Folksmiths - The Musicians

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
Four of the Folksmiths who introduced “Kumbaya” to twenty New England residential camps in the summer of 1957 primarily were interested in music when they were students at Oberlin College.

Ruth Weiss
Ruth Weiss was the granddaughter of Otto Loewi, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1936.  He fled to Brussels in 1938 when the Germans invaded Austria that year.  From there he made his way to New York City in 1940. [1]

Her father, Ulrich Weiss, was a chemist in Austria.  In 1939, she and her mother moved to Brussels, then to France after Ulrich’s company opened a branch in Paris.  They began fleeing the Germans in 1940.  After short stays in England, Martinique, and the Dominican Republic, they were able to settle in New York City with the Loewis. [2]

By the time Ruth was a French student at Oberlin, the family had moved to Maryland where Ulrich worked for the National Institutes of Health.  They had hidden their Jewish roots.  Weiss recalled that “her father was an atheist, her mother an agnostic. They celebrated Christmas and observed no Jewish holidays.” [3]

Her activism was confined to singing Christmas carols at a Cleveland hospital for the campus Christian Science Organization. [4]  She played recorder with the Folksmiths and sang the soprano parts. [5]  Her voice is the most recognizable on their recording of “Kumbaya.”

After graduation in 1959, she spent time in a work camp in Vienna, Austria, sponsored by the World Council of Churches. [6]  When she returned to this country, she became a case worker for the Cuyahoga County Welfare Agency’s Division of Child Welfare. [7]

Weiss moved to Portland, Oregon in 1975 where she is active with Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. [8]

Joe Hickerson
Joseph Charles Hickerson was born in Highland Park, Illinois, [9] where his father was a mathematics teachers. [10]  Teaching jobs were precarious in the Depression, and they moved several times before James Allen Hickerson was hired by New Haven State Teacher’s College in Connecticut. [11]

Hickerson’s older brother, Jay Allen, showed musical talents when he was young.  He earned a degree in music theory in 1956, and later became a music teacher in the schools in Bethany, Connecticut.  He also appeared as the piano soloist with orchestras, starting when he was in high school. [12]

Their mother, the former Elizabeth Hogg, often played piano and sang with the young boys.  Joe remembered she bought a plastic ukulele to peak his interest when he was about 14 years old.  This led to some lessons on guitar.  He already had sung with the church choir from “5th grade until my voice changed.” [13]

Hickerson majored in physics at Oberlin, but became more interested in folk music after Pete Seeger began appearing in concerts.  He became friends with the individual who had a program on the college radio station, and took over his place when he left. [14]  He played banjo and guitar, and led singing with the Folksmiths the summer he graduated. [15]

Joe spent the next few years studying folklore at Indiana University where he had a folk music program on the local college radio station. [16]  He spent a few summers working as a counselor at Camp Woodland, where he revised “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” [17]

Hickerson was hired by the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song in 1963, and began performing in the Washington DC area. [18]  He also made some records for Folk Legacy.  He retired to Portland, Oregon, where he still performs. [19]

Sarah Newcomb
Sarah Robinson Newcomb was born in Fairfax, Virginia, [20] where her father was a government economist.  He was chased out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when he began researching Negro businesses for his PhD from Brookings Institute.  When she was young, he was on Harry Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors. [21]  By the time that she was a psychology major at Oberlin, [22] he was working for the Urban Land Institute. [23]

Newcomb’s mother, the former Carolyn Jones, was involved with Bluebird and Camp Fire Girls’ groups when Sarah was young. [24]  She may be the only member of the Folksmiths who participated in a middle-class youth group in the 1950s.  Newcomb spent her teen years at Oakwoods Friends School, a boarding school in New York state. [25]

Hickerson remembers that, while she was in high school, she visited the Archives of American Folk Song.  She was the one who took him there for his first interview. [26]

Newcomb played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [27]  In the 1960s, she was writing songs with Susie Dean, an Oakwoods classmate. [28]  Around 1972, met Shari Ajemian Craig through The Folk Song Society of Greater Boston.  They began writing parodies at Pinewoods Music Camp, and, by 1986, had expanded to musical comedies. [29]

Newcomb still lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is writing songs with Dean. [30]

Chuck Crawford
Charles Raymond Crawford played banjo and guitar with the Folksmiths. [31]  One of his classmates, Neil Rosenberg, remembered Crawford was living in Mansfield, Ohio, and had “a neat record collection that included jazz greats Django Reinhart and Fats Waller.” [32]  Rosenberg also remembered a group of guys would gather before and after meals to figured out how to play what was then the new Bluegrass genre. [33]

This group was beginning to move away from Pete Seeger.  Rosenberg recalled: “The Pete Seeger manual, in the second edition that Mayne [34] had, didn’t have anything useful for learning Scruggs picking.  There was a page devoted to it, but it wasn’t accurate.  So we learned from other musicians.” [35]

Crawford went to the University of Michigan where he earned a PhD in mathematics in 1970. [36]  From there, he was the first computer professor at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. [37]  Throughout this time he played in local Bluegrass bands. [38]  He still lives in Toronto and has joined sacred harp singing groups. [39]

End Notes
1.  “Otto Loewi.”  Nobel Prize website.

2.  Ulrich Weiss interview.  The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, 1993.

3.  Melissa Binder.  “Holocaust Remembrance Day: Survivor Recalls Her Own Early Escape, Honors Those Who Died.”  The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon, 16 April 2015.

4.  Hi-O-Hi.  Oberlin College yearbook, 1958.  87.

5.  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.

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

7.  Item.  Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Oberlin College, 56(7):28:November 1960.
8.  Binder.
9.  “Joe Hickerson.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 26 March 2023.

10.  The elder Hickerson wrote the article “Similarities Between Teaching Language and Arithmetic.”  The Arithmetic Teacher 6(5):241-244:November 1959.

11.  Joe Hickerson.  Liner notes.  Joe Hickerson with a Gathering of Friends.  Folk Legacy FSI-39.  Released 1970.  1.

12.  “Jay Allen Hickerson.”  Leesburg News, Leesburg, Florida, 9 August 2022.
13.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  1.
14.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  2.
15.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.
16.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  3.

17.  “Joe Hickerson (Special Event).”  Folklore Society of Greater Washington website, 13 July 2014.

18.  Joe Hickerson, 1970.  4.
19.  Joe Hickerson, 2014.
20.  “Sarah Newcomb in the 1940 Census.”  Ancestry website.

21.  James R. Fuchs.  “Oral History Interview with Dr. Robinson Newcomb,” 6 August 1977.  Harry S. Truman Library website.

22.  Line notes, Folksmiths.
23.  Internet references to his publications.
24.  “Carolyn Jones Newcomb.”  Washington Post, 29 January 1989.

25.  “Class of 1956” reunion photograph.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Poughkeepsie, New York, Summer 2016.  8.

26.  Joe Hickerson.  “Folk Music, Archives & Performing: Experiences, Adventures & Great Stories.”  Interviewed by Jennifer Cutting for Library of Congress webcast, 15 July 2014; posted to YouTube on 26 January 2015.

27.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

28.  Newcomb told her Oakwood classmates that a parody of a sea chantey she had written with Susan Dean Miller was being performed by groups in Britain in 2009. [40]

29.  “Ajemian & Newcomb’s Artistic Resume.”  Ajemian and Newcomb website, 2011.

30.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2020.  5.
31.  Liner notes, Folksmiths.

32.  Neil V. Rosenberg.  Bluegrass Generation.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.  No page numbers in on-line edition.

33.  Neil Rosenberg.  Interviewed by George Lyon in “Wherein George Lyon Talks to Neil Rosenberg and We Get To Listen!”  The Canadian Folk Music Bulletin 35:1-10:2001.  3.  Rosenberg earned a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University, and became the academic expert on Bluegrass music, as well as an accomplished musician.

34.  Pete Seeger.  How To Play the 5-String Banjo.  Beacon, New York: Pete Seeger, 1954.  Mayne Smith was a friend of Rosenberg’s from California who also attended Oberlin.

35.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.  Earl Scruggs began playing banjo for Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass group in 1945.  In 1948, he and Lester Flatt formed their own group. [41]

36.  “Charles Raymond Crawford.”  Mathematics Genealogy Project, North Dakota State University website.  For more information on the importance of his dissertation, see Frank Uhlig.  “On Computing the Generalized Crawford Number of a Matrix.”  Linear Algebra and Its Applications 438:1923-1935:2013.

37.  G. Scott Graham.  “Computer Science at 25.”  61 in Celebrating 40 Years of History at the University of Toronto Mississauga, edited by John Percy and Sabeen Abbas.  University of Toronto Mississauga, 2007.

38.  Rosenberg, 2001.  3.

39.  “Directory and Minutes of Sacred Harp Singings 2009 & 2010.”  Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association, Huntsville, Alabama, website.

40.  Item.  Oak Leaves, Oakwood Friends School newsletter, Summer 2009.  13.
41.  “Flatt and Scruggs.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 15 April 2023.