“Federal One,” the New Deal's cultural project giving employment to artists, musicians, actors, and writers, is often considered one of the Roosevelt administration's most lasting achievements. The program was one of the many initiatives of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the largest of all New Deal agencies. Federal One included specific theater, art, and writers’ projects that helped some of America's most famous creative talents weather the Great Depression. Its dedicated program for the visual arts, for instance, supported painters Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko; its writers’ project included Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck; and the theater project Orson Welles. In contrast, the Federal Music Project (FMP), which was initiated in 1935 and ran until 1943, had fewer luminaries, is less known, and has received little scholarly attention so far. Peter Gough's book thus fills an important void, focussing on the FMP's activities in the American West. Gough argues that the FMP was more important than existing research would have it; in fact, he even asserts that it was “the most successful of all WPA cultural ventures” (2) and that it should step out of the shadow of its better-researched, more controversial, and more widely acknowledged siblings.

According to Gough, the FMP deserves particular credit for acknowledging the “pluralistic reality of American society” (192). Its activities went beyond the standard repertoire of the time and transcended traditional classical forms of musical expression. Instead, it “encouraged participation across racial, ethnic, class, religious, and, to a lesser degree, gender lines” (5). The book's focus on the West underlines this claim, with the author maintaining that music during the New Deal strongly reflected regional specificities. The analysis builds on an impressive base of sources, including state reports, newspaper clippings, and oral histories. While its first chapter explores the general history of the FMP, several of the following chapters focus on specific regions to illustrate the variety of repertoires and practices across the different parts of the American West. The book provides rich descriptions of the various actors involved in the FMP, and of its administrative development, but also of the cultural activities on the ground. Gough's attempts to construct a specific western brand of regionalism is less convincing, and he is sometimes not clear enough in distinguishing the specificities of developments in this part of the United States.

Having said this, he successfully argues that regional and local dynamics mattered a great deal. For instance, he provides careful assessments of the roles of administrators such as Charles Louis Seegers and Sidney Robertson Cowell, who both played important roles in FMP activities in the western region, as well as their relation to FMP administrators at the national level and dynamics on the ground. When describing bands, choirs, and programs, Gough shows that some of FMP's western programs went further in celebrating a pluralistic understanding of American culture than practices in other parts of the country. African Americans, Hawaiians, and Hispanic Americans – as well as their music – acquired a visible space that transcended Eurocentric genres and musicalities. There is, however, hardly any mention of Chinese and Japanese Americans, which raises the question about the limits of this pluralistic approach and of the New Deal's emphasis on inclusion, particularly in the Far West. This, and the situation in other parts of the nation, make it doubtful whether the FMP really deserves the aforementioned accolade as the “most successful of all WPA cultural ventures.” Particularly in the introduction and conclusion, Gough's interpretive framework seems to hark back to the largely sympathetic liberal perspective of authors such as Arthur Schlesinger and William Leuchtenburg, which has long been challenged.

In sum, the book is a useful account of the FMP, and is important for anyone interested in this specific program, in Federal One more broadly, or in (the politics of) music in the depression-ridden West during the 1930s. It also demonstrates that more research is needed in this field.