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.
Showing posts with label Weavers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weavers. Show all posts
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Folk Revival - 1930s Labor Songs
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Workers Music League was formed in 1931 [1] as an extension of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians that was mentioned in the post for 7 July 2019. Norman Cazden remembered a group of classical composers formed a subgroup, the Composer’s Collective of New York, because many of the members of the larger organization lacked the "musical expertise" required to "talk on technical matters." [2]
The Collective’s initial interest was piqued by Hanns Eisler. Like them, the Austrian composer had been influenced by Arnold Schönberg. Unlike them, he had made successful forays into popular political theater with Bertold Brecht [3] using "rhythms and extended harmonies such as ‘blue notes’" [4] in Communist East Berlin during the Weimar period. Their "Solidarity Song" [5] was so popular in 1932, the year the Collective was organized, [6] that it was sung at sports events. [7]
While the Communist Party was promoting proletarian music created by professional musicians, unaffiliated organizers in the South were using Protestant camp meeting traditions to engage members. Harry Leland Mitchell organized the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) as a mixed-race movement in 1934. [8] Joshua Youngblood wrote:
"From the union’s beginning, both white and black leaders worked tirelessly on its behalf. Ministers and preachers of both races overwhelmingly dominated the leadership of the STFU." [9]
Union leaders discovered the only buildings owned by African Americans were churches. [10] By 1935, SFTU organizers were instructed to emulate prayer meetings. Speakers could then move seamlessly from labor to theology if they suspected the approach of white vigilantes. [11]
"J. W. Washington of Earl, Arkansas, described a meeting his local had with the union lawyer in January 1936. The meeting opened with prayer and the singing of a spiritual: ‘We had just begun to get in the [middle] of a big time. We first sung two verses of I Shall Not be Moved that song I do believe sprang from our lips with the voice of god [sic].’ The meeting was then interrupted as the union members were attacked and the song took on a greater meaning." [12]
Lee Hays remembered in the late 1930s at "meetings way out in the back woods or in the heart of the dismal cotton country," Claude Williams "would sing a song like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’—prepared to break into the old hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [13]
Williams was raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church by sharecroppers in northwestern Tennessee. [14] The denomination was a direct descendant of the 1801 Cane Ridge Revival. [15] It was formed in 1810 by churches that were expelled by the Presbyterian Church for promoting Arminianism over Calvinism and for elevating religious experiences by their ministers over seminary educations. [16] Congregations also offended the Scots body by singing hymns, as well as psalms. [17]
His first pastorate after leaving Vanderbilt in 1930 was Paris, Arkansas. Williams expanded the church’s outreach by creating a recreation center for adolescents, [18] and supported the Logan County coal miners in their strike against local operators. [19] Two who joined him at this time were Hays and Zilphia Johnson. [20] Hays’ father was a Methodist minister assigned to Logan County where he died in 1927. [21] Johnson’s father’s maternal grandfather had been part of the original migration of Cumberland Presbyterians to Arkansas from Kentucky in the 1820s. [22]
The Paris church removed Williams, who then was sent to Fort Smith in 1935. [23] Zilphia went to the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. [24] Soon after her arrival, she married its director. Myles Horton was a Cumberland Presbyterian [25] whose parents were sharecroppers and factory workers in the western Tennessee River valley. [26]
At Highlander, Zilphia trained students to be song leaders, [27] and showed them how to modify existing songs to fit particular circumstances. [28] Each year she published a collection of labor songs from the school. [29] She didn’t include tunes. Chelsea Hodge suggested that eliminated barriers for people who couldn’t read music. [30] Equally important, it drew upon familiar psalm and early hymn singing traditions that used a few melodies with many texts. [31]
In 1938, Zilphia began editing Labor Songs for the Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [32] To obtain material, she asked union locals in all parts of the country to send her songs, along with explanations for how they were used. [33] Her concern was not what workers ought to sing, but what had been proven to work.
Zilphia didn’t just teach; like others at Highlander, she worked directly with union organization drives and strikes. In 1936, she worked with textile workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. [34] She later told farm union leaders in Montana that she organized a parade of unity on Washington’s Birthday. They began
"marching two by two, with the children and the band. They marched past the mill and 400 machine gun bullets were fired into the midst of the group. A woman was shot in the leg on the right and in the ankle on the left, on the left of me. And I looked around and the police were all disappeared…well, in about five minutes, a few of us stood up at the mill gates and sang, "We shall not be moved, just a like a tree that’s planted by the water." And in ten minutes, [the workers] began to come out again from behind the barns and garages and the little stores that were around in this small town, and they stood there, and they were not moved and sang, and that’s what won their organization. [35]
End Notes
1. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
2. Norman Cazden. June 1976. Quoted by David Dunaway. "Unsung Songs of Protest: the Composers’ Collective of New York." New York Folklore 5:1–20:1979. 1–2. Requoted by Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." Masters thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 3.
3. Margaret R. Jackson. "Workers, Unite!: The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926-1932." PhD Diss. Florida State University School of Music, Fall 2003. 8.
4. Jackson. 27.
5. Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler. "Solidaritätslied." For the film Kuhle Wampe. Prometheus Film, 14 May 1932.
6. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. No page numbers in online edition. The Collective was the result of a seminar led by Cowell, Jacob Schaefer, and Leo Charles to pursue "the specific goal of creating an American version of the successful proletarian music by European composers and writers such as Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Bertoldt Brecht."
7. Wikipedia. "Solidaritätslied."
8. 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. 5. A number of more thorough histories exist of the union. I am using this one for its treatment of religion and Claude Williams.
9. Youngblood. 3.
10. Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless. "Of the Least and the Most: The African American Rural Church." In African American Life in the Rural South, 1900 – 1950. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 61. Cited by Youngblood. 24.
11. Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. "New Methods of Organization for the S.T.F.U." 1935. Union papers in University of North Carolina Library. Cited by Youngblood. 25.
12. J. W. Washington. Letter to Harry Leland Mitchell. 19 January 1936. STFU Papers. Quoted by Youngblood. 32.
13. Lee Hays. "The Singing Preacher." People’s Songs Bulletin, February and March 1948. 11, 13, 44. Reprinted in Hays. "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!" 67–70. Edited by Robert S. Koppelman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 70.
14. William H. Pruden III. "Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 9 April 2018.
15. Cane Ridge was mentioned briefly in the post for 2 November 2017.
16. Wikipedia. "Cumberland Presbyterian Church."
17. B. W. McDonnold. History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Nashville: Board of Publication of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1899. 41.
18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 27.
19. Pruden.
20. I am using Zilphia’s first name throughout to avoid confusion. She often is identified as the daughter of the mine owner. In fact, her father was a mine prospector [36] who moved the family between Idaho and Arkansas several times during her childhood. Chelsea Hodge said when they returned the last time, her father "owned a small interest in a coal mine." [37]
21. Willens. 3. Hays was 13-years-old. They were living in Booneville about 16 miles from Paris.
22. Wikipedia, "Zilphia Horton," named her parents. Her parents’ entries on Find a Grave did not mention their children, probably because they were buried elsewhere. The Grave data placed them in the right part of Arkansas at the right time.
Charles Robin Rauch. "Robert Guy Johnson" [Zilphia’s father] Find a Grave website. 26 May 2011
Bea Smith Daniel. "Ida May Cox Johnson" [Zilphia’s father’s mother/her grandmother]. Find a Grave website. 8 October 2008.
Bea Smith Daniel. "Rev Anderson Buchanan Cox" [Zilphia’s father’s mother’s father/her great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 30 September 2008. Updated by Bill Hunt.
Bill Hunt. "Coleman Cox" [Cox’s father/Zilphia’s great-great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 25 October 2010. Cox was converted at a revival that preceded Cane Ridge.
23. Pruden.
24. The Highland Folk School was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
25. Franklin and Betty J. Parker. "Myles Horton (1905-90), Educator and Social Activist of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; With Addendum." Highlander website. 20 January 2013.
26. Bill Ayers and Therese Quinn. "Myles Horton (1905–1990)." Education Encyclopedia website.
27. Hays said he learned to be a song leader from Zilphia at Highlander. [38]
28. 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. 38.
29. Hodge. 25.
30. Hodge. 27.
31. Psalm singing was mentioned briefly in the post for 23 August 2017.
32. Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939.
33. Hodge. 25–26.
34. Zilphia Horton. Letter to Myles Horton. 1936. Myles Horton Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Cited by Hodge 34–35.
35. Zilphia Horton. Speech to Montana Farmers’ Union School, 1952. Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection in Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Quoted by Hodge. 51.
36. Hodge. 9.
37. Hodge. 7.
38. Lee Hays. People’s Songs, January 1947. 11. Cited by Hodge. 31–32. Willens repeated the story, with the added detail the incident occurred at a miner’s meeting. [39]
39. Willens. 94–95.
The Workers Music League was formed in 1931 [1] as an extension of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians that was mentioned in the post for 7 July 2019. Norman Cazden remembered a group of classical composers formed a subgroup, the Composer’s Collective of New York, because many of the members of the larger organization lacked the "musical expertise" required to "talk on technical matters." [2]
The Collective’s initial interest was piqued by Hanns Eisler. Like them, the Austrian composer had been influenced by Arnold Schönberg. Unlike them, he had made successful forays into popular political theater with Bertold Brecht [3] using "rhythms and extended harmonies such as ‘blue notes’" [4] in Communist East Berlin during the Weimar period. Their "Solidarity Song" [5] was so popular in 1932, the year the Collective was organized, [6] that it was sung at sports events. [7]
While the Communist Party was promoting proletarian music created by professional musicians, unaffiliated organizers in the South were using Protestant camp meeting traditions to engage members. Harry Leland Mitchell organized the Southern Farmers’ Tenant Union (SFTU) as a mixed-race movement in 1934. [8] Joshua Youngblood wrote:
"From the union’s beginning, both white and black leaders worked tirelessly on its behalf. Ministers and preachers of both races overwhelmingly dominated the leadership of the STFU." [9]
Union leaders discovered the only buildings owned by African Americans were churches. [10] By 1935, SFTU organizers were instructed to emulate prayer meetings. Speakers could then move seamlessly from labor to theology if they suspected the approach of white vigilantes. [11]
"J. W. Washington of Earl, Arkansas, described a meeting his local had with the union lawyer in January 1936. The meeting opened with prayer and the singing of a spiritual: ‘We had just begun to get in the [middle] of a big time. We first sung two verses of I Shall Not be Moved that song I do believe sprang from our lips with the voice of god [sic].’ The meeting was then interrupted as the union members were attacked and the song took on a greater meaning." [12]
Lee Hays remembered in the late 1930s at "meetings way out in the back woods or in the heart of the dismal cotton country," Claude Williams "would sing a song like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’—prepared to break into the old hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [13]
Williams was raised in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church by sharecroppers in northwestern Tennessee. [14] The denomination was a direct descendant of the 1801 Cane Ridge Revival. [15] It was formed in 1810 by churches that were expelled by the Presbyterian Church for promoting Arminianism over Calvinism and for elevating religious experiences by their ministers over seminary educations. [16] Congregations also offended the Scots body by singing hymns, as well as psalms. [17]
His first pastorate after leaving Vanderbilt in 1930 was Paris, Arkansas. Williams expanded the church’s outreach by creating a recreation center for adolescents, [18] and supported the Logan County coal miners in their strike against local operators. [19] Two who joined him at this time were Hays and Zilphia Johnson. [20] Hays’ father was a Methodist minister assigned to Logan County where he died in 1927. [21] Johnson’s father’s maternal grandfather had been part of the original migration of Cumberland Presbyterians to Arkansas from Kentucky in the 1820s. [22]
The Paris church removed Williams, who then was sent to Fort Smith in 1935. [23] Zilphia went to the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee. [24] Soon after her arrival, she married its director. Myles Horton was a Cumberland Presbyterian [25] whose parents were sharecroppers and factory workers in the western Tennessee River valley. [26]
At Highlander, Zilphia trained students to be song leaders, [27] and showed them how to modify existing songs to fit particular circumstances. [28] Each year she published a collection of labor songs from the school. [29] She didn’t include tunes. Chelsea Hodge suggested that eliminated barriers for people who couldn’t read music. [30] Equally important, it drew upon familiar psalm and early hymn singing traditions that used a few melodies with many texts. [31]
In 1938, Zilphia began editing Labor Songs for the Textile Workers Union of America in Atlanta. [32] To obtain material, she asked union locals in all parts of the country to send her songs, along with explanations for how they were used. [33] Her concern was not what workers ought to sing, but what had been proven to work.
Zilphia didn’t just teach; like others at Highlander, she worked directly with union organization drives and strikes. In 1936, she worked with textile workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. [34] She later told farm union leaders in Montana that she organized a parade of unity on Washington’s Birthday. They began
"marching two by two, with the children and the band. They marched past the mill and 400 machine gun bullets were fired into the midst of the group. A woman was shot in the leg on the right and in the ankle on the left, on the left of me. And I looked around and the police were all disappeared…well, in about five minutes, a few of us stood up at the mill gates and sang, "We shall not be moved, just a like a tree that’s planted by the water." And in ten minutes, [the workers] began to come out again from behind the barns and garages and the little stores that were around in this small town, and they stood there, and they were not moved and sang, and that’s what won their organization. [35]
End Notes
1. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
2. Norman Cazden. June 1976. Quoted by David Dunaway. "Unsung Songs of Protest: the Composers’ Collective of New York." New York Folklore 5:1–20:1979. 1–2. Requoted by Abigail Chaplin-Kyzer. "Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers’ Collective and Its Musical Implications." Masters thesis. University of North Texas, May 2018. 3.
3. Margaret R. Jackson. "Workers, Unite!: The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926-1932." PhD Diss. Florida State University School of Music, Fall 2003. 8.
4. Jackson. 27.
5. Bertold Brecht and Hanns Eisler. "Solidaritätslied." For the film Kuhle Wampe. Prometheus Film, 14 May 1932.
6. Joel Sachs. Henry Cowell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. No page numbers in online edition. The Collective was the result of a seminar led by Cowell, Jacob Schaefer, and Leo Charles to pursue "the specific goal of creating an American version of the successful proletarian music by European composers and writers such as Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Bertoldt Brecht."
7. Wikipedia. "Solidaritätslied."
8. 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. 5. A number of more thorough histories exist of the union. I am using this one for its treatment of religion and Claude Williams.
9. Youngblood. 3.
10. Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless. "Of the Least and the Most: The African American Rural Church." In African American Life in the Rural South, 1900 – 1950. Edited by R. Douglas Hurt. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. 61. Cited by Youngblood. 24.
11. Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. "New Methods of Organization for the S.T.F.U." 1935. Union papers in University of North Carolina Library. Cited by Youngblood. 25.
12. J. W. Washington. Letter to Harry Leland Mitchell. 19 January 1936. STFU Papers. Quoted by Youngblood. 32.
13. Lee Hays. "The Singing Preacher." People’s Songs Bulletin, February and March 1948. 11, 13, 44. Reprinted in Hays. "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!" 67–70. Edited by Robert S. Koppelman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 70.
14. William H. Pruden III. "Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979)." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 9 April 2018.
15. Cane Ridge was mentioned briefly in the post for 2 November 2017.
16. Wikipedia. "Cumberland Presbyterian Church."
17. B. W. McDonnold. History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Nashville: Board of Publication of Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1899. 41.
18. Doris Willens. Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. 27.
19. Pruden.
20. I am using Zilphia’s first name throughout to avoid confusion. She often is identified as the daughter of the mine owner. In fact, her father was a mine prospector [36] who moved the family between Idaho and Arkansas several times during her childhood. Chelsea Hodge said when they returned the last time, her father "owned a small interest in a coal mine." [37]
21. Willens. 3. Hays was 13-years-old. They were living in Booneville about 16 miles from Paris.
22. Wikipedia, "Zilphia Horton," named her parents. Her parents’ entries on Find a Grave did not mention their children, probably because they were buried elsewhere. The Grave data placed them in the right part of Arkansas at the right time.
Charles Robin Rauch. "Robert Guy Johnson" [Zilphia’s father] Find a Grave website. 26 May 2011
Bea Smith Daniel. "Ida May Cox Johnson" [Zilphia’s father’s mother/her grandmother]. Find a Grave website. 8 October 2008.
Bea Smith Daniel. "Rev Anderson Buchanan Cox" [Zilphia’s father’s mother’s father/her great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 30 September 2008. Updated by Bill Hunt.
Bill Hunt. "Coleman Cox" [Cox’s father/Zilphia’s great-great-grandfather]. Find a Grave website. 25 October 2010. Cox was converted at a revival that preceded Cane Ridge.
23. Pruden.
24. The Highland Folk School was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.
25. Franklin and Betty J. Parker. "Myles Horton (1905-90), Educator and Social Activist of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; With Addendum." Highlander website. 20 January 2013.
26. Bill Ayers and Therese Quinn. "Myles Horton (1905–1990)." Education Encyclopedia website.
27. Hays said he learned to be a song leader from Zilphia at Highlander. [38]
28. 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. 38.
29. Hodge. 25.
30. Hodge. 27.
31. Psalm singing was mentioned briefly in the post for 23 August 2017.
32. Labor Songs. Edited by Zilphia Horton. Atlanta: Textile Workers Union of America, 1939.
33. Hodge. 25–26.
34. Zilphia Horton. Letter to Myles Horton. 1936. Myles Horton Papers in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives. Cited by Hodge 34–35.
35. Zilphia Horton. Speech to Montana Farmers’ Union School, 1952. Zilphia Horton Folk Music Collection in Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Quoted by Hodge. 51.
36. Hodge. 9.
37. Hodge. 7.
38. Lee Hays. People’s Songs, January 1947. 11. Cited by Hodge. 31–32. Willens repeated the story, with the added detail the incident occurred at a miner’s meeting. [39]
39. Willens. 94–95.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Folk Revival - Indigenous Communists
Topic: Folk Music Revival
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
The Communist Party’s influence on the folk-music revival in the United States occurred in phases, with each period appearing among a different set of people.
Jews began leaving Russian-controlled Poland after Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son believed the only answer was a single, shared culture. He forced Poles to speak Russian and adopt the Orthodox religion. After mobs attacked Jewish settlements, Alexander III banned Jews from rural areas and shtetlekh, and restricted their occupations in 1882. [1] Those who emigrated to the United States settled in large cities from New York to Cleveland, [2] while Polish Catholics moved to industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. [3]
Americans responded with missionary programs that had been initiated when Germans began arriving after 1848, [4] and expanded during and after the Civil War when Northerners went South to teach African Americans. [5] Phoebe Palmer organized the first urban mission in 1853 at Five Points in New York. [6] Their goals were teaching English, vocations like sewing for women, and homemaking skills.
In 1886, Stanton Coit secularized the movement with what became the University Settlement House in New York. [7] Jews began establishing their own organizations in 1893. [8] Many of the leaders were individuals who had fled Germany in the 1840s, and now wanted to socialize eastern Europeans into their form of Jewish-American life. Jacob Schiff encouraged groups to cooperate in what became New York’s Educational Alliance. [9] Women in Cleveland affiliated with the Alliance to manage a settlement house in 1898. [10]
The Educational Alliance in New York organized its first children’s camp in Cold Springs in 1902. It evolved into Surprise Lake. [11] In 1907, Helen Bauldauf suggested Cleveland’s Alliance raise money for its own summer camp. [12] Within a few years, Camp Wise was handling 200 children every two weeks, a thousand every summer. [13]
The programs were not ideological. Albert Brown remembered the only goal in the early years at Wise was providing healthy food and fun. [14] They were inspired by the sanitarium movement introduced in 1854 by Hermann Brehmer to treat tuberculosis in Silesia with fresh air, exercise, and good diet. [15]
Willard Parsons went from Henry Ward Beecher’s Brooklyn church to a small town in the Pocono mountains. Differences in the two environments provoked him to ask his parishioners to provide summer homes for poor children living in city tenements in 1881. A New York newspaper formalized his initiative with The Tribune Fresh Air Fund Aid Society in 1888. [16]
A new generation of Jews began arriving after pogroms in 1903. Many more arrived after a rebellion against the czar failed in 1905. [17] Some of these immigrants supported radical movements, and maintained an interest in Russia when the Bolsheviks took power during World War I.
Richard Stites said, in Russia, "thousands of choruses were established in workers’ clubs throughout the land. On every possible public occasion the old radical songs were intoned." [18] Workers’ choruses in New York used natal languages to reach foreign-born audiences. [19]
Ronnie Gilbert’s parents represented the differences between the two groups. Her father came to this country with his parents when he was a child from Ukraine. Her mother came directly from Warsaw in her teens. Some half-brothers paid her way after her parents died in epidemics. He was apolitical. She was active in trade unions and joined the Communist party. [20]
The groups diverged after World War I. Children of Russian immigrants became rabbis. In the 1920s, they took power back from the laity to transform settlement houses into synagogue community centers. Instead of assimilation, they emphasized maintaining their religion within American society. [21]
In 1911, Surprise Lake became associated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In 1917, it was folded into the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. [22] Camp Wise added a staff rabbi in 1925. [23]
More politically-motivated Jews began organizing their own camps. The United Workers Cooperative House opened Camp Nitgedaigit in 1922. Sholem Aleichem’s Folk Institute established Camp Boiberik the next year near Rhinebeck as a secular Yiddish-speaking community. [24] The same year, a Workmen’s Circle established Lakeland in Dutchess County for adults, and Camp Kinderland for children. [25]
Again, camps were more concerned with giving people a chance to escape the city than with indoctrination. Julia Gaberman Davis remembered: "I didn’t lecture the Nitgedaigit kids on Communism; that was not my way. I preferred games, social studies and even sex education." [26]
The Russian Communist Party was not content with letting indigenous movements develop. It forced groups to merge into the Workers Party of America in 1921, [27] and ordered it to infiltrate existing institutions, like labor unions. [28] It tried to subvert Nitgedaigit. When that failed, Communists organized Camp Unity in 1924. [29] In 1926, Communists tried coopting the Workmen’s Circles. The mutual-aid society abandoned Kinderland to establish Kinder Ring. [30]
Stalin consolidated his position in 1928, and banned folk music. [31] The next year the Proletarian Musicians Association was formed in Moscow to produce appropriate music. [32] In 1931, a group of some twenty choruses, bands, and orchestras organized the Workers Music League in New York to provide entertainment for party events. [33]
In 1932, it published the Red Song Book "as an incentive toward the organization of choruses and singing groups." [34] Serge Denisoff found most of the melodies were from Russia, Germany, France, and England. [35]
The Depression continued. Families no longer could afford a few days at an inexpensive resort as they had done in the early 1920s. University Settlement House opened a children’s camp on land near Beacon, New York, that had been used for more general retreats since 1910. [36] The International Workers Order established a children’s camp near a tributary of the Delaware river in New Jersey in 1934. [37]
Most of the music in those years was choral. Naomi Feld Bassuk remembered during World War II at Wo-Chi-Ca:
"The chorus did everything: folk songs, topical songs, union songs, work songs, Dust Bowl ballads. We did classical music, even produced a full-scale opera by Mozart. - ‘Basien and Bastienne’." [38]
She added:
"We performed pieces by Villa-Lobos and Bach. We sang in Italian, Spanish and French – in German, Hebrew, Yiddish. We did Earl Robinson’s ‘Lonesome Train.’ [39] We did a cantata by Herbert Haufrecht [40] called ‘We’ve Come From the City,’ about New Yorkers and upstate farmers learning that they had a lot in common." [41]
Gilbert went to the camp in these years. She recalled, they "were indoctrinated in very socially conscious ideas" by a deliberately diverse staff. The camp expanded from serving Jewish children to include Blacks and Puerto Ricans while she went there. [42]
End Notes:
Some of this material appeared in a different form in Camp Songs, Folk Songs. As should be clear, not all settlement house camps served Jewish immigrants, not all camps established by Jews were political, and not all political camps were sanctioned by the Communist party. Indigenous radical activities evolved from conditions in the United States.
1. Wikipedia. "Alexander III of Russia."
2. Wikipedia. "History of the Jews in the United States."
3. Wikipedia. "History of the Poles in the United States."
4. For instance, the YMCA began English classes for Germans in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. [43]
5. William Francis Allen’s work on Saint Helena Island was mentioned briefly in the post for 25 September 2018.
6. Wikipedia. "Five Points, Manhattan." Palmer’s contributions to the Holiness Movement were mentioned in the post for 7 December 2017.
7. David Kaufman. Shul with a Pool. Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1999. 98. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago two years later in 1888. Detroit’s Franklin Settlement House was established on the east side of the city where Polish Catholics were living. [44]
8. Kaufman. 94. He said the first Hebrew school was organized in 1864 "to combat the Christian missionary schools then operating in Jewish neighborhoods of the city."
9. Kaufman. 104.
10. Albert M. Brown. The Camp Wise Story. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Judah Rubinstein. Cleveland: The Western Reserve Historical Society, 1989. 3.
11. Brown. 1.
12. Brown. 4.
13. Brown. 24.
14. Brown. 11.
15. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 219.
16. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220. Beecher was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Plymouth Church began as an abolitionist church, supported in part by royalties from Stowe’s 1843 short-story collection, The Mayflower.
17. Wikipedia. "Nicholas II of Russia."
18. Richard Stites. Russian Popular Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. 46.
19. R. Serge Denisoff. Great Day Coming. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 41.
20. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand. Smith College archives. 10 March 2004. She was born in 1926.
21. Kaufman.
22. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 224.
23. Brown. 23.
24. Paul C. Mishler. Raising Reds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 84.
25. Mishler. 89.
26. Julia Gaberman Davis. Quoted by June Levine and Gene Gordon. Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca. San Rafael, California: Avon Springs Press, 2002. 1.
27. Wikipedia. "History of the Communist Party USA."
28. Wikipedia. "Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)."
29. Mishler. 84–85.
30. Mishler. 89.
31. Laura Olson. "Soviet Approaches to Folk Music Performance: Revival or Appropriation?" Washington: The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research report. 21 September 2000. 3.
32. Daniel Jaffé. Historical Dictionary of Russian Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012. 133–134.
33. Denisoff. 42.
34. Workers Music League. Red Song Book. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Quoted by Denisoff. 44.
35. Denisoff. 44.
36. Karen Maserjian Shan. "University Settlement Faces a New Future." Beacon Dispatch website. 5 March 2006. Pete Seeger lived near Beacon and often appeared at the camp.
37. Levine. 2.
38. Naomi Feld Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 35.
39. Earl Robinson was music director at Camp Unity. Millard Lampell wrote the text of the 1942 cantata. [45]
40. Herbert Haufrecht was associated with Camp Woodland, [46] which was founded in 1938 [47] near Phoenicia, New York, by Norman Studer. [48] Pete Seeger appeared at the camp. [49]
41. Bassuk. Quoted by Levine. 36.
42. Gilbert. The Communist Party began focusing on African Americans in 1929. [50]
43. Camp Songs, Folk Songs. 220.
44. "Franklin-Wright Settlement House District." Detroit 1701 website.
45. Wikipedia. "Earl Robinson."
46. Mishler. 103.
47. Mishler. 99.
48. Mishler. 101.
49. Mishler. 105–106.
50. Wikipedia. "The Communist Party USA and African Americans."
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
Heidi Cope - Kumbaya
Topic: Lullaby - Definition
Pete Seeger probably was the first commercial performer to use the "sleeping" verse with "Kumbaya." [1] He was singing it in Chicago in 1957. [2] When he recorded the song in a Carnegie Hall concert in December of that year the people in the audience already knew the verse. [3]
The Weavers were responsible for the popular perception of "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. [4] In 1958, they said: "It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it only had one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [5]
What it was about the melody that signaled lullaby is a conundrum. Ontario researchers presented a sample of songs from "several regions of the world" to university students and asked them which were the lullabies in matched sets of adult and infant songs. They made sure each pair was the same tempo, since they knew if they did not, people would select the slower. 63% were able to identify the lullabies. [6]
More interesting were the error patterns. Some 85% were able to recognize lullabies from Ireland, Czechoslovakia, the Creek, and Pygmies. Nearly all had problems identifying infant songs from Chad, Ecuador, Samoa, and Ukraine. [7]
When Sandra Trehub’s team obscured the voices, most could no longer identify the lullabies on musical traits alone. The researchers thought the tone of voice was a determining factor. The students said their criteria were simplicity and repetitiveness. [8]
Repetition was easy to define, and certainly characterized "Kumbaya." The AAAB line pattern was mirrored by an AA1AB melody. The lines were broken into statements and refrains, with only the statements changing from stanza to stanza. The refrains constituted the final B lines. Melodically, the statement phrases all used the same musical pattern; only the refrains on the A lines distinguished the second line from the first and third.
Simplicity was harder to define scientifically. In a followup study, the group made tapes of pairs of adult and infant songs from thirty cultures, making sure many were non-western. This time they simply asked students which ones were simpler. In most cases, the simpler ones were the lullabies, and again people were consistent in their mistakes. [9]
Anna Unyk transcribed the songs, and classified them by musical attrbutes the group thought might signify simplicity. A computer then compared the traits against the student identifications. The attributes related to the tone of voice were not significant. They speculated that might have been because they field recordings of lullabies were not done with infants present. [10]
The purely musical attributes that did correlate with the lullabies students thought were simpler were the higher numbers of descending phrases and fewer changes in melodic direction. When compared with the adult songs, the median pitches were higher. [11]
"Kumbaya" relied on musical phrases with one change of direction. The A lines initially ascended through a triad, and repeated the top note several times in the statement, before rising slightly and descending in the refrain. [12] The second, A1, line used the same broken chord for the statement, but descended in the refrain. [13] The final line undulated around the base note of the chord. [14]
The team did not define high, and did not publish musical details on the songs they used [15] so it was impossible to know if "Kumbaya" would have been considered a higher or a lower song. Its standard range was from middle C to the orchestra’s A. The Weavers’ version was one tone higher, from D to B.
The only other change The Weavers made to the melody was to simplify it by altering the Xxx rhythm to some form of Xx. They sang the A lines in 3/2 and the B lines in 2/2 or 2/4. As for the tempo, they simply said they used "lullaby tempo."
The words they added were probably what cemented its linkage with a lullaby. They changed the pronoun "someone" to nature nouns, one of which, moon, was associated with the evening. Heidi Cope’s version dropped The Weavers’ trees verse and expanded the night symbols. Her moon was shining while her stars were twinkling. Her final verses were even more specific: the penultimate was baby’s sleeping, and the last was a series of uh’s.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Heidi Cope, soprano
Vocal Group: none
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harp
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Amazon
(C) 2008 Heidi Cope
CD Baby [16]
© Copyright - Cope Productions
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bye yah, with slight emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya/moon/stars/sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: moon, stars, baby
Term for Deity: none, used "oh"
Special Terms: nature images
Basic Form: five-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated last line of "oh" verse
Unique Features: use of vocables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in ornamentation and accompaniment
Singing Style: Cope altered the melody in one line of the second verse, changed the key in the third, and used glissandi in the fourth and fifth iterations.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the harp was subdued. It played arpeggios between the phrases of the first and second verses. In the stars verse, the style changed to a tinkling on the word "twinkling." In the fourth verse, the playing more resembled a keyboard instrument.
Notes on Performance
CD cover was plain lavender with a anthropomorphic yellow quarter moon and some scattered stars. The moon had closed eyes and a smile.
Cope assumed an audience that could understand the words, and would be bored by simple repetition. The testimonials she published suggested she sent copies to daycare centers for use during after-lunch rest periods.
One director wrote: "We use this in our nap rooms. It is wonderfully soothing music." [17]
A Montessori owner echoed: "We are enjoying Lullaby and Goodnight and it truly works at naptime. Thank you!!" [18]
Daycare centers are noisy places, even during their rest periods. Erin Carole Patterson noted in ones she visited in Florida it never really was quiet. The facilities’ layouts meant teachers and others had to walk through nap areas to get from one place to another. Other disruptions included "children being picked up by parents, construction outside the building, sick children." [19] and changes to the schedule that altered start times. [20]
She experimented with playing a Disney instrumental lullaby CD and one with rain sounds to see if simly masking the noise would help the children fall asleep. The lullaby worked best the first day, but once the children were used to both CDs, they fell asleep faster with the rain sounds. She had no control group to give her information about how quickly they would have napped with nothing to calm them. [21]
Audience Perceptions
Several participants in on-line forums have commented on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. Echoing The Weavers, one wrote: "Kumbaya is, after all, a luulaby, not a protest song." [22]
Another responded, "I don’t think I’ve heard it sung for at least 32 years. I can remember singing it then because it makes a great lullabye, and I sang it to both my kids." [23]
A third told readers to "think of Kumbaya stripped of words. The rhythm and melody invite (almost compel) gentle rocking and swaying -- like a lullaby. Humans of any age will always need that from time to time." [24]
Notes on Performers
No information available.
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. 7 November 2008.
End Notes
1. I suspect it already was in tradition in some of the camps where the song was treated as an open-ended song sung slowly in the evening.
2. Pete Seeger. "Kumbaya." Pete Seeger Live '57. Goldenland Records MP3. 2013. Thomas Stern identified this tape as a performance for the Folklore Society of the University of Chicago, 13 October 1957. (Reply to query "Pete Seeger Live '57". Mudcat Café website, 2 May 2016.)
3. Pete Seeger. "Kum Ba Ya" in "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Carnegie Hall, 27 December 1957; released 1958.
4. Their version was discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
5. "Kumbaya." 156-158 in The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156. This transcription was the one used for this post. They had to have heard Seeger’s version with sleeping; they could not have reproduced his form from hearing a single word.
6. Sandra E. Trehub, Anna M. Unyk, and Laurel J. Trainor. "Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures." Infant Behavior and Development 16:193-211:1993. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 58.
7. Trehub, Adults. Discussed by Anna M. Unyk, Sandra E. Trehub, Laurel J. Trainor, and E. Glenn Schellenberg. "Lullabies and Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective." Psychology of Music 20:15-28:1992. 19.
8. Trehub, Adults. Unyk, Simplicity. 17.
9. Unyk, Simplicity. 19.
10. Unyk, Simplicity. 23.
11. Unyk, Simplicity. 24.
12. C-E-G-G-G-A-A-G. Arc in bold.
13. C-E-G-G-G-F-E-D. Descent in bold.
14. F-E-C-D-D-C. Base note in bold.
15. Unyk did list all the recordings.
16. "Lullaby and Goodnight by Heidi Cope." CD Baby website.
17. Lori W. Director, Children’s World Center. CD Baby website.
18. Phyllis B. Director, Mountainside Montessori. CD Baby website.
19. Erin Carole Patterson. "The Effect of Lullaby Music versus Rain Sounds on Inducing Sleep in the First 20 Minutes of Daycare Naptime." Master’s thesis. Florida State University, 2011. 19.
20. Patterson. 20.
21. Patterson was a music major, not a science one. She believed repetitive sound was a critical factor and wanted to determine if the sounds of rain were as effective as lullabies. Given the logistics of fieldwork, she may not have been able to observe the infants before her experiment. However, it would have helped if she had talked with the teachers about what they normally did and asked to see any CDs they were using.
22. BuckMulligan. Mudcat Café website. "Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?" Thread begun 16 February 2008. Comment added 19 February 2008.
23. Nancy King. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun 29 January 2007. Comment added 7 January 2007.
24. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006.
Pete Seeger probably was the first commercial performer to use the "sleeping" verse with "Kumbaya." [1] He was singing it in Chicago in 1957. [2] When he recorded the song in a Carnegie Hall concert in December of that year the people in the audience already knew the verse. [3]
The Weavers were responsible for the popular perception of "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. [4] In 1958, they said: "It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it only had one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [5]
What it was about the melody that signaled lullaby is a conundrum. Ontario researchers presented a sample of songs from "several regions of the world" to university students and asked them which were the lullabies in matched sets of adult and infant songs. They made sure each pair was the same tempo, since they knew if they did not, people would select the slower. 63% were able to identify the lullabies. [6]
More interesting were the error patterns. Some 85% were able to recognize lullabies from Ireland, Czechoslovakia, the Creek, and Pygmies. Nearly all had problems identifying infant songs from Chad, Ecuador, Samoa, and Ukraine. [7]
When Sandra Trehub’s team obscured the voices, most could no longer identify the lullabies on musical traits alone. The researchers thought the tone of voice was a determining factor. The students said their criteria were simplicity and repetitiveness. [8]
Repetition was easy to define, and certainly characterized "Kumbaya." The AAAB line pattern was mirrored by an AA1AB melody. The lines were broken into statements and refrains, with only the statements changing from stanza to stanza. The refrains constituted the final B lines. Melodically, the statement phrases all used the same musical pattern; only the refrains on the A lines distinguished the second line from the first and third.
Simplicity was harder to define scientifically. In a followup study, the group made tapes of pairs of adult and infant songs from thirty cultures, making sure many were non-western. This time they simply asked students which ones were simpler. In most cases, the simpler ones were the lullabies, and again people were consistent in their mistakes. [9]
Anna Unyk transcribed the songs, and classified them by musical attrbutes the group thought might signify simplicity. A computer then compared the traits against the student identifications. The attributes related to the tone of voice were not significant. They speculated that might have been because they field recordings of lullabies were not done with infants present. [10]
The purely musical attributes that did correlate with the lullabies students thought were simpler were the higher numbers of descending phrases and fewer changes in melodic direction. When compared with the adult songs, the median pitches were higher. [11]
"Kumbaya" relied on musical phrases with one change of direction. The A lines initially ascended through a triad, and repeated the top note several times in the statement, before rising slightly and descending in the refrain. [12] The second, A1, line used the same broken chord for the statement, but descended in the refrain. [13] The final line undulated around the base note of the chord. [14]
The team did not define high, and did not publish musical details on the songs they used [15] so it was impossible to know if "Kumbaya" would have been considered a higher or a lower song. Its standard range was from middle C to the orchestra’s A. The Weavers’ version was one tone higher, from D to B.
The only other change The Weavers made to the melody was to simplify it by altering the Xxx rhythm to some form of Xx. They sang the A lines in 3/2 and the B lines in 2/2 or 2/4. As for the tempo, they simply said they used "lullaby tempo."
The words they added were probably what cemented its linkage with a lullaby. They changed the pronoun "someone" to nature nouns, one of which, moon, was associated with the evening. Heidi Cope’s version dropped The Weavers’ trees verse and expanded the night symbols. Her moon was shining while her stars were twinkling. Her final verses were even more specific: the penultimate was baby’s sleeping, and the last was a series of uh’s.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Heidi Cope, soprano
Vocal Group: none
Vocal Director: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: harp
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Amazon
(C) 2008 Heidi Cope
CD Baby [16]
© Copyright - Cope Productions
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bye yah, with slight emphasis on second syllable
Verses: kumbaya/moon/stars/sleeping
Vocabulary
Pronoun: moon, stars, baby
Term for Deity: none, used "oh"
Special Terms: nature images
Basic Form: five-verse song
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: repeated last line of "oh" verse
Unique Features: use of vocables
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: repetition with variations in ornamentation and accompaniment
Singing Style: Cope altered the melody in one line of the second verse, changed the key in the third, and used glissandi in the fourth and fifth iterations.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the harp was subdued. It played arpeggios between the phrases of the first and second verses. In the stars verse, the style changed to a tinkling on the word "twinkling." In the fourth verse, the playing more resembled a keyboard instrument.
Notes on Performance
CD cover was plain lavender with a anthropomorphic yellow quarter moon and some scattered stars. The moon had closed eyes and a smile.
Cope assumed an audience that could understand the words, and would be bored by simple repetition. The testimonials she published suggested she sent copies to daycare centers for use during after-lunch rest periods.
One director wrote: "We use this in our nap rooms. It is wonderfully soothing music." [17]
A Montessori owner echoed: "We are enjoying Lullaby and Goodnight and it truly works at naptime. Thank you!!" [18]
Daycare centers are noisy places, even during their rest periods. Erin Carole Patterson noted in ones she visited in Florida it never really was quiet. The facilities’ layouts meant teachers and others had to walk through nap areas to get from one place to another. Other disruptions included "children being picked up by parents, construction outside the building, sick children." [19] and changes to the schedule that altered start times. [20]
She experimented with playing a Disney instrumental lullaby CD and one with rain sounds to see if simly masking the noise would help the children fall asleep. The lullaby worked best the first day, but once the children were used to both CDs, they fell asleep faster with the rain sounds. She had no control group to give her information about how quickly they would have napped with nothing to calm them. [21]
Audience Perceptions
Several participants in on-line forums have commented on "Kumbaya" as a lullaby. Echoing The Weavers, one wrote: "Kumbaya is, after all, a luulaby, not a protest song." [22]
Another responded, "I don’t think I’ve heard it sung for at least 32 years. I can remember singing it then because it makes a great lullabye, and I sang it to both my kids." [23]
A third told readers to "think of Kumbaya stripped of words. The rhythm and melody invite (almost compel) gentle rocking and swaying -- like a lullaby. Humans of any age will always need that from time to time." [24]
Notes on Performers
No information available.
Availability
CD: Lullaby and Goodnight. 7 November 2008.
End Notes
1. I suspect it already was in tradition in some of the camps where the song was treated as an open-ended song sung slowly in the evening.
2. Pete Seeger. "Kumbaya." Pete Seeger Live '57. Goldenland Records MP3. 2013. Thomas Stern identified this tape as a performance for the Folklore Society of the University of Chicago, 13 October 1957. (Reply to query "Pete Seeger Live '57". Mudcat Café website, 2 May 2016.)
3. Pete Seeger. "Kum Ba Ya" in "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Carnegie Hall, 27 December 1957; released 1958.
4. Their version was discussed in the post for 3 October 2017.
5. "Kumbaya." 156-158 in The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156. This transcription was the one used for this post. They had to have heard Seeger’s version with sleeping; they could not have reproduced his form from hearing a single word.
6. Sandra E. Trehub, Anna M. Unyk, and Laurel J. Trainor. "Adults Identify Infant-Directed Music across Cultures." Infant Behavior and Development 16:193-211:1993. Summarized by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel Trainor. "Singing to Infants: Lullabies and Play Songs." Advances in Infancy Research 12:43-77:1998. 58.
7. Trehub, Adults. Discussed by Anna M. Unyk, Sandra E. Trehub, Laurel J. Trainor, and E. Glenn Schellenberg. "Lullabies and Simplicity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective." Psychology of Music 20:15-28:1992. 19.
8. Trehub, Adults. Unyk, Simplicity. 17.
9. Unyk, Simplicity. 19.
10. Unyk, Simplicity. 23.
11. Unyk, Simplicity. 24.
12. C-E-G-G-G-A-A-G. Arc in bold.
13. C-E-G-G-G-F-E-D. Descent in bold.
14. F-E-C-D-D-C. Base note in bold.
15. Unyk did list all the recordings.
16. "Lullaby and Goodnight by Heidi Cope." CD Baby website.
17. Lori W. Director, Children’s World Center. CD Baby website.
18. Phyllis B. Director, Mountainside Montessori. CD Baby website.
19. Erin Carole Patterson. "The Effect of Lullaby Music versus Rain Sounds on Inducing Sleep in the First 20 Minutes of Daycare Naptime." Master’s thesis. Florida State University, 2011. 19.
20. Patterson. 20.
21. Patterson was a music major, not a science one. She believed repetitive sound was a critical factor and wanted to determine if the sounds of rain were as effective as lullabies. Given the logistics of fieldwork, she may not have been able to observe the infants before her experiment. However, it would have helped if she had talked with the teachers about what they normally did and asked to see any CDs they were using.
22. BuckMulligan. Mudcat Café website. "Why is Kumbaya a dirty word?" Thread begun 16 February 2008. Comment added 19 February 2008.
23. Nancy King. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun 29 January 2007. Comment added 7 January 2007.
24. mj. 31 August 2006. Comment on Eric Zorn. "Someone’s dissin’, Lord, kumbaya." Chicago Tribune website. 31 August 2006.
Thursday, October 12, 2017
The Weavers - Kum-Ba-Ya
Topic: Political Versions
Carl Benkert recognized the importance of documenting events while they were occurring. After the Civil Rights and Vietnam protest movements had faded, Tom Glazer collected their songs in his 1970 Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. He included Carawan’s version of "Come by Here" and a new variant by The Weavers. [1] He called the first "a fraternal twin" of the second." [2]
In this one The Weavers added four verses to three taken from the standard song (weeping, singing, praying); one permutation was "the world’s in danger." They used "someone" and restored "Lord." The latter bridged the gulf between New Testament Christians, who associated the word with Jesus, and Old Testament believers, who used it for Jehovah. [3]
Glazer gave the same copyright information for this song that appeared with the recorded version discussed in the post for 3 October 2017. So far as I know they never recorded it. Did any of you ever hear them sing it? Let me know with a comment or email.
Credits
Additional words and new music by Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, and Erik Darling.
Copyright: © 1959, Sanga Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: kumbaya, weeping, singing, praying, their own
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: they replaced the usual crying with weeping
Theme: the political verses were generic. They could have fitted the atom bomb tests of the 1950s and today’s problems with climate change.
Format: 8 verse song
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 8 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAAB
Line Form: statement-refrain
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/2 and 2/2
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar Chords: C F G
Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert’s mother was active in the trade union movement, and took her to a rally where Paul Robeson performed. She later told an interviewer:
"I can remember my mother on the picket line, singing, what would it have been? (singing) ‘Hold the fort for we are coming. Union men be strong.’ Union men, not union women. ‘Union men be strong.’ And so there was that. And then there was Robeson. So something clicked at that time, and Robeson said, I remember him saying, ‘Your people and mine are forever connected by our slave heritage.’ Well, that got me thinking, what was that about? So, there it was. That was the beginning of my life as a singer and a — I wouldn’t call myself an activist, but a singer, a singer with social conscience, let’s say." [4]
Her mother sent her to Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, sponsored by the Communists’ Worker’s Order. Paul Robeson appeared most summers. She began singing with Hellerman when the two were counselors there. [5]
Lee Hays remembered he discovered the importance of singing in the 1930s when he was in a car with African-American activists trying to outrun a white mob in Arkansas. Jeff Sharlet summarized the experience for the Oxford American in 2014:
"‘The organizer started singing.’
"Ordinarily, they’d sing union songs. ‘But in this cold night we sang hymns.’ They’d all been raised in the church and all had converted to the union; they believed in deliverance, here and now, not salvation in the hereafter. But they remembered the old words, harmonies swelling and breaking (‘Floods of joy o’er my soul like the sea billows roll’) bass voice giving way to sweet soprano, the organizer’s raspy baritone coming in with a verse or a chorus, one hymn after another, and all the voices searching, working for harmonies unheard and unknown, perfect blends of tones and feelings and fears.
"I wondered about this, why we found such comfort in the old hymns, we whose eyes were fixed on a new day and a new way of life. For awhile it was possible not to be scared, even.
"But the answer was there, and it came to me that the words of the song didn’t matter. They were there and we sang them, but what mattered was that we were singing." [6]
Hellerman, Darling, and Glazer were musicians rather than activists. Darling said he had not thought much about politics until he was hired by The Weavers. He then found others assumed he was a serious as they, even though "I wasn’t aligned with any political group." He left after he read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an event that coincided with his divorce. [7]
Glazer began playing guitar in Washington after he met Alan Lomax, then moved to New York where people like Pete Seeger were generating a new interest in American folk music. He wrote songs for folk revival singers in the 1950s and 1960s, but his best remembered was a parody, "On Top of Spaghetti." [8]
Hellerman later produced Joan Baez’s first album for Vanguard [9] and worked as music director for Elektra Records. [10]. He argued:
"It would seem that the question boils down to looking upon a folksong in either one of two ways: (1) as a inviolate museum piece, which must be kept as antiseptic as possible; or (2) as a living expression of a folk culture, susceptible and subject to all the forces of the culture. As a living thing, it must grow and change." [11]
Availability
Songbook: Tom Glazer. Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. New York: D. McKay Company, 1970.
End Notes
1. The Weavers’ first version of "Kumbaya" was described in the post for 3 October 2017.
2. Glazer. 56. It did not credit Carawan’s book discussed in the post for 5 October 2017.
3. Hebrews were forbidden from pronouncing or writing the name of their god, Jehovah. The word translated as Lord was given to Moses as YHWH, which was the word stripped of its vowels. (Encyclopædia Britannica. "Yahweh.")
The New Testament usage came from 1 Corinthians 8:6: "But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him." ("There Is One God." Is God a Trinity. United Church of God Beyond Today website.)
The two words went through several translations before they emerged as one in the Greek. The Encyclopædia Britannica said the first Hebrew word, "Elohim," was replaced with "Adonai." That, in turn, became "Kyrios" in Greek. The New Testament used the Greek "Theos" for God, and "Kyrios" for Lord. (S. Michael Houdmann. "What do LORD, GOD, Lord, God, etc., stand for in the Bible?" Got Questions website.)
4. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand, Smith College archives, 10 March 2004. 4-5. Paul Robeson was mentioned in the post for 17 August 2017.
5. Gilbert. 9.
6. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, Fall 2007. The line quoted was from "Since Jesus Came into My Heart." It was written in 1914 by Rufus H. McDaniel. (Hymnary website.)
7. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life!" Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 2008. 249-251.
8. Douglas Martin. "Tom Glazer, Folk Singer, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 26 February 2003.
9. Wikipedia. "Joan Baez."
10. Fred Hellerman. Quoted by Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 second edition. 111.
11. Hellerman. 112.
Carl Benkert recognized the importance of documenting events while they were occurring. After the Civil Rights and Vietnam protest movements had faded, Tom Glazer collected their songs in his 1970 Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. He included Carawan’s version of "Come by Here" and a new variant by The Weavers. [1] He called the first "a fraternal twin" of the second." [2]
In this one The Weavers added four verses to three taken from the standard song (weeping, singing, praying); one permutation was "the world’s in danger." They used "someone" and restored "Lord." The latter bridged the gulf between New Testament Christians, who associated the word with Jesus, and Old Testament believers, who used it for Jehovah. [3]
Glazer gave the same copyright information for this song that appeared with the recorded version discussed in the post for 3 October 2017. So far as I know they never recorded it. Did any of you ever hear them sing it? Let me know with a comment or email.
Credits
Additional words and new music by Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, and Erik Darling.
Copyright: © 1959, Sanga Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Verses: kumbaya, weeping, singing, praying, their own
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: they replaced the usual crying with weeping
Theme: the political verses were generic. They could have fitted the atom bomb tests of the 1950s and today’s problems with climate change.
Format: 8 verse song
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 8 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAAB
Line Form: statement-refrain
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: 3/2 and 2/2
Key Signature: no sharps or flats
Guitar Chords: C F G
Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert’s mother was active in the trade union movement, and took her to a rally where Paul Robeson performed. She later told an interviewer:
"I can remember my mother on the picket line, singing, what would it have been? (singing) ‘Hold the fort for we are coming. Union men be strong.’ Union men, not union women. ‘Union men be strong.’ And so there was that. And then there was Robeson. So something clicked at that time, and Robeson said, I remember him saying, ‘Your people and mine are forever connected by our slave heritage.’ Well, that got me thinking, what was that about? So, there it was. That was the beginning of my life as a singer and a — I wouldn’t call myself an activist, but a singer, a singer with social conscience, let’s say." [4]
Her mother sent her to Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, sponsored by the Communists’ Worker’s Order. Paul Robeson appeared most summers. She began singing with Hellerman when the two were counselors there. [5]
Lee Hays remembered he discovered the importance of singing in the 1930s when he was in a car with African-American activists trying to outrun a white mob in Arkansas. Jeff Sharlet summarized the experience for the Oxford American in 2014:
"‘The organizer started singing.’
"Ordinarily, they’d sing union songs. ‘But in this cold night we sang hymns.’ They’d all been raised in the church and all had converted to the union; they believed in deliverance, here and now, not salvation in the hereafter. But they remembered the old words, harmonies swelling and breaking (‘Floods of joy o’er my soul like the sea billows roll’) bass voice giving way to sweet soprano, the organizer’s raspy baritone coming in with a verse or a chorus, one hymn after another, and all the voices searching, working for harmonies unheard and unknown, perfect blends of tones and feelings and fears.
"I wondered about this, why we found such comfort in the old hymns, we whose eyes were fixed on a new day and a new way of life. For awhile it was possible not to be scared, even.
"But the answer was there, and it came to me that the words of the song didn’t matter. They were there and we sang them, but what mattered was that we were singing." [6]
Hellerman, Darling, and Glazer were musicians rather than activists. Darling said he had not thought much about politics until he was hired by The Weavers. He then found others assumed he was a serious as they, even though "I wasn’t aligned with any political group." He left after he read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an event that coincided with his divorce. [7]
Glazer began playing guitar in Washington after he met Alan Lomax, then moved to New York where people like Pete Seeger were generating a new interest in American folk music. He wrote songs for folk revival singers in the 1950s and 1960s, but his best remembered was a parody, "On Top of Spaghetti." [8]
Hellerman later produced Joan Baez’s first album for Vanguard [9] and worked as music director for Elektra Records. [10]. He argued:
"It would seem that the question boils down to looking upon a folksong in either one of two ways: (1) as a inviolate museum piece, which must be kept as antiseptic as possible; or (2) as a living expression of a folk culture, susceptible and subject to all the forces of the culture. As a living thing, it must grow and change." [11]
Availability
Songbook: Tom Glazer. Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest. New York: D. McKay Company, 1970.
End Notes
1. The Weavers’ first version of "Kumbaya" was described in the post for 3 October 2017.
2. Glazer. 56. It did not credit Carawan’s book discussed in the post for 5 October 2017.
3. Hebrews were forbidden from pronouncing or writing the name of their god, Jehovah. The word translated as Lord was given to Moses as YHWH, which was the word stripped of its vowels. (Encyclopædia Britannica. "Yahweh.")
The New Testament usage came from 1 Corinthians 8:6: "But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him." ("There Is One God." Is God a Trinity. United Church of God Beyond Today website.)
The two words went through several translations before they emerged as one in the Greek. The Encyclopædia Britannica said the first Hebrew word, "Elohim," was replaced with "Adonai." That, in turn, became "Kyrios" in Greek. The New Testament used the Greek "Theos" for God, and "Kyrios" for Lord. (S. Michael Houdmann. "What do LORD, GOD, Lord, God, etc., stand for in the Bible?" Got Questions website.)
4. Ronnie Gilbert. Interview with Kate Weigand, Smith College archives, 10 March 2004. 4-5. Paul Robeson was mentioned in the post for 17 August 2017.
5. Gilbert. 9.
6. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, Fall 2007. The line quoted was from "Since Jesus Came into My Heart." It was written in 1914 by Rufus H. McDaniel. (Hymnary website.)
7. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life!" Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc., 2008. 249-251.
8. Douglas Martin. "Tom Glazer, Folk Singer, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 26 February 2003.
9. Wikipedia. "Joan Baez."
10. Fred Hellerman. Quoted by Ray M. Lawless. Folksingers and Folksongs in America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1965 second edition. 111.
11. Hellerman. 112.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
The Weavers - Kumbaya
Topic: Political Versions
"Kumbaya" did not enter camp tradition as a purely religious song, but as a song that could be easily learned and sung with timbraic or parallel harmony. One participant in Mudcat Café remembered:
"I understood it to have vaguely African origins, but this was just a point of interest without political overtones. It was simply, like Michael Row the Boat Ashore, an appealing (for awhile) spiritual that everyone could join in on." [1]
As Meself indicated, "Kumbaya" also had no political connotations when it first was introduced. When The Weavers first heard it, probably from Pete Seeger, [2] they said:
"It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it had only the one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [3]
The New York- and Arkansas-bred singers may not have recognized the Midwestern use of "someone" as an elastic term that could shift between the speaker, the audience, and specific members of the group within a sentence. They supplied an antecedent to what they may have assumed was a dangling third-person pronoun. Their first stanza was still "someone’s sleeping," but the second was "trees are sleeping" and the third was "moon is smiling."
The group of two Jews, an unchurched Episcopalian, and the son of a Methodist minister excised the religious content when they made the refrain "kumbaya ya," and changed the last line to "na na kumbaya." Nana was a common name for a grandmother, [4] but more likely it came from the 1954 television version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Richard. The Darling family dog, who looked after Wendy and her brothers, was named Nana.
If the song had any polemical value in 1959, one of their members would have known. The group grew from 1930s political activities of Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. In the 1940s the two joined with Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers that performed at union and other political events. After Guthrie became ill and Lampell dropped out, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman join in the reconstituted Weavers. At the time this album was recorded, Seeger had just left the group, and Erik Darling was taking his place.
Seeger’s uncle Allan was a romantic poet killed glorifying the adventure of fighting with the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Before he moved to Paris, he lived the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and visited a boardinghouse where William Butler Yeats’ father presided. [5] Pete’s idea of a political song probably was drawn from Bertolt Brecht and Guthrie. Most were ballads that described events or were rallying cries to action.
Hays had more experience making simple changes in familiar songs. When he came of age, economic conditions in the Depression prevented him from going to college. Instead, he went to the Highlander Folk School, [6] which had been founded to train union organizers in the South. [7] He returned to his native Arkansas to organize sharecroppers and teach at Commonwealth College, [8] another school for activists. [9] He learned to substitute union words into hymns so they could "break into the hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [10]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Ronnie Gilbert, contralto
Vocal Accompaniment: Lee Hays, bass; Fred Hellerman, baritone; Erik Darling, tenor
Instrumental Accompaniment: the usual configuration was Fred Hellerman on guitar and Erik Darling on banjo. Their songbook included a piano accompaniment and guitar chords.
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Album
Hays, Hellerman, Darling, Gilbert
All songs Sanga Music Inc - B. M. I.
Songbook
New words and new music arrangement by Erik Darling, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman.
Copyright 1959 Sanga Music Inc., New York, N.Y.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: on the refrains they pronounced the first syllable of kumbaya as "cum" and emphasized "by." When kumbaya was the verse, they sang and emphasized "koom."
Verses: kumbaya, sleeping, their own
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone and then nouns
Term for Deity: "na na" and "ya ya" were substituted
Special Terms: nana
Format: verse-burden
Verse Length: 5 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: xAxxA
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 7 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAABB
Line Form: statement-refrain
Ending: additional repetition of last line
Literary Devices: incremental repetition
Notes on Music
Album
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; they smoothed the syncopation into quarter quarter half half notes.
Tempo: slow
Songbook
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: alternated between 3/2 and 2/2
Tempo: lullaby tempo
Key Signature: two sharps
Guitar Chords: D G A A7
Basic Structure: call-response
Harmonic Structure: parallel chords
Singing Style: One syllable to one note
Solo: Gilbert trilled the "ba" in kumbaya
Solo-Group Dynamics: on verses, Gilbert sang the statements and the group joined on the refrains and final lines. The entire group sang the kumbaya stanzas. The first and last repetitions were sung by two voices, either Gilbert and Darling, or Gilbert recording with herself.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the banjo played a high-low-high-low motif in the introduction and continued it softly during the singing. The guitar played the melody in place of a repetition of the burden between the second and third verses, with the banjo playing arpeggios and strumming chords. The banjo continued the high-low motif after the voices faded at the end.
Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her Jewish father had immigrated from Ukraine. Her mother was a Polish-born Jew. [11]
Fred Hellerman was born in Flatbush, New York, where his Jewish father had moved from Riga, Latvia. His mother’s Jewish parents also came from Riga. [12]
Erik Darling was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Canandaigua, New York. He spent his high school years with his mother in New York City. [13] Darling remembered his father’s church "had been Episcopalian, and he had found religion hypocritical, mean-spirited, and centered around exclusivity. The self-righteous, he thought, were a slap in the face of God, if there was one." [14]
Lee Hays was born to a Methodist minister in Little Rock, Arkansas. [15]
Availability
Album: Travelling On With The Weavers. Vanguard VRS 9043. 1958.
Reissue: Best Of The Vanguard Years. Vanguard 79580-2. 2001.
Reissue: Various Artists. Folk-Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. X5 Music Group. 17 September 2013.
YouTube: uploaded by The Orchard Enterprises, 25 December 2014.
Songbook: The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156-158.
End Notes
1. Meself. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun January 29, 2007. Comment added 18 February 2008.
2. Seeger had performed "Kumbaya" at Carnegie Hall on 27 December 1957. In "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Released 1958
3. Travelling On liner notes and songbook, page 156.
4. The Random House Dictionary suggested "nana" was used for a grandmother in the Northeastern United States, for a godmother in the Gulf states, and for a nursemaid in the Southeast. ("Nana." Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Quoted by Dictionary website, 2016.)
It might have been introduced into this country by Irish immigrants. The word was reported by a ten-year-old girl in England in 1844 for her nanny. (Emily Pepys. Diary entries for 9 March 1844 and 25 December 1844. Quoted in Oxford English Dictionary entry for "nana.")
The word grandmother made little sense in a lullaby, which would have been sung by a grandmother to an infant. It also was not clear if any of The Weavers would have grown up with the term. The Yiddish word for grandmother was some form of "Bubbe." (Sarah Bunin Benor. Jewish English Lexicon website.)
5. Wikipedia. "Alan Seeger."
6. John S. Wilson. "Lee Hays, a Co-founder of the Weavers, Dies." The New York Times, 27 August 1981.
7. Wikipedia. "Highlander Research and Education Center."
8. Wilson.
9. William H. Cobb. "Commonwealth College." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 27 February 2012.
10. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, fall 2007.
11. Bruce Weber. "Ronnie Gilbert, Bold-Voiced Singer With The Weavers, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 6 June 2015.
12. William Grimes. "Fred Hellerman, Last of The Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 2 September 2016.
13. William Grimes. "Erik Darling Dies at 74; Musician in The Weavers." The New York Times, 7 August 2008.
14. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc. 2008. 6.
15. Wilson.
"Kumbaya" did not enter camp tradition as a purely religious song, but as a song that could be easily learned and sung with timbraic or parallel harmony. One participant in Mudcat Café remembered:
"I understood it to have vaguely African origins, but this was just a point of interest without political overtones. It was simply, like Michael Row the Boat Ashore, an appealing (for awhile) spiritual that everyone could join in on." [1]
As Meself indicated, "Kumbaya" also had no political connotations when it first was introduced. When The Weavers first heard it, probably from Pete Seeger, [2] they said:
"It came to us as a song supposedly from Africa, and it had only the one word. The pretty tune suggested that it might be a lullaby, so we added a few lines to make it that." [3]
The New York- and Arkansas-bred singers may not have recognized the Midwestern use of "someone" as an elastic term that could shift between the speaker, the audience, and specific members of the group within a sentence. They supplied an antecedent to what they may have assumed was a dangling third-person pronoun. Their first stanza was still "someone’s sleeping," but the second was "trees are sleeping" and the third was "moon is smiling."
The group of two Jews, an unchurched Episcopalian, and the son of a Methodist minister excised the religious content when they made the refrain "kumbaya ya," and changed the last line to "na na kumbaya." Nana was a common name for a grandmother, [4] but more likely it came from the 1954 television version of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Richard. The Darling family dog, who looked after Wendy and her brothers, was named Nana.
If the song had any polemical value in 1959, one of their members would have known. The group grew from 1930s political activities of Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. In the 1940s the two joined with Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers that performed at union and other political events. After Guthrie became ill and Lampell dropped out, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman join in the reconstituted Weavers. At the time this album was recorded, Seeger had just left the group, and Erik Darling was taking his place.
Seeger’s uncle Allan was a romantic poet killed glorifying the adventure of fighting with the French Foreign Legion in World War I. Before he moved to Paris, he lived the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and visited a boardinghouse where William Butler Yeats’ father presided. [5] Pete’s idea of a political song probably was drawn from Bertolt Brecht and Guthrie. Most were ballads that described events or were rallying cries to action.
Hays had more experience making simple changes in familiar songs. When he came of age, economic conditions in the Depression prevented him from going to college. Instead, he went to the Highlander Folk School, [6] which had been founded to train union organizers in the South. [7] He returned to his native Arkansas to organize sharecroppers and teach at Commonwealth College, [8] another school for activists. [9] He learned to substitute union words into hymns so they could "break into the hymn words if gun thugs should appear." [10]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Ronnie Gilbert, contralto
Vocal Accompaniment: Lee Hays, bass; Fred Hellerman, baritone; Erik Darling, tenor
Instrumental Accompaniment: the usual configuration was Fred Hellerman on guitar and Erik Darling on banjo. Their songbook included a piano accompaniment and guitar chords.
Rhythm Accompaniment: none
Credits
Album
Hays, Hellerman, Darling, Gilbert
All songs Sanga Music Inc - B. M. I.
Songbook
New words and new music arrangement by Erik Darling, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman.
Copyright 1959 Sanga Music Inc., New York, N.Y.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: on the refrains they pronounced the first syllable of kumbaya as "cum" and emphasized "by." When kumbaya was the verse, they sang and emphasized "koom."
Verses: kumbaya, sleeping, their own
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: someone and then nouns
Term for Deity: "na na" and "ya ya" were substituted
Special Terms: nana
Format: verse-burden
Verse Length: 5 lines
Verse Repetition Pattern: xAxxA
Line Meter: trochaic
Line Length: 7 syllables
Line Repetition Pattern: AAABB
Line Form: statement-refrain
Ending: additional repetition of last line
Literary Devices: incremental repetition
Notes on Music
Album
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5; they smoothed the syncopation into quarter quarter half half notes.
Tempo: slow
Songbook
Opening Phrase: 1-3-5
Time Signature: alternated between 3/2 and 2/2
Tempo: lullaby tempo
Key Signature: two sharps
Guitar Chords: D G A A7
Basic Structure: call-response
Harmonic Structure: parallel chords
Singing Style: One syllable to one note
Solo: Gilbert trilled the "ba" in kumbaya
Solo-Group Dynamics: on verses, Gilbert sang the statements and the group joined on the refrains and final lines. The entire group sang the kumbaya stanzas. The first and last repetitions were sung by two voices, either Gilbert and Darling, or Gilbert recording with herself.
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: the banjo played a high-low-high-low motif in the introduction and continued it softly during the singing. The guitar played the melody in place of a repetition of the burden between the second and third verses, with the banjo playing arpeggios and strumming chords. The banjo continued the high-low motif after the voices faded at the end.
Notes on Performers
Ronnie Gilbert was born in Brooklyn, New York, where her Jewish father had immigrated from Ukraine. Her mother was a Polish-born Jew. [11]
Fred Hellerman was born in Flatbush, New York, where his Jewish father had moved from Riga, Latvia. His mother’s Jewish parents also came from Riga. [12]
Erik Darling was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Canandaigua, New York. He spent his high school years with his mother in New York City. [13] Darling remembered his father’s church "had been Episcopalian, and he had found religion hypocritical, mean-spirited, and centered around exclusivity. The self-righteous, he thought, were a slap in the face of God, if there was one." [14]
Lee Hays was born to a Methodist minister in Little Rock, Arkansas. [15]
Availability
Album: Travelling On With The Weavers. Vanguard VRS 9043. 1958.
Reissue: Best Of The Vanguard Years. Vanguard 79580-2. 2001.
Reissue: Various Artists. Folk-Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. X5 Music Group. 17 September 2013.
YouTube: uploaded by The Orchard Enterprises, 25 December 2014.
Songbook: The Weavers Song Book. Edited by Ronnie Gilbert with musical arrangements by Robert De Cormier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. 156-158.
End Notes
1. Meself. Mudcat Café website. "Holding Hands and Singing ‘Kumbaya’." Thread begun January 29, 2007. Comment added 18 February 2008.
2. Seeger had performed "Kumbaya" at Carnegie Hall on 27 December 1957. In "Goofing Off Suite." Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry. Folkways Records FA2412. Released 1958
3. Travelling On liner notes and songbook, page 156.
4. The Random House Dictionary suggested "nana" was used for a grandmother in the Northeastern United States, for a godmother in the Gulf states, and for a nursemaid in the Southeast. ("Nana." Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Quoted by Dictionary website, 2016.)
It might have been introduced into this country by Irish immigrants. The word was reported by a ten-year-old girl in England in 1844 for her nanny. (Emily Pepys. Diary entries for 9 March 1844 and 25 December 1844. Quoted in Oxford English Dictionary entry for "nana.")
The word grandmother made little sense in a lullaby, which would have been sung by a grandmother to an infant. It also was not clear if any of The Weavers would have grown up with the term. The Yiddish word for grandmother was some form of "Bubbe." (Sarah Bunin Benor. Jewish English Lexicon website.)
5. Wikipedia. "Alan Seeger."
6. John S. Wilson. "Lee Hays, a Co-founder of the Weavers, Dies." The New York Times, 27 August 1981.
7. Wikipedia. "Highlander Research and Education Center."
8. Wilson.
9. William H. Cobb. "Commonwealth College." Encyclopedia of Arkansas website. Last updated 27 February 2012.
10. Jeff Sharlet. "The Embattled Lee Hays." Oxford American, fall 2007.
11. Bruce Weber. "Ronnie Gilbert, Bold-Voiced Singer With The Weavers, Is Dead at 88." The New York Times, 6 June 2015.
12. William Grimes. "Fred Hellerman, Last of The Weavers Folk Group, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 2 September 2016.
13. William Grimes. "Erik Darling Dies at 74; Musician in The Weavers." The New York Times, 7 August 2008.
14. Erik Darling. "I’d Give My Life. Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books, Inc. 2008. 6.
15. Wilson.
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