the Depression.
Migrants leaving the Plains states took their music with them. Oklahoma migrants, in particular, were descended from rural Southerners and transplanted country music to California. Today, the "Bakersfield Sound" describes this blend, which developed after the migrants brought country music to the city. Their new music inspired a proliferation of country dance halls as far south as Los Angeles.
Read more about this topic: Dust Bowl
Famous quotes containing the words influence on the, influence on, influence and/or arts:
“The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Important as fathers are, their influence on children shouldn’t be exaggerated just because they were ignored so long. There is no evidence that there is something especially good about fathers as caretakers. There are no areas where it can be said that fathers must do certain things in order to achieve certain outcomes in children. The same goes for mothers.”
—Michael Lamb (late–20th century)
“The example of America must be the example, not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because it is the healing and elevating influence of the world, and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What ails it, intrinsically, is a dearth of intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion. Running through it, and characterizing the work of almost every man and woman producing it, there is an unescapable suggestion of the old Puritan suspicion of the fine arts as such—of the doctrine that they offer fit asylum for good citizens only when some ulterior and superior purpose is carried into them.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)