Upland Cotton

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The first commercially successful [1] short-staple cotton crop was raised in 1799 by Wade Hampton. [2] He was typical of the Revolutionary War generation that discovered the value of land speculation: governments were paying veterans with land that often was purchased by speculators, and public lands were sold off to pay debts. The problem was much of South Carolina’s land was incapable of producing a commercial crop.

From the earliest years Hampton’s family had been merchants. His immigrant ancestor had arrived at Jamestown in 1620 to look after the interests of an uncle who was an investor in the Virginia Company. William acquired tidewater land and purchased wool from his neighbors for export to his brother in London. [3]

Wade’s father moved from place to place through North Carolina making a living trading with Indians. Anthony finally moved to western South Carolina where he was killed by Cherokee in 1766. [4] Wade also became a frontier trader, then led a regiment against the British in 1781.

By the end of the war, he owned land in the area where the state capital would be moved. [5] He bought more land there in 1788, [6] and became involved in speculation in Georgia land in 1795. [7]

Hampton’s first crop was not accidental. Prior to the War of 1812, farmers were filling in vacant piedmont land to grow cotton that then was selling at inflated prices. [8] He sent a spy into Eli Whitney’s shop to learn how to make a gin, then built one that used water power. [9] After buying slaves, he "carried his great gang from the seaboard." [10] He obtained the green-seed cotton variety [11] rather than the black-seeded species grown in the Sea Islands. At the time Jacob Lewis thought he got his seed from Florida. [12]

Walter Edgar said, after Hampton’s success, it was grown in Edgefield in 1802 and in Spartanburg in 1804. [13] William Capers’ father sold his land on the Wacamaw in 1805 to grow cotton on the inland coastal plain of Sumter County. [14] By 1808, cotton was the primary crop in two-thirds of South Carolina. [15]

The main problem with the new crop was that it exhausted soils that hadn’t been submerged during the Pleistocene. The Ultisol soils were created solely by "continuous weathering of minerals in a humid, temperate climate without new soil formation via glaciation." Wikipedia noted, "major nutrients, such as calcium and potassium, are typically deficient." The red color in the clays came from iron. [16]

When the thin layer of top soil disappeared, it left an acidic substrata that reduced yields. George Langdale and William Schrader noted that, on Ultisols, "crop yield reductions appear more permanent and difficult to restore." [17] Simple fertilization doesn’t work with Ultisols, and they don’t recover when left fallow. Farmers had no choice but to leave. In 1835, Joseph Holt Ingraham described the destruction around Natchez, the first area in Mississippi to grow cotton.

"The rich loam which forms the upland soil of this state is of a very slight depth–and after a few years is worn away by constant culture and the action of the winds and rain. The fields are then ‘thrown out’ as useless. Every plough-furrow becomes the bed of a rivulet after heavy rains— these uniting are increased into torrents, before which the impalpable soil dissolves like ice under a summer’s sun. By degrees, acre after acre, of what was a few years previous beautifully undulating ground, waving with the dark green, snow-crested cotton, presents a wild scene of frightful precipices, and yawning chasms, which are increased in depth and destructively enlarged after every rain. There are many thousand acres within twenty miles of the city of Natchez, being the earliest cultivated portions of the country, which are now lying in this condition, presenting an appearance of wild desolation, and not unfrequently, of sublimity." [18]

From Georgia, men moved west following the subtropical climate and band of soils that supported cotton. As suggested in the post for 23 January 2019, they followed the black belt of soil across Alabama. After the Civil War, they moved into the Mississippi Delta and Texas. [19]

Graphics
1. Magnus Manske. "Map of the United States showing what percentage of the soil in a given area is classified as an ultisol-type soil." Wikimedia Commons. 21 February 2011.

2. Distribution of cotton. In Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby. The New International Encyclopaedia. New York : Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902. 5:478.

End Notes
1. Many articles list earlier dates for the first cotton crop, but they were not on a commercial scale.

2. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 271.
3. Virginia Sanders-Mylius. "Hampton Family." Our Southern Cousins website. 2010.

4. Virginia Sanders-Mylius. "Family of Anthony Hampton." Our Southern Cousins website. 2010.

5. Thomas Adkins. "Wade Hampton." Adkins Family Genealogy, History and Heritage website.

6. Jeffrey W. Dennis and Spencer C. Tucker. "Hampton, Wade (1752–1835). 1:144–145 in U.S. Leadership in Wartime. Edited by Spencer Tucker. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009.

7. Sanders-Mylius, Anthony Hampton.

8. Statistics developed by Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta were quoted in the post for 26 May 2019.

9. Roger G. Kennedy. Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. No page numbers in online version.

10. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. American Negro Slavery. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929 edition. 160.

11. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode. "‘Wait a Cotton Pickin’ Minute!’ A New View of Slave Productivity." University of California, Davis, website. April 2007. 16.

12. Kennedy. Lewis was a privateer from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who was involved with Aaron Burr.

13. Edgar. 271.

14. William Capers. "Recollections of Myself." Reprinted by William M. Wrightman. Life of William Capers, D. D. Nashville: Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South, 1902. 45.

15. Edgar. 270.
16. Wikipedia. "Ultisol."

17. G. W. Langdale and W. D. Schrader. "Soil Erosion Effects on Soil Productivity of Cultivated Cropland. Chapter 4 in Determinants of Soil Loss Tolerance. Madison: American Society of Agronomy, 1982. Mollisols are found on the American prairies.

18. Joseph Holt Ingraham. The South-West By a Yankee. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835. Chapter 32; no page numbers in archived on-line version.

19. Cotton in Mississippi was discussed in the post for 30 January 2019.

Folk Revival - Communist Influences in the United States

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist influence on the commercial folk revival in the United States was largely a figment of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ (FBI) imagination. [1] Scholars like Richard Reuss [2] and Serge Denisoff [3] dedicated much of their graduate school lives to trying to document the links, and couldn’t.

None of the important performers were party organizers bent on the overthrow of the government. Few even argued party philosophy. Most were bothered by disparities of income and the condition of the working and poor classes, or by the rise of fascism in Europe. They drifted into the party’s orbit when those interests coincided, and left when they diverged. [4]

The FBI probably thought anyone who questioned the status quo was more dangerous than a true revolutionary. It seemed particularly concerned with those who challenged social hierarchies in the South, and hounded those it could.

The Soviet model was authoritarian with individuals taking direction from their leaders, and changing their views as necessary. The early folk-song revival movement was largely the uncoordinated actions of individuals. It resembled Brownian motion rather than iron filings tracking a magnet.

The artists who inspired the Composer’s Collective, mentioned in the posts for 4 August 2019 and 11 August 2019, were Marxists before they were Communists. [5] Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party of America sponsored the Southern Farmer’s Tenant Union (SFTU). [6] It was organized in 1934 as a direct response to the displacement of farm workers by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act that paid farmers to keep their land fallow. Southern landowners evicted their tenants and sharecroppers, and appropriated the money intended to compensate them. [7]

Josef Stalin changed direction in August 1935 at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, and declared the end of parallel unions. In their place, he proposed joining other liberal groups in a Popular Front against fascism, especially in Spain. [8] Many discovered this was a subterfuge: the party’s goal still was to establish hegemony by destroying its rivals. [9]

The party targeted the SFTU. Its president recognized the danger, [10] but men like Claude Williams believed in the possibilities of the Poplar Front. [11] The union was effectively destroyed when Williams failed to take control in 1938. [12] He had gained publicity for the cause when he and a white woman were attacked by white vigilantes the previous year. Sis Cunningham remembered it "provided a perfect opening for all sorts of racketeering outfits to jump in and raise money for poor sharecroppers. (The sharecroppers, of course, never saw the first dime.)" [13]

The Highlander Folk School, also mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019, had been established in 1932 with support from Reinhold Niebuhr. [14] The Party left it alone, because it already had taken over another school that trained labor organizers in Mena, Arkansas. Williams became head of Commonwealth College in 1937. [15] Party intrigues became so intense he left for Detroit in 1940 to support Presbyterian efforts to reach Southern Blacks and whites streaming into the area to work in factories. [16]

Lee Hays, mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019, [17] had followed Zilphia Horton to the Highlander Folk School in 1935, then returned to Arkansas when Williams took over Cumberland College. Hays went north to Philadelphia in 1940 where he stayed with Walter Lowenfels, [18] and began submitting articles to The New Republic. [19]

Extended droughts in western Oklahoma precipitated another agricultural crisis in 1935. Farmers lost their land, and began moving to California. [20] Their cause gained more reputable publicity than the African-American one when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939. [21] John Ford’s film followed the next year. [22]

In March 1940, Will Greer staged a benefit for Okies in New York City. The headline performers included Burl Ives, Josh White, and Richard Dyer-Bennett. It was Pete Seeger’s first concert. He was scheduled after the stars, when many in the audience already had left. He was followed by a still unknown singer Greer knew in California, Woody Guthrie. [23]

Alan Lomax brought Guthrie and Seeger together to compile a book of labor songs. When Lomax found no publisher, [24] Guthrie decided to return to Oklahoma and asked Seeger to accompany him. [25]

While Seeger and Guthrie were away, Hays moved to New York to room with Millard Lampell. [26] Lampbell had just graduated from West Virginia University, where he’d played football for a year and visited the mining hometown of his roommate. He had had a couple articles published by The New Republic, and had written to Hays about one his in the same periodical. [27]

Since Hays was considering publishing a collection of labor songs, [28] Pete Hawes introduced Seeger to them in November. [29] Seeger remembered:

"He liked the sound of my banjo accompanying him, and I really admired his way with an audience. I was relatively shy and inexperienced in many, many ways. So we took bookings together." [30]

Others began dropping by and a communal house evolved for mostly college-aged individuals interested in singing political songs. By February 1941 they were calling themselves the Almanac Singers. [31] Among those who came and left were Lomax’s younger sister Bess, [32] and Sis Cunningham and her husband. They had had to leave Oklahoma for the same reason Molly Jackson had had to leave Kentucky: labor organizers were threatened with physical violence. [33]

In the summer, Seeger, Hays, Hawes, and Lampell planned a tour for the umbrella union group, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Just before they started, Hitler invaded Russian in June 1941, and Hawes developed pneumonia. Guthrie happened to return, [34] and replaced him in the group. [35]

Events continued to overtake the group. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Seeger was drafted, [36] and became a suspicious character after he married a Japanese-American. [37] Some family friends pulled strings, [38] and he spent the rest of the war at a hospital recovery site in the Mariana Islands. [39]

Hays was rejected by the military because he had tuberculosis. He spent the war working for a YMCA group assisting prisoners of war. [40] Guthrie avoided active service by joining the Merchant Marine. [41]

Lomax spent much of the war with the Office for War Information, [42] before being drafted in 1944. [43] He spent some time with Armed Forces Radio, [44] before being transferred to the entertainment division. [45]

Lampell had left the Almanac Singers when their CIO tour reached California. [46] The son of Jewish immigrants in Patterson, New Jersey, was the only one to enlist in 1943, and the only one to see combat as a machine gunner in the Army Air Corps. [47]

After the war, Seeger and others put together a cooperative clearing house to book jobs for politically liberal musicians. [48] Lomax helped with the promotion. [49] Then, Seeger removed Hays from the board in 1946, and replaced him, with one of the men he met in the army. [50] Irwin Silber showed up in 1947. [51] Just as Walter Reuther was expelling Communists from the United Auto Workers union and the CIO, [52] a committed party man [53] took over its publication company. [54]

The costs for publishing the People’s Songs Bulletin were greater than its revenues, and the publication fell into debt. [55] Seeger was chagrined to discover unions preferred the highly polished Dyer-Bennett to his folk-inflected style. [56]

Then to generate some income in 1948, Lomax helped them get hired by Henry Wallace’s campaign for president, [57] even though both the UAW and the CIO supported his opponent, Harry Truman. [58] Whatever union audience they still had disappeared.

One last attempt was made to raise money for People’s Songs with a Thanksgiving concert. Hays was working with Fred Hellerman, who he’d met in 1946, [59] to put together some music to accompany folk dancing. [60] They were joined by Seeger and a woman Hellerman knew from Wo-Chi-Ca in 1944. [61]

All the cultural and political streams that fed the commercial folk-music revival in the United States came together. Ronnie Gilbert understood how to prepare and rehearse a program from Wo-Chi-Ca. [62] Sometime between 1935 and 1937, when Hays was at Highlander, he’d been trained by the New Theater League. [63] Hellerman had worked in Yiddish-language theaters when he was young. [64]

More important, three had traditions of singing harmony, the two in camps, and Hays in his father’s Methodist meetings in Arkansas. [65] They knew how to use timbraic harmony and improvise parallel seconds. Seeger had no such background: he’d had some instruction at Old Avon Farms, but the prep school sang in unison in chapels. [66] He only knew how to sing a counter-melody.

The Weavers’ initial repertoire was general, rather than political. By then, Seeger no doubt was influenced by his stepmother. Her American Folks Songs for Children had just been published by Doubleday. [67] Instead of trying to copy Lomax’s folk-music styles to reach labor groups, they used American folk songs to reach whatever audience would listen. [68]

The group was surprised by its reception. Seeger’s wife, the former Toshi Ohta, got The Weavers an audition at the Village Vanguard. [70] They began during December 1949, [71] when the owner probably had few expectations for large crowds. Then, Lomax took Carl Sandburg to a show. The poet’s comments to the press brought more people, [72] including a representative from Decca Records that Lomax had worked with in the past. [73]

End Notes
1. Harvey Matusow identified Communists, including members of The Weavers, to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. He later admitted he had fabricated most of the evidence and was convicted of perjury. [74]

2. Richard A. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957. With JoAnne C. Reuss. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000.

3. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
4. Reuss. Chapter 10, "The Folk Music Legacy of the American Communist Movement."

5. Bertold Brecht didn’t become interested in Marxism, until 1925, after he had been a playwright for years. [75] His collaborator, Hanns Eisler, was raised in Vienna where his brother and sister were both members of the German Communist Party. [76]

6. Marci Bynum Robertson. "Harry Leland Mitchell (1906–1989)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 18 March 2014. The SFTU was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019. Norman Thomas was originally a Presbyterian minister. [77]

7. Wikipedia. "Agricultural Adjustment Act."
8. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."

9. George Orwell described this behavior in Homage to Catalonia. His memoir of the Spanish Civil War was published in England in 1943 by Penguin.

10. The union head was Harry Leland Mitchell.

11. Williams began as conventional Cumberland Presbyterian minister but was radicalized by reading Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Modern Use of the Bible [78] in 1927. [79] He then enrolled in Vanderbilt’s School of Religion where he was exposed to the ideas of Reinhold Neibuhr. [80] When he was in Fort Smith in 1935 he tried to organized the unemployed. He was beaten and jailed, then tried for heresy by the church. It was while he was in jail, he became disillusioned with gradual methods, and became more committed to the ideas of the Communist Party. [81]

12. Joshua C. Youngblood. "Realistic Religion and Radical Prophets: The STFU, the Social Gospel, and the American Left in the 1930s." Masters thesis. The Florida State University, Spring 2004.

13. Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen. Red Dust and Broadsides. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. 158.

14. Anthony P. Dunbar. Against the Grain. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982. 43.

15. Wikipedia. "Commonwealth College (Arkansas)."
16. Youngblood. 124.
17. Hays also was mentioned in post for 3 October 2017.

18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 63. Lowenfels worked for the Party’s Daily Worker in Philadelphia. [82]

19. Willens. 65.

20. Wikipedia. "Dust Bowl". The first of three droughts occurred in 1934. Cunningham and Guthrie were from areas outside the drought’s epicenter.

21. John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: The Viking Press, 14 April 1939.
22. The Grapes of Wrath. 20th Century Fox. 24 January 1940.

23. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 67. Greer had a role in the Broadway production of Tobacco Road, [83] and thought he could find job for Guthrie. [84] An earlier concert appearance by Guthrie was mentioned in the post for 11 August 2019.

24. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 161–162. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People finally was published in 1967 by Oak Publications.

25. Dunaway. 69.
26. Willens. 65.

27. Dennis Gildea. "Millard Limpall: From Football to Blacklist." 29–46 in Defending the American Way of Life. Edited by Toby C. Rider and Kevin B. Witherspoon. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018. 33–34.

28. Dunaway. 80.
29. Dunaway, 80, and Willens, 66.
30. Willens. 66.
31. Dunaway. 82.
32. Dunaway. 87. She was a student at Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia.
33. Wikipedia. "Sis Cunningham." Molly Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
34. Willens. 69.
35. Dunaway. 94.
36. Dunaway. 118.
37. Dunaway. 121–122.
38. Dunaway. 122.
39. Dunaway. 124.
40. Willens. 76. The organization was War Prisoners Aid.
41. Wikipedia. "Woody Guthrie."
42. Szwed. 196. He left the Library of Congress for OWI in October 1942.
43. Szwed. 205–206.
44. Szwed. 209.
45. Szwed. 211. The entertainment group was Special Services Training.
46. Dunaway, 95; and Willens, 70.
47. Gildea. 37.

48. Dunaway, 95; Reuss, 186; and Willens, 70. Richard Reuss provided the most detailed, and therefore the clearest, chronology of events in the 1940s. The booking agency was People’s Artists.

49. Reuss. 187. Alan Lomax organized concerts for them [85] and created an honorary group of sponsors. [86]

50. Willens. 89–90.
51. Dunaway, 139, and Reuss, 191.
52. Wikipedia. "Walter Reuther."
53. Reuss. 206.

54. The publication arm was People’s Songs. Silber replaced the People’s Songs Bulletin with Sing Out! in May 1950. [87]

55. Dunaway, 149; and Reuss, 204–205.
56. Dunaway, 163; and Reuss, 235.
57. Reuss, 198–202; and Szwed, 235–236.
58. Wikipedia. "1948 United States Presidential Election."

59. Willens. 97. Hays and Hellerman met in 1946. After Seeger isolated Hays, "Lee had suggested they might work up some material and take bookings together."

60. Dunaway, 160; and Willens, 106.

61. William Ruhlmann. "Fred Hellerman." All Music website. The International Workers Order children’s summer camp was discussed in the post for 14 July 2019.

62. June Levine and Gene Gordon made clear the camp had both a strong performance arts programs and group singing traditions like those found in other children’s camps. [88]

63. Willens. 38. The New Theater League was a Popular Front organization that was established in 1935. Chris Vials said it "moved away from the agitprop guerilla theater of the early 1930s and toward professional, polished work." [89] The agitprop was inspired by Brecht.

64. Caleb Hellerman. Quoted by Associated Press. "Fred Hellerman, Member of Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89." 3 September 2016. Caleb was Fred’s son. I have not seen anyone follow up on this information on the internet. His later work as a record producer for people like Joan Baez suggests he had a talent, even then, for putting together a sound that appealed to an audience.

65. Wikipedia. "Lee Hays." Hays’ father was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.
66. Dunaway. 42.

67. Ruth Crawford Seeger. American Folk Songs for Children. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1948.

68. Seeger later told Dunaway: "As the labor movement kicked out the radicals, I settled for ‘Let’s get American singing’; maybe the basic democratic philosophy in these songs will filter out subliminally to the American people." [90]

69. Dunaway. 163–164.
70. Dunaway. 165.
71. Willens. 116.

72. Dunaway, 165; Szwed, 238; and Willens, 122. The relationships between Sandburg, Lomax, and Ruth Seeger were discussed in the post for 11 August 2019.

73. Willens, 124; and Szwed, 128–129. The Decca representative, Gordon Jenkins, was born in suburban Saint Louis. He "responded to the rural flavor of Lee’s stories almost as much as he did to the Weavers’ music." [91]

74. John Simkin. "Harvey Matusow." Spartacus Educational website. September 1997. Last updated August 2014.

75. Wikipedia. "Bertolt Brecht."
76. Wikipedia. "Hanns Eisler."
77. Wikipedia. "Norman Thomas."

78. Harry Emerson Fosdick. Modern Use of the Bible. London: Student Christian Movement. 1926.

79. Wikipedia. "Claude C. Williams."
80. Youngblood. 19.
81. Youngblood. 44.
82. Wikipedia. "Walter Lowenfels."
83. Szwed. 160 .
84. Szwed. 157.
85. Szwed. 225–226.
86. Szwed. 235.
87. Reuss. 229.

88. June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002.

89. Chris Vials. Realism for the Masses. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 51.
90. Dunaway. 175.
91. Willens. 124.

Seegers and Lomaxes

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The folk music revival in the United States provided opportunities for generations of Seegers and Lomaxes. Charles Louis Seeger went to México soon after Porfirio Díaz opened the country to foreign investors. [1] He began as a journalist, then became a partner in an import-export business that sold machinery to sugar plantations. [2]

Charles Louis was not happy when his sons did not enter business. [3] To him the arts were the avocations of men successful in other areas. [4] The older boy, Charles, studied music at Harvard, then went to Germany to pursue composition and conducting. [5] The younger, Alan, majored in English at Harvard, lived in Greenwich Village, and migrated to Paris in 1912. [6]

Charles returned home unemployed, hindered, he said, by a hearing impediment that prevented him from detecting high pitches. He was hired by the University of California in Berkeley where he began focusing on music history. [7] His most important student was the modernist composer, [8] Henry Cowell. [9]

World War I ended his second career. Alan had joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914, and been killed in 1916. [10] His collection of war poetry was being reissued in 1919, [11] as Charles was announcing he was a pacifist. He took his pregnant wife and two sons back to his father’s home in New York. [12]

John Lomax, as was mentioned in the post for 27 January 2019, lost his first career when he was removed from the University of Texas in 1917 by James Ferguson as part of the governor’s purge of political rivals. [13] Some friends found him a position selling bonds in Chicago. While there, he became friends with Carl Sandburg, mentioned in the post for 5 May 2019. [14] After the governor was impeached, Lomax returned to the university to work with alumni relations. [15]

Charles’ wife, Constance Edson, was a concert violinist who found self-inflicted penury hard to accept. [16] She finally found employment for the two of them in 1921 at the Institute of Musical Art through Walter Damrosh. The school’s director was a close family friend. [17]

The marriage was rocky, and the boys were sent to boarding schools. The youngest, Pete, was four the first time he was dispatched. [18]

In 1925, John left the University of Texas, this time over the politics of football, and again sold bonds, this time in Texas. [19]

While Charles was teaching music history in a conservatory, Cowell was touring as the leading modern composer in the United States. [20] He met Ruth Crawford when he was in Chicago. [21] She also was introduced to Sandburg, who included the modernist composer in his family’s music evenings and had her transcribe some songs for The American Songbag. [22]

In 1927, Constance told Charles she had a private bank account, and he walked out with the children. [23] The memories Pete chose to share with his biographer are fragmentary. He recalled refusing his mother’s request to take music lessons, but did remember someone gave him a ukulele that he played constantly. He also said his mother gave him a collection of sea chanteys that he used with the uke [24] at the Spring Hill boarding school [25] in Litchfield, Connecticut. [26]

Cowell later urged Charles to take Ruth as a student. [27] After a year she went to Europe, [28] but returned when her fellowship wasn’t renewed. [29] Charles and Ruth became lovers, and Constance finally accepted a divorce. [30] The Institute had merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, but the chairman of the board for the two schools refused to let Charles teach his new theories of musicology. [31] Damrosch cut his hours, then terminated his contract. [32]

John lost his bank job in the early 1930s. [33] Steady employment didn’t exist in the Depression, so he converted his salesman’s skills from bonds to promoting himself. He suggested his publisher sponsor a new collection of American Ballads and Folk Songs. [34]

His oldest son, John Junior, also lost a banking job, but found employment with Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He contacted the Library of Congress to get support for his father’s project. It was an honorary position that paid a token dollar a year, but provided John with the status needed to get cooperation from local officials. [35]

Charles began teaching at the New School for Social Research. Cowell had urged Charles to join the Communist Party’s Pierre Degeyter Club in 1931. [36] A group of modernist composers within the group formed the Composer’s Collective of New York in 1932. [37] Pete’s first contact with the party occurred that year when Charles and Ruth took him to a Collective meeting featuring Aaron Copeland. [38]

During the summer of 1933, Sandburg was advising John Lomax on how to get bookings on the lecture circuit. In return, John’s son, Alan, was helping Sandburg find work in the South. [39] Before American Ballads and Folk Songs was published in 1934, Macmillan asked Charles and Cowell to review it. Charles remembered they found the transcriptions "god-awful," but were enthusiastic about the lyrics. [40]

Charles’ fourth career didn’t last long. New School should have been ideal: it was founded by men like himself who had lost their academic appointments for opposing the entry of the United States into World War I. [41] All he intimated in 1935 was "American universities do not yet recognize musicology as a respectable subject." [42]

A friend from the New School had gone to work as a painter for Franklin Roosevelt’s Work’s Progress Administration (WPA). He helped Charles get hired by the Resettlement Administration’s culture section in 1936. [43] The same year, John began working for the Federal Writers’ Project within the WPA. [44]

Soon after, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, [45] and Charles began moving from job to job in the bureaucracy. [46] In 1937, he became the deputy music director of the Federal Music Project. [47] The same year, John asked the vice-president, a politician from Texas, to help his son, Alan, get a job with the Library of Congress. [48]

Sometime in this period, John and his children, Alan and Bess, began work on a second volume of American Ballads. To avoid the criticisms leveled against the first volume, John asked Charles to do the transcriptions. He claimed he was too busy, but recommended Ruth do the work. [49]

In 1939, with infighting in Washington, the Federal Music Project budget was cut, and the agency absorbed by the WPA. [50] Charles moved to a State Department committee on Latin American relations. From there, he joined the Pan American Union in 1941. [51]

Alan Lomax was in New York City, working part time for the Library of Congress while taking graduate courses in anthropology. [52] He asked companies, like Columbia, Decca, and RCA Victor, for copies of records by folk or folklike musicians. [53] He got so many contributions, he hired Bess and Pete to help him sort through them. [54]

In the fall, CBS radio asked him to contribute to their School of the Air. This gave him an opportunity to provide paying jobs for people who had helped him, [55] including the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Molly Jackson, and Pete. [56] In each program, he asked listeners to send him copies of folk songs. As mentioned in the post for 30 January 2019, he gave the most interesting to his father to pursue.

In 1940, while still working for the Library of Congress, Alan performed at a New York concert for refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It was the first time he heard Woody Guthrie. [57] They both appeared a month later at a concert for John Steinbeck’s committee to aid farm workers. [58]

Such efforts were noblesse oblige by middle class whites who had no more job security than tenant farmers. Charles was a bureaucrat serving at the whims of politicians. John was constantly looking for opportunities "on the low-rent outskirts of academia." [59]

Their years of financial and familial security passed when their sons were young children. Alan still hadn’t held a full time job outside the government. Pete dropped out of college and failed to find work in journalism. He had yet to overcome his inherited view that music was for fun [60] and his rejection of practicing, to make music a profession. [61]

End Notes:
First names are used to make it easier to distinguish between members of the Seeger and Lomax families.

1. Ann M. Pescatello. Charles Seeger. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 10–11.

2. Pescatello. 8.
3. "Alan Seeger." Poetry Foundation website.
4. Pescatello. 8.
5. Wikipedia. "Charles Seeger."
6. Poetry Foundation.

7. Mark Swed. "Behind Pete Seeger, A Formative Father and Mother." Los Angeles Times website. 6 February 2014.

8. Wikipedia. "Henry Cowell."

9. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. No page numbers in online edition.

10. Poetry Foundation.

11. According to WorldCat, Alan Seeger’s Poems was published in London in 1916, in New York in 1917, and in Paris in 1918. A second printing was issued in London in 1919 and in New York 1920. The English publisher was Constable, the U. S. was C. Scribner’s sons, and the French was Payot.

12. David King Dunaway. How Can I Keep from Singing? New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition. 25–28.

13. Wikipedia. "James E. Ferguson."
14. John Szwed. Alan Lomax. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010. 13.
15. John Szwed. 14.

16. Dunaway. 26–27. Each Seeger has edited the past. I have not been able to find any information about Constance de Clyver Edson that did not come from a male Seeger.

17. Pescatello. 86.
18. Dunaway. 32.
19. John Szwed. 16.
20. Wikipedia, Cowell.
21. Pescatello. 102.
22. Pescatello. 102-103. The American Songbag was discussed in the post for 5 May 2019.
23. Pescatello. 85.
24. Dunaway. 33.
25. Dunaway. 35.
26. "Spring Hill School Collection, 1926-1939." Litchfield Historical Society website.
27. Pescatello. 104.
28. Pescatello. 107.
29. Pescatello. 108.

30. Pescatello. 108. Charles Seeger later said the divorce occurred in 1927, [62] which made his relationship with Ruth conform with bourgeois morality.

31. Pescatello. 94. The Institute of Musical Art merged with the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in 1927, and John Erskine was chairman of the board that oversaw both. [63]

32. Pescatello. 109.
33. John Szwed. 23.

34. John Szwed. 31. American Ballads and Folk Songs was discussed in the post for 12 May 2019.

35. John Szwed. 32.
36. Sachs.

37. Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." MA thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 1. The Collective was mentioned in the post for 28 July 2019.

38. Dunaway. 36.
39. John Szwed. 61.

40. Charles Seeger. Dictated to Penny Seeger Cohen, 22 April 1977. Cited by Pescatello. 135.

41. "Our History." New School website.

42. Charles Seeger. "Preface to All Linguistic Treatment of Music." Music Vanguard 1:17–31:1935. Quoted by Pescatello. 129. Earlier she noted a man active in the New York Musicological Society said it could not become a national organization "unless Charles Seeger (who must have ruffled a few feathers) agreed to step down from the leadership." [64]

43. Pescatello. 236. The friend was Charles Pollack, a student of Thomas Hart Benton. Charles had attended Benton’s weekly gatherings of musicians at the New School. [65]

44. John Szwed. 107. John Lomax’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project was mentioned in post for 23 January 2019.

45. Wikipedia. "Resettlement Administration." It later became part of the Farm Security Administration.

46. Pescatello. 150.
47. Pescatello. 154.

48. John Szwed. 104. Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president was John Nance Garner. He represented south Texas in United States House of Representatives from 1903 to 1933 when John Lomax was at the University of Texas. [66]

49. Pescatello. 162. Also, John Szwed. 109.
50. Wikipedia. "Federal Music Project."
51. Pescatello. 173.
52. John Szwed. 140.
53. John Szwed. 142.
54. John Szwed. 144.

55. John Szwed. 154. Alan said, "The whole thing was ridiculous so I took this job only on the basis that I could have guests on the program and could pay them." [67]

56. John Szwed. 156. Jackson was mentioned in the post for 21 July 2019.
57. John Szwed. 157.
58. John Szwed. 160.
59. John Szwed. 77.
60. Dunaway. 63.
61. Dunaway. 61.
62. Wikipedia, Charles Seeger.
63. Wikipedia. "Juilliard School."

64. Pescatello. 121. She was quoting Harold Spivacke, but gave no source. He later was head of the Library of Congress Music Division, and Alan’s supervisor.

65. Pescatello. 133.
66. Wikipedia. "John Nance Garner."
67. No source given.

We Shall Not Be Moved

Topic: Folk Music Revival
The similarities between the uses of "We Shall Not Be Moved" in the 1936 Chattanooga, Tennessee, textile workers, discussed in the post for 28 July 2019, and the 1937 Flint, Michigan, automotive workers sit-down strike, discussed in the post for 21 July 2019, are obvious. Both used it as a performance piece to dramatize unity in the face of deadly force.

The link was what today would be called consultants, organizers who moved from strike to strike as advisors. One group used by Walter Reuther against General Motors was the Brookwood Labor College. Both he and his brother Roy had been trained there, [1] and Roy was on the faculty in 1936. [2] Zilphia Horton was working at the Highlander Folk School when she went to Chattanooga. [3]

She believed "sharecroppers in Arkansas" [4] in the Southern Farm Tenants Union were the first to use "We Shall Not Be Moved." However, Helen Grosvenor Norton watched "a mixed group of white and Negro miners and their wives" sing "We Shall Not Be Moved" during a 1931 strike in the Kanawha Coal Fields of southern West Virginia. As they stood on the steps of a "dilapidated Negro schoolhouse," they were watched by "a group of state ‘po-lice’ and mine guards, their guns conspicuously displayed." [5]

Norton and Tom Tippet were in West Virginia for Brookwood. [6] He told Archie Green he always went into local stores to purchase records, which he used to work with local organizers. [7] One of them, and more likely he, probably was responsible for the song moving into the labor movement. She married one of the Brookwood instructors in 1932, and became Helen Norton Starr. [8] Tippet was director of Brookwood’s extension activities until 1933. [9]

The event described by Norton was very like the later occurrences, but that’s not necessarily what was happening. She thought the steps were a stage, but David Corbin made clear miners lived on company property, and any building in the area was controlled by the operators. They had locked the churches in an earlier conflict, and the school likewise may have been made inaccessible. [10] It also may have been unsafe to go into a building where they could be ambushed.

Corbin said that after the failed strike of 1921, the Logan County Coal Operators’ Association had invited Billy Sunday [11] to hold a month-long revival in Charleston in 1922. [12] The state capital was in Kanawha County. Sunday lumped strikers with all other sinners in his exhortations. [13]

Miners turned away from company-controlled churches, and listened to other miners who were called by God to preach. They led prayers before men entered the pits, and often offered thanks when they came up. The "mine pit often became the pulpit" [14] unobserved by company spies. Men were free to read the Bible and one miner remembered "there’s a sermon in those songs, so we sang them all the time." [15]

One unintended consequence of inviting Sunday to Charleston was the introduction of new gospel songs, because wherever Sunday went, Homer Rodeheaver was there as his song leader. Rodeheaver had opened his own publishing house in 1910, [16] and, no doubt, always carried a store of his songbooks to sell.

"I Shall Not Be Moved" was copyrighted in 1908 by Alfred Ackley, [17] a year after his brother joined the Sunday organization as a pianist. [18] Rodeheaver, began including it in songbooks sold at revivals held by William Biederwolf. [19] In 1910, Rodeheaver went to work for Sunday [20] and included it in a new songbook. [21]

Rodeheaver was still promoting "I Shall Not" when he published a 1920 songbook that sold for thirty cents. [22] He had a new book in 1922 that did not include it, [23] and he may not have sung it during the Charleston revival. But, if he continued to sell Victory Songs, which he likely did, it would have been a safe purchase for miners. "I Shall Not" appeared on page 28. From there, it could have moved into the repertoire of some in Kanawha County.

The song may have moved from southern West Virginia to the Southern Farm Tenants Union (SFTU) through labor organizers, or through the gossip network that connected union leaders. [24] The labor use also could have been an independent invention in Arkansas that Horton observed when she lived there. [25]

Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer did not provide a source for the Norton quotation, but it sounds like it was from a later interview, rather than a contemporaneous account. The group in southern West Virginia may or may not have been singing "we shall not," but by the time Norton was interviewed, that was the accepted form. The letter from an SFTU member quoted in the post for 28 July 2019 was written in 1936, and used "I."

The song entered tradition in the South, and was undergoing changes from oral transmission in the 1920s. Ackley’s version followed the verse-chorus form with the two-line first verse beginning "As a tree beside the water." The AABA chorus repeated "I Shall Not Be Moved" three times, with "anchored to the Rock of Ages" as the B line.

Edward Boatner included "I Shall Not Be Moved" in the collection of spirituals he amassed for the National Baptist Convention in 1927. [26] His version used an AAB form. The A lines used a statement-refrain format with the statement changing with each iteration and "I shall not be moved" repeated. The B line, which appeared in every verse, used "like a tree planted by the water" as the statement.

It’s not known if Ackley, who joined his brother with Sunday before entering seminary to become a Presbyterian minister in 1914, [27] created the song or reworked something he heard in a revival meeting. [28] Boatner could have been closer to the original, or his version could have resulted from the digestion of the complicated Ackley form. He may have created this variant, which he copyrighted in 1925.

Joe and Emma Taggart recorded a version that was between the two the year before the African-American Baptist version was available. [29] "I Shall Not Be Removed" followed Boatner’s AAB form, but repeated the "I shall not be moved" after every variant as a burden.

Two versions collected by Julian Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, in the fall of that year, 1926, followed the Taggarts’ pattern. Minnie Lee sang "I shall not be blue," [30] while Bryan D. Banks used "I Shall Not be Moved." [31] None of the three shared any verses with each other or with Boatner, but all used Boatner’s "planted by the water" phrase.


Joe Taggart was a blind African-American musician from Abbeville, South Carolina, who worked in Atlanta before moving to Chicago in 1921. [32] Banks was from a white family that had been in Pamlico County for generations, [33] and may have been a Free Will Baptist. Lee also was a white Free Will Baptist. [35]

Once "I Shall Not" moved into active tradition among both whites and African Americans in the South, it became an especially useful song for unions that included members from both groups. By 1939, Boatner’s version was the most common. It was adapted by Zilphia as a "Union Hymn" in a collection she edited for Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [36]

End Notes
1. Wikipedia. "Brookwood Labor College."

2. James TenEyck. The Life and Times of Walter Reuther. New York: Page Publishing, 2016. Roy was a student in 1933, the year Tucker Smith became the director. Under the previous director, A. J. Muste, it had grown closer to Marxism, and Smith was charged with returning the Quaker-founded school to its original purpose. [37]

3. Horton was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.

4. Chelsea Hodge. "‘A Song Workers Everywhere Sing:’ Zilphia Horton and the Creation of Labor’s Musical Canon." Master’s thesis. University of Arkansas. May 2014. 49.

5. Helen Norton Starr. Quoted by Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer. Songs of Work and Freedom. New York: Dover Publications, 1983. 39. Reprint of edition published in 1960 by Roosevelt University’s Labor Education Division in Chicago.

6. Archie Green. Only a Miner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 254–256.
7. Tom Tippet. Letter to Archie Green. 6 February 1958. Quoted by Green. 254.

8. Richard Lewis. Biography of Marc Starr in Dictionary of Labour Biography. London: The Macmillan Press, 1993. 9:279.

9. Wikipedia, Brookwood.

10. David Alan Corbin. "We Shall Not Be Moved." 146–175 in Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. The chapter was not about the song, but about religious life in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. The comment on churches shuttered during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike was on page 151.

11. Corbin. 151.
12. Jerry Waters. "Billy Sunday." My WV Home website.
13. Corbin. 151.

14. Corbin. 158. One miner-preacher mentioned by Corbin was Walter Seacrist, who served as vice president of the West Virginia Mine Workers Union. Green said Tippet taught Seacrist a song about Mother Jones, which he localized. [38]

15. Corbin. 149.
16. Wikipedia. "Homer Rodeheaver."

17. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Copyrighted by A. H. and B. D. Ackley, Hilburn, New York, 1908. [39]

18. Wikipedia. "B. D. Ackley."

19. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for the King’s Business. Edited by Franklin Edson Belden. Chicago: B. E. Belden, 1909. 67. Robert Waltz and David G. Engle listed a collection [40] published by Rodeheaver and William Edward Bierderwolf in 1906. However, it was not in the copy I own. [41] The book went through several editions, and was in the 1910 revision [42] I obtained. It was undated, but was probably from 1910. The word "revised" appeared on the cover," but not on the title page.

20. Wikipedia, Rodeheaver.

21. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Great Revival Hymns for the Church, Sunday School and Evangelistic Services. Edited by Homer Alvan Rodeheaver and Bentley DeForrest Ackley. Chicago: Rodeheaver, 1910. 58.

22. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Victory Songs. Edited by Homer A. Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1920. 28.

23. Homer A. Rodeheaver. Rodeheaver’s Gospel Songs. Chicago: The Rodeheaver Company, 1922.

24. The SFTU shared one trait with the Frank Kenney’s West Virginia Mine Workers Union that might have made the one group contact leaders of the other. Unlike Harlan County, Kentucky, and Gastonia, North Carolina, West Virginia had a mixed labor force. When railroads and New York entrepreneurs began exploiting coal in the state, the population was so sparse, agents were sent to recruit immigrants from the mines in Pennsylvania and African Americans from Virginia, North and South Carolina. [43] In 1908, just before John D. Rockefeller facilitated the creation of Consolidated Coal, [44] 73.5% of Kanawha County’s miners were native-born whites, but were only 55% in Raleigh County and 47.1% in Fayette County. [45] The percentages no doubt changed when World War I shut down immigration from Europe.

The likelihood men from one union joined the other are slight. Corbin noted that, while miners moved from job to job, most stayed in the area because they preferred mining to the drudgery of industrial jobs. As one African American told him, "in the mines, the supervisors, they don’t bother you none." [46]

25. Horton’s life in Arkansas was discussed in the post for 28 July 2019.

26. "I Shall Not Be Moved." 9 in Spirituals Triumphant Old and New. Edited by Edward Boatner. Nashville: Sunday School Publishing Board, National Baptist Convention, 1927. Copyrighted by Boatner, who arranged it.

27. "Alfred Henry Ackley." Hymn Time website.

28. This revision of a tradition that then was recreated in tradition was described with "At the Cross" in the post for 22 November 2018. David Spener’s study of "We Shall Not Be Moved" did not provide any early history. [47]

29. Joe and Emma Taggart. "I Shall Not Be Removed." Vocalion 1062. 1926. Uploaded to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises. 5 November 2014.

30. Minnie Lee. "I Shall Not Be Blue." The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. 3:639.

31. B. D. Banks. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Brown 3:639–640.
32. Wikipedia. "Blind Joe Taggart."

33. Notes on Julian Boyd’s students may be found in the posts for 6 February 2019, 24 November 2019, and 1 December 2019.

34. Mittie Banks was married to Bryan Banks, and was survived by one son in 1967, B. D. Banks, Junior. She was buried by the Rock of Zion Free Will Baptist Church. [47]

35. Information on Minnie Lee appeared in the post for 8 December 2019.

36. Anonymous. "We Shall Not Be Moved." Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939. 32. Tune was identified as "I Shall Not Be Moved."

37. Wikipedia, Brookwood.
38. Green. 255.

39. Library of Congress. Copyright Office. Musical Compositions. Part 3, Numbers 36-39. September 1908. 817.

40. "I Shall Not Be Moved." The Traditional Ballad Index. California State University-Fresno website. Version 4.5.

41. William Edward Biederwolf. Hymns for His Praise No 2. Assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: McCrea-Taylor, 1906.

42. Alfred A. Ackley. "I Shall Not Be Moved." Songs for his Praise No. 2 Revised. Edited by William Edward Biederwolf, assisted by Homer Rodeheaver. Chicago: The Glad Tidings Publishing Company. 188.

43. W. Jett Lauck. Immigrants in Industries. Part 1. Bituminous Coal Mining. United States. 61st Congress Joint Immigration Commission report. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911. 6:23.

44. Ronald L. Lewis. "Coal Industry." The West Virginia Encyclopedia website. Last updated 8 January 2019.

45. Lauck. 7:156
46. Corbin. 41.

47. David Spener. We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016.

48. Victor T. Jones, Jr. "Sunday’s Obituary: Mittie Banks." Genealogy Jones and the Lost Crusade website.