Folksmiths - The Activists

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Folksmiths, mentioned in the post for 2 April 2023 were eight Oberlin College students who introduced “Kum Ba Yah” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957.  Four became activists in later life while three became more involved with music and one supported charitable work.

David Sweet
David Sweet, who suggested the summer tour, majored in far-eastern history at Oberlin, and played bongo drums. [1]  His father, Frederick Beaver Sweet, was from Michigan [2] and married Mary Ellen Funk in Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. [3]  In the 1930s, they published the Union Register.  During World War II, the family lived in Detroit were Fred worked for the United Auto Workers. [4]  By the 1950s, he was editing Catering Industry Employee, [5] and she was active with the Girl Scouts.  She later taught school and was active with the ACLU and Camp Joy, [5] a camp for the disadvantaged. [7]

David’s brother, John, was five years younger.  His obituary indicated that John went to “a communist summer camp” as a child and that he sang, played guitar, and collected songs, “the more radical the song the better.” [8]  In 1959, an informant told the FBI that:

“Pete Seeger had been a house guest of Frederick B.  Sweet and his wife, Mary Ellen Sweet [. . .] during the previous weekend when Seeger had given a concert in Cincinnati.  He further stated that Mary Ellen and her daughter, Marni, a student at the University of Cincinnati, reportedly sold 200  tickets at $2.00 per ticket to the concert of Seeger.” [9]

David went to Mexico in 1962 where he “learned Spanish on the street, studied Mexican history at the National University, figured a way to make a living in NGO work, married and had kids.” [10]  Twelve years later he earned a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin and was teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [11]  Sweet still lives in Santa Cruz and remains active in community affairs. [12]

Joani Blank
Joan E. Blank [13] chaired the 1958 Oberlin folk festival. [14]  She graduated from high school in Belmont, Massachusetts, where she sang in the choir and played recorder. [15]  Her mother was a teacher and her father a research scientist. [16]

At Oberlin she majored in sociology.  When she was with the Folksmiths she played recorder and taught folk dancing. [17]  After she graduated in 1959, she toured Europe and Asia where she spent six months in India. [18]  During her last months, she taught folk songs for the International Recreation Association. [19]

Blank considered the Peace Corps, but then started another long trip that landed her to Hawaii.  She earned a master’s degree in Asian Studies with an emphasis on public health, and learned to play the koto and jamisen.  From there she earned another master’s in public health from the University of North Carolina and worked with family planning groups in Detroit; Concord, New Hampshire, and Morgantown, West Virginia. [20]

Blank moved to San Francisco in 1971, where her interest in family planning expanded to sexuality.  She found Down There Press in 1974, and opened a store that sold sexual toys to women.  She also sang with the Masterworks Chorale of College of San Mateo. [21]

After she retired in 1992, the Jew joined the Unitarian Church where she sang in the choir and learned to play handbells. [22]  She died in 2016. [23]

Ricky Sherover
Erica Reed Sherover [24] was the daughter of émigrés from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  Her grandfather arrived in New York City in 1903 and became an agent for a company selling insurance policies to immigrants. [25]  Before she was born, her father Miles worked in Russia on a project to build a steel mill. [26]

During the Spanish Civil War, he formed Hanover Sales Corporation to export aircraft to the Communist-backed Republican army. [27]  The war ended before the planes were delivered, and a contest developed over them in México. [28]  The family lived in Mexico from 1943 to 1946 where Ricky remembered her governess was a German communist refugee. [29]

The Sherovers returned to the United States where her father became treasurer of the American Russian Institute.  Soon after it was denounced as a Communist front in 1948, [30] Miles organized a steel corporation in Venezuela.  He later became an active supporter of Israel. [31]

At Oberlin, Sherover majored in history and literature, and played guitar. [32]  During the summer of 1958 she attended a folklore institute at Indiana University. [33]  She spent the next summers at a Kibbutz in Israel where she “played on her guitar by the fire at nights, the songs of that period, songs by Joan Baez.” [34]  In 1964, Sherover was one of the folk singers who participated in the Mississippi Caravan of Music that taught freedom songs during the efforts to educate Blacks and register them to vote. [35]

Interest in folk music faded with the rise of the Beatles, and politics became more radical.  Sherover went to study Marxism with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego.  They were married from 1976 until his death in 1979.  She carried on his work with workshops combating racism.  She died in 1988. [36]

Bo Israel
Mark Israel was born in Cincinnati.  His grandfather migrated from Russia to Birmingham, Alabama, where he had a tailor’s shop. [37]  When his father Mike graduated from high school in 1918, he said he wanted “to leave the world a little better than I found it.” [38]

Mike graduated from Purdue with a degree in agriculture in 1922.  While in Indiana, he played football and was in the glee club. [39]  He moved to Cincinnati in the early 1930s, where he worked for Fashion Frocks. [40]  His wife’s father was a partner in the Universal Skirt Company. [31]  In 1932, the elder Israel founded The Forum lecture series under the auspices of the Jewish Community Center. [42]

Bo inherited many of his father’s interests.  At the 1957 Oberlin Folk Festival, he played “Hana-ava Babanot” on a mandolin-banjo. [43]  During the summer with the Folksmiths, he played mandolin and washtub base. [44]  Israel was a member of Students for Democratic Action, [45] and, in his senior year, was active in promoting a Youth March on Integrated Schools. [46]

The summer of 1959, after his graduation, Israel trained to be an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Arkansas. [47]  He earned a law degree from Columbia Law School, and was hired by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights in 1963.  Israel eventually moved to the Washington, DC, area where he as a “public sector legislative consultant.” [48]

As a child, Israel remembered his family raised food.  To begin his return to the land, he rented some acreage from the brother of Sarah Newcomb, another member of the Folksmiths.  In 1978, he bought his own farm in Maryland and has been selling produce to farmers’ markets since he retired. [49]

End Notes
1.  Liner notes for Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah (Come by Here).”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do: The Folksmiths Travelling Folk Workshop.  Folkways Records FA 2407, released 1958.

2.  “Fred Sweet in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.
3.  Item.  Granville Times, Granville, Ohio, 15 August 1935.  3.

4.  “Mary Ellen Sweet, Teacher, Activist.”  Ohio Obituary and Death Notice Archive on Gen Lookups website, 1 June 2012.

5.  Matthew C. Bates.  A History of the International Labor Communications Association.  PhD dissertation.  University of Maryland, 2012.  138.

6.  Gen Lookups.

7.  National Directory of Accredited Camps for Boys and Girls.  Martinsville, Indiana: American Camping Association, 1974.  202-203.

8.  Bill Banks.  “John Sweet, Activist and Lawyer, Dies at 77.”  Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia, 22 June 2020.  Quotation about songs is from John’s wife, Midge.

9.  Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Domestic Security.  Declassified documents.  The Archive website has no more details.  The informant was M. G. Lowman.  He got his information from a girl friend who was a student at the University of Cincinnati.

10.  David Sweet.  “Learning from Mexicans.”  Uploaded to his website on 4 July 2012.

11.  University of Wisconsin - Madison History Newsletter 8(1):9:1979.

12.  Cathy Kelly.  “Santa Cruz Style: Holiday Art Fair Showcases Work of Tannery Arts Center Artists, Others.”  Santa Cruz Sentinel, Santa Cruz, California, 8 December 2012.

13.  Dorothy M. Smith.  “Class of 1959 Directory.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, December 1959.  2.

14.  Sarah Newcomb.  “Marathon Folk Festival Features Singing, Dancing.”  The Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 14 May 1957.  The festival is discussed in the post for 2 April 2023.

15.  Joani Blank.  “Personal Stuff.”  Her website.

16.  Lynn Comella.  “Remembering Good Vibrations Founder Joani Blank, 1937 - 2016.”  Bitch Media website, 12 August 2016.

17.  Liner notes.
18.  Blank.

19.  Smith. 2.  The International Recreation Association is mentioned in the post for 26 March 2023.

20.  Blank.
21.  Blank.
22.  Blank.
23.  Comella.

24.  Andreas Keller.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse.”  Geni website; last updated 28 April 2022.

25.  “Edler, Fisher, Redsecker, Wald and Related Families.”  Edlers website, page 220, entries for “Erica Reed ‘Ricky’ Sherover PhD,” “Miles (Meyer) Sherover,” and “Moris Sherower.”  Her father was born in Kraków, then part of Galicia.

26.  Miles M. Sherover.  “Magnitogorsk: Epic of Soviet Labor.”  Current History 36(4):405-410:July 1932.

27.  Cordell Hull, Secretary of State.  Letter to the Chargé in France ( Wilson ), 9 March 1937.  United States Department of State website.

28.  Santiago Flores.  “Those Mexican Bellancas.”  Latin American Aviation Historical Society website, 14 September 2018.

29.  “Erica Sherover-Marcuse (1938-1988).”  Marcuse website.
30.  American Business Consultants, Inc.  Counterattack, 20 August 1948.
31.  “Miles Sherover, Industrialist, 80.”  The New York Times, 4 March 1976.
32.  Liner Notes.

33.  Richard M. Dorson.  “The 1958 Folklore Institute of America.”  Midwest Folklore 9(1):39-48:Spring 1959.

34.  Elisha Porat, 27 December 2010.  Anecdote reprinted on Marcuse website.  He was a Hebrew poet. [50]

35.  Bob Cohen.  “The Mississippi Caravan of Music.”  Broadside (51):7-9:20 October 1964.  7.

36.  Marcuse website.
37.  Debbie.  “Mayer A Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 May 2017.

38.  Mirror.  Birmingham, Alabama, Central High School yearbook, 1918.  93.  His father was Clarence Elbert Israel.

39.  Debris.  Purdue University yearbook, 1922.  99.

40.  “A Finding Aid to the Clarence E. Israel Papers.”  The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives website.

41.  Department Reports of the State of Ohio, 1922.  Mark’s mother was born Clare Sapadin, and her father was Philip Sapadin. [51]

42.  Marcus Center.
43.  Newcomb.
44.  Liner notes.

45.  “Oberlin Politics.”  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  81.  SDA was the youth branch of Americans for Democratic Action.

46.  “Sixty To Join March in Capital Saturday.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 87(48):1:14 April 1959.

47.  David Zeigler.  “Bo Israel Tells of Union Work In Ozark Hills.”  Oberlin Review, Oberlin College, 88(20):1:4 December 1959.

48.  “Getting to Know...Mark Israel and Judith Lesser.”  The Connections Newspapers, Alexandria Virginia, website,  20 June 2007.  Sarah Newcomb’s brother was Tony Newcomb.

49.  The Connections.
50.  “Elisha Porat.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 29 March 2023.
51.  Debbie.  “Clare Sapadin Israel.”  Find a Grave website, 1 Mary 2017.