Philip Guston, Lead Belly, and “Woke” Art

Thinking About Two WPA Artists Today

While doing research for an eventual post on “wokeness,” I learned something interesting: It turns out one of the earliest documented uses of the word “woke,” in the modern sense of being socially or politically aware, comes from a Lead Belly recording of his song about the Scottsboro Boys. Speaking to folklorist Alan Lomax at the end of the recording, …