#thegreatdepression — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #thegreatdepression, aggregated by home.social.
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The Great Depression was in full swing in 1931, with banks around the world falling like dominos. ‘Hoovervilles,’ shantytowns for the homeless and jobless who lost their homes due to foreclosure, sprung up all over the nation, named after the president who took his blood-covered axe to the economy.
With the reality of economic hardship now impossible to deny, blues music became a way for Americans to vent their stress and feel their grief for all they had lost in such a short amount of time.
One of the biggest blues hits of 1931 was the great Skip James performing “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” You can really feel the pain and sorrow in his voice. Despite the brilliance of his musicianship, the Depression kept Skip’s music career from taking off, and his record company ended up dropping him and many other deserving musicians. (He got rediscovered in 1964, solidifying his rightful place in music history as one of the blues’s greats.)