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.
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