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.

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.

Folksmiths - KUM BA YAH (COME BY HERE)

Topic: Kumbaya 1955-1961
The Folksmiths introduced “Kum Ba Yah” to New England residential camps in the summer of 1957.  The four young women and four young men were students at Oberlin College who had been inspired, in part, by Pete Seeger.

As mentioned in the post for 26 March 2023, Seeger and his group, The Weavers, lost their recording contract and had their tour dates cancelled in 1953.   In 1954, two Oberlin students from New York City [1] asked Seeger to perform at the college.  250 went into the basement of the art museum.  Freshman Joe Hickerson wrote his family: “I have never seen anything so wonderful in my life.” [2]

Seeger returned in 1955 when 500 came to hear him in the chapel. [3]  In the summer he was at Camp Woodland and testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. [4]  By then, junior Robert Fuller remembers, Seeger had become “a heroic figure to Oberlinians.” [5]

The following fall Hickerson, then a senior, organized the Oberlin Folk Song Club. [6]  In December, David Sweet suggested they form the Folksmiths.  Over the Christmas holiday, the eight talked to their parents and began planning their summer experiment. [7]

Rickey Shoverner recalled they searched for songs and games they could teach.  Someone must have put them in contact with Lynn Rohrbough because they became agents for Cooperative Recreation Service (CRS) and the closely allied World Wide Games. [8]  Their workshop topics could have been dictated by Rohrbough: folk dancing, making instruments, indoor and outdoor games, Lemmi Sticks, and Swing Poi Balls. [9]

Over spring break, Hickerson and some others went to the Swarthmore Folk Festival where they heard Tony Saletan sing “Kumbaya.” [10]  In May, the club organized a folk festival on campus.  Saletan was one of the guests.  He lead them in singing spirituals. [11]

Performers
Vocal Soloist: man on singing, woman on sleeping, man on shouting
Vocal Group: four women and four men
Instrumental Accompaniment: banjo
Rhythm Accompaniment: none

Credits
“One version appears in print in several pocket songbooks of the Cooperative  Recreation Service of Delaware, Ohio and is Copyrighted by them.  They collected it from a professor at Baldwin College in Ohio, who heard it from a missionary in Angola, Africa.” [12]

Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: KUM ba yah
Verses: kumbaya, singing, sleeping, shouting
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: none

Basic Form: “verses can be made up ranging from ‘Someone’s reading’ to ‘someone’s groaning’ etc.” [13]

Verse Repetition Pattern: begin and end with “kumbaya”
Ending: repeat “kumbaya” verse

Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; same melody as that published by CRS
Tempo: moderate
Length: 2:10 minutes
Basic Structure: strophic repetition

Singing Style: timbraic harmonie with occasional divergent harmony on “ya” at ends of “kumbaya”

Solo-Group Dynamics: An individual sings the first line of a new verse, and the group joins on the second; they all sing the “kumbaya” verses.  This demonstrates how campers can sing songs they have not heard before.

Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: banjo introduction, then strummed to keep rhythm
Ending: none

Notes on Performance
The group made their demo tapes in a building on the Goddard College campus during a period when they had no engagements. [14]  The recording has more than those four songs.

Notes on Audience
The Folksmiths visited 20 camps and an unspecified number of resorts in New England.  The camps varied in style from tightly structured, competitive ones, to more relaxed progressive ones.  Thirteen were co-ed; one spoke only Hebrew.  The first one they visited was in Brewster, New York. [15]  It may have been Green Chimneys, a camp dedicated to children with special needs.  If so, they probably faced their greatest challenges on their first job, before they had built any expectations for what would happen.

Audience Perceptions
Sherover mentioned two songs more than once.  She noted: “We visited camps which were slightly familiar with folk singing and we saw others whose children had never sung a folk song and who listened entranced to Deep Blue Sea.” [16]

The other was “Kum Ba Yah.”  She wrote: “We remember being greeted by Kumbaya, My Lord, Kumbaya, when we returned to a girl’s camp in the Poconos.”  It’s the only song they knew entered local tradition from their singing. [17]

Notes on Performers
Profiles of the Folksmiths appear in the posts for 9 April 2023 and 16 April 2023.

Availability
Album: 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.

Reissue: Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah.”  We’ve Got Some Singing To Do.  Smithsonian Folkways FA 2407, CD released 2006.  Versions of the song and the album can be downloaded from the Smithsonian’s Folkways website.

YouTube: Folksmiths.  “Kum Ba Yah.”  Uploaded on 24 May 2015 by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

End Notes
1.  Michael Horowitz went to high school in the Bronx and earned a PhD in anthropology from the State University of New York - Binghamton. [18]  He specialized in the processes of development.  As such, he was an advisor to the World Bank [19] before he died in 2018. [20]

Kent Sidon graduated from Great Neck High School and majored in music at Oberlin.  After a short career as a performer, he founded the Guitar Workshop on Long Island in 1963 to teach classical technique and introduce traditional music to children and adults. [21]  He died in 1975. [22]

2.  Ted Gest.  “A Folk Legend’s Fertile Ground.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine 109(3):14-17:Summer 2014.  14.

3.  Pete Seeger.  Quoted by David King Dunaway.  How Can I Keep from Singing?  New York: Villard Books, 2008 edition.  232.

4.  Dunaway.  204.

5.  Gest.  14.  Robert Works Fuller left Oberlin before he graduated to earn a PhD in physics from Princeton in 1962.  He returned as college president in 1970.  He left in 1974, and became involved with The Hunger Project and informal international diplomacy.  He now lives in Berkeley, California. [23]

6.  Sue Angell.  “A Community of Folk.”  Oberlin Alumni Magazine 20(4):Spring 2005.

7.  Ricky Sherover.  “The Folksmiths: Eight Students Who Had Some Singing to Do.”  Sing Out! 8(1):17-20:Spring 1958.  17.

8.  World Wide Games is discussed in the post for 22 May 2022.

9.  Sherover.  17-18.  She identifies “Lummi Sticks” as “An American Indian stick game.”  On pages 424-425, Folk Songs, Camp Songs traces it back to a Maori tradition introduced into this country by a Mormon, Leona Holbrook.  Holbrook’s photograph appears on page 78.

10.  Saletan and the Swarthmore festival are discussed in the post for 26 March 2023.

11.  Sarah Newcomb.  “Marathon Folk Festival Features Singing, Dancing.”  The Oberlin Review, 14 May 1957.

12.  Liner notes for We’ve Got Some Singing To Do.
13.  Liner notes.
14.  Sherover.  20.
15.  Sherover.  18-19.
16.  Sherover.  19.
17.  Sherover.  21.

18.  “Michael M Horowitz.”  Ernest H. Parsons Funeral Home, Binghamton, New York, website, 20 November 2018.

19.  “Michael M. Horowitz.”  Prabook website.
20.  Parsons Funeral Home.

21.  George Vecsey.  “Guitar Workshop Stresses Tradition.”  The New York Times, 16 December 1973.

22.  Mattan Segev-Frank.  “Kent Sidon.”  Geni website; last updated 12 January 2021.
23.  “Robert W. Fuller.”  Wikipedia website; accessed 25 March 2023.