Although this work for small orchestra is only three minutes long, it is highly important in its composer's career because it marks a radical break with her prior work. Ruth Crawford (1901 - 1953) was a powerful avant-garde composer whose music featured thickly polyphonic dissonant textures and very little melody or tonality to speak of. Such works as her String Quartet of 1931 bear witness that she was, as she proclaimed herself: a "warrior" of the avant-garde.

Marriage to Charles Seeger in 1931 led both of them, already drawn towards leftist ideas, into the Communist Party and its proletarian music movement. Soon thereafter Crawford Seeger altered her artistic aim to that of making music that was "a weapon in the class struggle." In 1935, the international Communist movement, taking its cue from Moscow, rejected avant-gardism in favor of "the people's music," and Crawford Seeger admitted that her effort to create "Marxist modernism" was doomed to failure. In the same year, she and Charles moved (with Charles' son Pete Seeger) to Washington, D.C. to work for the WPA in a project to catalog a vast collection of recordings of American folk music.

She transcribed literally thousands of field recordings into written notation by ear as she, Charles, and Pete became leaders, along with Alan and John Lomax, in the what would become known as the folk music revival. Her transcriptions were the basis of the Lomaxes' book Our Singing Country, and of her own American Folk Songs for Children and Animal Folk Songs for Children.

During this period of over 15 years, she gave up her original composition, except for this work written for a broadcast of Alan Lomax's radio program Wellsprings of America, a broadcast that also featured a folk song setting by her husband.

Rissolty Rossolty is tonal, folksy, clearly orchestrated, and built on conventional triadic harmonies, all elements that were missing from her prior work. It is based on two comic folk songs and a fiddle tune. The work starts in a mood that sounds like a superior example of the many American orchestral compositions of the period that are folk song orchestrations. But the work continues to get more active and the texture more complex. Soon all three folk songs are going at once, irrespective of their inherent harmonic and rhythmic clashes, while fragments of all of them fall off into other voices as accompaniment patterns, making the overall sound that much wilder. Ultimately, a web of warring tunes worthy of Charles Ives is in motion. The music suddenly all but ceases, and the opening measures of the first folk tune reappear as if the music is going to go through it all again, but then rapidly fades away. This ending reflects the composer's observation that many folk songs have a feeling that they "keep on going" and don't end conclusively.

The work seems not to have been heard again, after the Lomax program, for over 60 years, when it was recorded by British conductor Oliver Knussen on a Deutsche Grammophon recording released in 1997.

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