With its 2001 Ruth Crawford Seeger Centennial Festival, which inspired this book, the Institute for Studies in American Music (ISAM) at Brooklyn College once again galvanized exploration of a crucial area of American music. In the case of Crawford Seeger, the career of a strikingly original composer provided a focus for discussion about a nexus of issues: gender and compositional style, aesthetics and politics, modernism and populism, and the legacy of one of the most prominent American families in folk music performance and preservation. At the same time, ISAM marked its own thirty-year anniversary. The tale of how Crawford Seeger's reputation rose during the late twentieth century intertwines intriguingly with that of ISAM's pioneering work in bringing scholarship about American music into the academic mainstream.

During her heyday as a composer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Crawford Seeger received both performances and critical attention, mostly within the highly specialized modernist community. She stood out as being especially gifted, and her flair for innovation was valued in a climate that prized newness and experimentation. She was also notable as one of the few females on the American compositional scene. Remarkably, an entire essay about her music appeared in Henry Cowell's historic American Composers on American Music of 1933, authored by her mentor and husband Charles Seeger, who rigorously stacked her music against that of male colleagues. “Especially in respect to rhythm,” Seeger wrote, “we may note a variety of invention scarcely to be seen in the work of any other composer… . One can find only a few men among American composers who are as uncompromisingly and successfully radical.”

A period of relative eclipse followed. After Crawford's marriage in 1932, she gave birth to four children, at the same time as her attention and Seeger's turned from the avant-garde to folk music. Modernist impulses were under siege during the Depression among American artists in general. By the time of her premature death in 1953, Crawford Seeger's compositions had faded from view, waiting to be discovered gradually. This process began in 1960, as a confluence of forces brought attention to her work, including postwar composers seeking an ancestry for their own second wave of modernist experiments, scholars fascinated with the American ultramoderns, and feminist historians in search of lost female voices.