Almanac Singers
Encyclopedia
The Almanac Singers were a group of folk music
ians who, as their name indicates, specialized in topical songs, especially songs connected with the labor movement. They were part of the Popular Front
, an alliance of liberals and leftists, including the Communist Party USA
(whose slogan, under their leader Earl Browder
, was "Communism is twentieth century Americanism"), who had vowed to put aside their differences in order to fight fascism and promote racial and religious inclusiveness and workers' rights. The Almanac Singers felt strongly that songs could help achieve these goals.
. For this was the age of the CIO, the years that one historian has called 'the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history'". "By the early 1940s," he continues, "the CIO was dominated by new unions in the metalworking industries--the United Autoworkers, the United Steel Workers, and the United Electrical Workers--and 'industrial unionism' was not simply a kind of unionism but a kind of social reconstruction". It is in the context of this social movement that the story of the Almanac Singers, which formed in early 1941, ought to be seen.
In late 1940 and early 1941 (before war had been declared) rearmament was putting an end to a decade of unemployment; and labor was at its most militant. As the CIO fought racial discrimination in hiring, it had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership, particularly in the UAW plants in Detroit where white workers sometimes struck to protest the promotion of black workers to production jobs. It also worked on this issue in shipyards in Alabama, mass transit in Philadelphia, and steel plants in Baltimore. The CIO leadership, particularly those in more left unions such as the Packinghouse Workers, the UAW, the NMU and the Transport Workers, undertook serious efforts to suppress hate strikes and to educate their membership. Those unions contrasted their relatively bold attack on the problem with the timidity and racism of the AFL.
Almanac members Millard Lampell
, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger
, and Woody Guthrie
began playing together informally in 1940 or 1941. Pete Seeger and Guthrie had met at Will Geer
's Grapes of Wrath Evening, a benefit for displaced migrant workers, in March 1940. That year, Seeger joined Guthrie on a trip to Texas and California to visit Guthrie's relatives. Hays and Lampell had rented a New York City apartment together in October 1940, and on his return Seeger moved in with them. They called their apartment Almanac House, and it became a center for leftist intellectuals as well as crash pad for folksingers, including (in 1942) Sonny Terry
and Brownie McGhee
.
Ed Cray says that Hays and Seeger's first paying gig was in January 1941 at a fund-raising benefit for Spanish Civil War loyalists at the Jade Mountain restaurant in New York City. According to a 1965 interview with Lee Hays by Richard Reuss, Seeger, Hays, and Lampell sang at an American Youth Congress held at Turner's Arena in Washington, D.C., in February 1941, at which sponsors had requested songs constructed around the slogan "Don't Lend or Lease our Bases" and "Jim Crow must Go". Shortly after this, they decided to call themselves the Almanacs. They chose the name because Lee Hays had said that back home in Arkansas farmers had only two books in their houses: the Bible, to guide and prepare them for life in the next world, and the Almanac, to tell them about conditions in this one."
Performers who sang with the group at various times included Sis Cunningham
, (John) Peter Hawes and his brother (Baldwin) Butch Hawes, Bess Lomax Hawes
(wife of Butch and sister of Alan Lomax
), Cisco Houston
, Arthur Stern, Josh White
, Jackie (Gibson) Alper, Burl Ives
, (Hiram) Jaime Lowden and Sam Gary
.
They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They wore street clothes, which was unheard of in an era when entertainers routinely wore formal, night-club attire, and they invited the audience to join in the singing. The Almanacs had many gigs playing at parties, rallies, benefits, unions meetings, and informal "hootenannies", a term Seeger and Guthrie learned on an Almanac tour of Portland and Washington.
On May day of 1941, they entertained a rally of 20,000 striking transit workers in Madison Square Garden, where they introduced the song "Talking Union" and participated in a dramatic sketch with the young actress Carol Channing
.
, recorded in February or March 1941 and issued in May, comprised four songs written by Millard Lampell and two by Seeger and Hays (including "Plow Under") that followed the Communist Party line (after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact), urging non-intervention
in World War II
. It was produced by the founder of Keynote Records
Eric Bernay. Bernay, who owned a small record store, was the former business manager of the magazine The New Masses, which in 1938 and 39 had sponsored John Hammond
's landmark From Spirituals to Swing
Concert. Perhaps because of its controversial content, Songs for John Doe came out under the imprint "Almanac Records", and Bernay insisted that the performers themselves (in this case Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary) pay for the costs of production. Songs for John Doe attacked big corporations such as DuPont, claiming they had supported German rearmament and which, during the period of re-armament in 1941, were vying for contracts to build up the defenses of the U.S. Besides being anti-union, these corporations were a focus of progressive and black activist anger because they barred blacks from employment in defense work. Other objections while at the same time blacks were being drafted into a segregated military where they were assigned the lowest status jobs (barred from combat or pilot training) and subjected to inferior living conditions.
The album also criticized Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft, insinuating he was going to war for J.P. Morgan. Pete Seeger later said that he believed the Communist argument at that time that the war was "phony" and that big business merely wanted to use Hitler as a proxy to attack Soviet Russia. Bess Lomax Hawes
, who was twenty at the time and did not sing on the John Doe album, writes in her autobiography Sing It Pretty (2008), that for her part, she had taken the pacifist oath as a girl out repugnance for the senseless brutality of the first World War (a sentiment shared by many) and that she took the oath very seriously. However, she said that events were happening so fast, and such terrible news was coming out about German atrocities, that the Almanacs hardly knew what to believe from one day to the next, and they found themselves adjusting their topical repertoire on a daily basis.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and attacked Russia, and Keynote promptly destroyed all its inventory of Songs for John Doe. The C.I.O now urged support for Roosevelt and the draft, and it forbade its members from participation in strikes for the duration (angering some on the extreme far left).
On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt, under pressure from black leaders, who were threatening a massive march on Washington against segregation in the army and the exclusion of blacks from factories doing defense work, signed Executive Order 8802
(The Fair Employment Act) banning racial discrimination by corporations receiving federal defense contracts. The racial situation, which had threatened black support for the peacetime draft, was now somewhat defused (even though the army still declined to desegregate) and the march was canceled.
The Almanac's second album, Talking Union, also produced by Bernay, was a collection of six labor songs: "Union Maid", "I Don't Want Your Millions Mister", "Get Thee Behind Me Satan", "Union Train", "Which Side Are You On?
", and, of course, the eponymous "Talking Union". This album, issued in July 1941, was not anti-Roosevelt but was criticized in a review by Time
magazine, nevertheless. It was reissued by Folkways in 1955 with additional songs and is still available today. The Almanacs also issued two albums of traditional folk songs with no political content in 1941: an album of sea chanteys
, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads (sea chanteys, as was well known, being Franklin Roosevelt's favorite kind of song) and Sod-Buster Ballads, which were songs of the pioneers. Both of these were produced by Alan Lomax
on General
, the label that had issued his Jelly Roll Morton
recordings in 1940. When the USA entered the European war after Germany's post-Pearl Harbor declaration of war in December 1941, the Almanacs recorded a new topical album for Keynote in support of the war effort, Dear Mr. President
, under the supervision of Earl Robinson
, that included Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James
" (1942).
The title song, "Dear Mr. President", was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his life-long credo:
The Almanacs were never allowed to forget their attempt to keep America out of the war against Hitler or their repudiated John Doe album, however. In 1942, Army intelligence
and the FBI determined the Almanacs and their former anti-draft message were still a seditious threat to recruitment and the morale of the war effort among blacks and youth. and they were hounded by hostile reviews, exposure of their Communist ties and gossip items in the New York tabloid press for the rest of their performing career. Eventually public hostility meant they had to change their name, resurfacing in 1950 with some new personnel, as The Weavers
. As a performing group, the Almanacs lasted a mere two or three years. Their influence, however, has been lasting. Their mission was continued after the war in the organization People's Songs, and later through their numerous imitators, not excluding their more famous and less overtly political offshoot, The Weavers.
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
ians who, as their name indicates, specialized in topical songs, especially songs connected with the labor movement. They were part of the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
, an alliance of liberals and leftists, including the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
(whose slogan, under their leader Earl Browder
Earl Browder
Earl Russell Browder was an American communist and General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945. He was expelled from the party in 1946.- Early years :...
, was "Communism is twentieth century Americanism"), who had vowed to put aside their differences in order to fight fascism and promote racial and religious inclusiveness and workers' rights. The Almanac Singers felt strongly that songs could help achieve these goals.
History
Cultural historian Michael Denning writes, "The base of the Popular Front was labor movement, the organization of millions of industrial workers into the new unions of the CIOCongress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
. For this was the age of the CIO, the years that one historian has called 'the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history'". "By the early 1940s," he continues, "the CIO was dominated by new unions in the metalworking industries--the United Autoworkers, the United Steel Workers, and the United Electrical Workers--and 'industrial unionism' was not simply a kind of unionism but a kind of social reconstruction". It is in the context of this social movement that the story of the Almanac Singers, which formed in early 1941, ought to be seen.
In late 1940 and early 1941 (before war had been declared) rearmament was putting an end to a decade of unemployment; and labor was at its most militant. As the CIO fought racial discrimination in hiring, it had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership, particularly in the UAW plants in Detroit where white workers sometimes struck to protest the promotion of black workers to production jobs. It also worked on this issue in shipyards in Alabama, mass transit in Philadelphia, and steel plants in Baltimore. The CIO leadership, particularly those in more left unions such as the Packinghouse Workers, the UAW, the NMU and the Transport Workers, undertook serious efforts to suppress hate strikes and to educate their membership. Those unions contrasted their relatively bold attack on the problem with the timidity and racism of the AFL.
Almanac members Millard Lampell
Millard Lampell
Millard Lampell was an American movie and television screenwriter who first became publicly known as a member of the Almanac Singers in the 1940s....
, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
, and Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie
Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his...
began playing together informally in 1940 or 1941. Pete Seeger and Guthrie had met at Will Geer
Will Geer
Will Geer was an American actor and social activist. His original name was William Aughe Ghere. He is remembered for his portrayal of Grandpa Zebulon Tyler Walton in the 1970s TV series, The Waltons....
's Grapes of Wrath Evening, a benefit for displaced migrant workers, in March 1940. That year, Seeger joined Guthrie on a trip to Texas and California to visit Guthrie's relatives. Hays and Lampell had rented a New York City apartment together in October 1940, and on his return Seeger moved in with them. They called their apartment Almanac House, and it became a center for leftist intellectuals as well as crash pad for folksingers, including (in 1942) Sonny Terry
Sonny Terry
Saunders Terrell, better known as Sonny Terry was a blind American Piedmont blues musician. He was widely known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers, and imitations of trains and fox hunts.-Career:Terry was born in Greensboro, Georgia...
and Brownie McGhee
Brownie McGhee
Walter Brown McGhee was a Piedmont blues singer and guitarist, best known for his collaborations with the harmonica player Sonny Terry.-Life and career:...
.
Ed Cray says that Hays and Seeger's first paying gig was in January 1941 at a fund-raising benefit for Spanish Civil War loyalists at the Jade Mountain restaurant in New York City. According to a 1965 interview with Lee Hays by Richard Reuss, Seeger, Hays, and Lampell sang at an American Youth Congress held at Turner's Arena in Washington, D.C., in February 1941, at which sponsors had requested songs constructed around the slogan "Don't Lend or Lease our Bases" and "Jim Crow must Go". Shortly after this, they decided to call themselves the Almanacs. They chose the name because Lee Hays had said that back home in Arkansas farmers had only two books in their houses: the Bible, to guide and prepare them for life in the next world, and the Almanac, to tell them about conditions in this one."
Performers who sang with the group at various times included Sis Cunningham
Sis Cunningham
Agnes Cunningham was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs...
, (John) Peter Hawes and his brother (Baldwin) Butch Hawes, Bess Lomax Hawes
Bess Lomax Hawes
Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax.-Early life and education:...
(wife of Butch and sister of Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
), Cisco Houston
Cisco Houston
Gilbert Vandine 'Cisco' Houston was an American folk singer and songwriter who is closely associated with Woody Guthrie due to their extensive history of recording together....
, Arthur Stern, Josh White
Josh White
Joshua Daniel White , better known as Josh White, was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor, and civil rights activist. He also recorded under the names "Pinewood Tom" and "Tippy Barton" in the 1930s....
, Jackie (Gibson) Alper, Burl Ives
Burl Ives
Burl Icle Ivanhoe Ives was an American actor, writer and folk music singer. As an actor, Ives's work included comedies, dramas, and voice work in theater, television, and motion pictures. Music critic John Rockwell said, "Ives's voice .....
, (Hiram) Jaime Lowden and Sam Gary
Sam Gary
Sam Gary was an African-American blues, spiritual and folk singer, who to the wider public is known for his long-lasting musical co-operation with Josh White....
.
They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They wore street clothes, which was unheard of in an era when entertainers routinely wore formal, night-club attire, and they invited the audience to join in the singing. The Almanacs had many gigs playing at parties, rallies, benefits, unions meetings, and informal "hootenannies", a term Seeger and Guthrie learned on an Almanac tour of Portland and Washington.
On May day of 1941, they entertained a rally of 20,000 striking transit workers in Madison Square Garden, where they introduced the song "Talking Union" and participated in a dramatic sketch with the young actress Carol Channing
Carol Channing
Carol Elaine Channing is an American singer, actress, and comedienne. She is the recipient of three Tony Awards , a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination...
.
Recordings and Reds
The Almanacs' first record release, an album of three 78s called Songs For John DoeSongs for John Doe
Songs for John Doe was the 1941 debut album and first released product of the Almanac Singers, an influential early folk music group.The album was released in May 1941, at a time when World War II was raging but the United States remained neutral. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were still at...
, recorded in February or March 1941 and issued in May, comprised four songs written by Millard Lampell and two by Seeger and Hays (including "Plow Under") that followed the Communist Party line (after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact), urging non-intervention
Non-interventionism
Nonintervention or non-interventionism is a foreign policy which holds that political rulers should avoid alliances with other nations, but still retain diplomacy, and avoid all wars not related to direct self-defense...
in World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. It was produced by the founder of Keynote Records
Keynote Records
Keynote Records was a record label founded by record store owner Eric Bernay in 1940. The label's initial releases were folk and protest songs from the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War, and several anti-war releases from American musicians followed...
Eric Bernay. Bernay, who owned a small record store, was the former business manager of the magazine The New Masses, which in 1938 and 39 had sponsored John Hammond
John H. Hammond
John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, musician and music critic from the 1930s to the early 1980s...
's landmark From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing was the title of two concerts presented by John Hammond in Carnegie Hall on 23 December 1938 and 24 December 1939. The concerts included performances by Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Mitchell's...
Concert. Perhaps because of its controversial content, Songs for John Doe came out under the imprint "Almanac Records", and Bernay insisted that the performers themselves (in this case Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary) pay for the costs of production. Songs for John Doe attacked big corporations such as DuPont, claiming they had supported German rearmament and which, during the period of re-armament in 1941, were vying for contracts to build up the defenses of the U.S. Besides being anti-union, these corporations were a focus of progressive and black activist anger because they barred blacks from employment in defense work. Other objections while at the same time blacks were being drafted into a segregated military where they were assigned the lowest status jobs (barred from combat or pilot training) and subjected to inferior living conditions.
The album also criticized Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft, insinuating he was going to war for J.P. Morgan. Pete Seeger later said that he believed the Communist argument at that time that the war was "phony" and that big business merely wanted to use Hitler as a proxy to attack Soviet Russia. Bess Lomax Hawes
Bess Lomax Hawes
Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax.-Early life and education:...
, who was twenty at the time and did not sing on the John Doe album, writes in her autobiography Sing It Pretty (2008), that for her part, she had taken the pacifist oath as a girl out repugnance for the senseless brutality of the first World War (a sentiment shared by many) and that she took the oath very seriously. However, she said that events were happening so fast, and such terrible news was coming out about German atrocities, that the Almanacs hardly knew what to believe from one day to the next, and they found themselves adjusting their topical repertoire on a daily basis.
Every day, it seemed, another once-stable European political reality would fall to the rapidly expanding Nazi armies, and the agonies of the death camps were beginning to reach our ears. The Almanacs, as self-defined commentators, were inevitably affected by the intense national debate between the "warmongers" and the "isolationists" (and the points between). Before every booking we had to decide: were we going to sing some of our hardest-hitting and most eloquent songs, all of which were antiwar, and if we weren't, what would we sing anyway? ... We hoped the next headline would not challenge our entire roster of poetic ideas. Woody Guthrie wrote a song that mournfully stated: "I started out to write a song to the entire population / But no sooner than I got the words down, here come a brand new situation".
On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and attacked Russia, and Keynote promptly destroyed all its inventory of Songs for John Doe. The C.I.O now urged support for Roosevelt and the draft, and it forbade its members from participation in strikes for the duration (angering some on the extreme far left).
On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt, under pressure from black leaders, who were threatening a massive march on Washington against segregation in the army and the exclusion of blacks from factories doing defense work, signed Executive Order 8802
Executive Order 8802
Executive Order 8802 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, to prohibit racial discrimination in the national defense industry...
(The Fair Employment Act) banning racial discrimination by corporations receiving federal defense contracts. The racial situation, which had threatened black support for the peacetime draft, was now somewhat defused (even though the army still declined to desegregate) and the march was canceled.
The Almanac's second album, Talking Union, also produced by Bernay, was a collection of six labor songs: "Union Maid", "I Don't Want Your Millions Mister", "Get Thee Behind Me Satan", "Union Train", "Which Side Are You On?
Which Side Are You On?
"Which Side Are You On?" is a song written by Florence Reece in 1931. Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1931, the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners. In an attempt to...
", and, of course, the eponymous "Talking Union". This album, issued in July 1941, was not anti-Roosevelt but was criticized in a review by Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, nevertheless. It was reissued by Folkways in 1955 with additional songs and is still available today. The Almanacs also issued two albums of traditional folk songs with no political content in 1941: an album of sea chanteys
Sea shanty
A shanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. Shanties became ubiquitous in the 19th century era of the wind-driven packet and clipper ships...
, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads (sea chanteys, as was well known, being Franklin Roosevelt's favorite kind of song) and Sod-Buster Ballads, which were songs of the pioneers. Both of these were produced by Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
on General
General
A general officer is an officer of high military rank, usually in the army, and in some nations, the air force. The term is widely used by many nations of the world, and when a country uses a different term, there is an equivalent title given....
, the label that had issued his Jelly Roll Morton
Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe , known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer....
recordings in 1940. When the USA entered the European war after Germany's post-Pearl Harbor declaration of war in December 1941, the Almanacs recorded a new topical album for Keynote in support of the war effort, Dear Mr. President
Dear Mr. President (Almanac Singers album)
Dear Mr. President is a 1942 album by the Almanac Singers: Agnes Cunningham, Baldwin Hawes, Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. After the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, in February 1942 the Almanacs went into the studio to record a set of songs supporting the American war...
, under the supervision of Earl Robinson
Earl Robinson
Earl Hawley Robinson was a singer-songwriter and composer from Seattle, Washington. Robinson is probably as well remembered for his left-leaning political views as he is for his music, including the songs "Joe Hill", "Black and White", and the cantata "Ballad for Americans"...
, that included Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James
Reuben James (Woody Guthrie song)
“Reuben James” is a song by Woody Guthrie about the sinking of the U.S. convoy escort, the Reuben James, which was the first U.S. naval ship sunk by German U-boats in World War II. Woody Guthrie had started to write a song including each name on the casualty list of the sinking...
" (1942).
The title song, "Dear Mr. President", was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his life-long credo:
Now, Mr. President, / We haven't always agreed in the past, I know, / But that ain't at all important now. / What is important is what we got to do, / We got to lick Mr. Hitler, and until we do, / Other things can wait.//
Now, as I think of our great land . . . / I know it ain't perfect, but it will be someday, / Just give us a little time. // This is the reason that I want to fight, / Not 'cause everything's perfect, or everything's right. / No, it's just the opposite: I'm fightin' because / I want a better America, and better laws, / And better homes, and jobs, and schools, / And no more Jim Crow, and no more rules like / "You can't ride on this train 'cause you're a Negro," / "You can't live here 'cause you're a Jew,"/ "You can't work here 'cause you're a union man."//
So, Mr. President, / We got this one big job to do / That's lick Mr. Hitler and when we're through, / Let no one else ever take his place / To trample down the human race. / So what I want is you to give me a gun / So we can hurry up and get the job done.
The Almanacs were never allowed to forget their attempt to keep America out of the war against Hitler or their repudiated John Doe album, however. In 1942, Army intelligence
Military intelligence
Military intelligence is a military discipline that exploits a number of information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to commanders in support of their decisions....
and the FBI determined the Almanacs and their former anti-draft message were still a seditious threat to recruitment and the morale of the war effort among blacks and youth. and they were hounded by hostile reviews, exposure of their Communist ties and gossip items in the New York tabloid press for the rest of their performing career. Eventually public hostility meant they had to change their name, resurfacing in 1950 with some new personnel, as The Weavers
The Weavers
The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. They sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, gospel music, children's songs, labor songs, and American ballads, and selling millions of records at the height of their...
. As a performing group, the Almanacs lasted a mere two or three years. Their influence, however, has been lasting. Their mission was continued after the war in the organization People's Songs, and later through their numerous imitators, not excluding their more famous and less overtly political offshoot, The Weavers.
Original Studio Albums
- Songs for John DoeSongs for John DoeSongs for John Doe was the 1941 debut album and first released product of the Almanac Singers, an influential early folk music group.The album was released in May 1941, at a time when World War II was raging but the United States remained neutral. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were still at...
(Almanac Records, 1941). - Talking UnionTalking Union & Other Union SongsTalking Union is a 1941 album by the Almanac Singers: Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. It was selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically...
(Keynote, 1941). - Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling BalladsDeep Sea Chanteys And Whaling BalladsDeep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads are two albums recorded then combined for release as a 1941 album by the Almanac Singers. The lineup of the group at the time was Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. The group received a $250 advance for both albums and bought a Buick...
(General, 1941). - Sod Buster BalladsSod Buster BalladsSod Buster Ballads is a 1941 album album by the Almanac Singers: Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. The songs are:-Track listing:...
(General, 1941). - Dear Mr. President (Keynote, 1942).
- Songs of the Lincoln BattalionSongs Of The Lincoln BattalionSongs of the Lincoln Battalion is a 1944 Asch album by three former members of the Almanac Singers: Baldwin 'Butch' Hawes, Bess Lomax Hawes and Pete Seeger, along with Tom Glazer.-Track listing:...
(Stinson/Asch, 1944). This album was performed by Almanac alumni: Pete Seeger, Bess Lomax, Butch Hawes, and Tom GlazerTom GlazerThomas Zachariah "Tom" Glazer was an American folk singer and songwriter known primarily as a composer of ballads, including: "Because All Men Are Brothers", recorded by The Weavers and Peter, Paul and Mary, "Talking Inflation Blues", recorded by Bob Dylan, and "A Dollar Ain't A Dollar Anymore"...
. It was reissued by Folkways Records FH5436 in 1961 as one side of an LP entitled Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Vol. 1, with, on the other side: Six Songs for Democracy, by Ernst Busch and the chorus of the Thaelmann Battalion, 11th International Brigade (named for German Communist leader Ernst Thaelmann). Interestingly, it was originally recorded in Barcelona (1938) with bombs falling in the background.
Singles
- Song For Bridges / Babe of Mine (Keynote, 1941).
- Boomtown Bill / Keep That Oil A-Rollin (Keynote, 1942).
Compilations
- Talking Union & Other Union SongsTalking Union & Other Union SongsTalking Union is a 1941 album by the Almanac Singers: Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. It was selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically...
(Smithsonian Folkways, 1973) - Their Complete General RecordingsTheir Complete General RecordingsTheir Complete General Recordings is a 1996 album of 1941 recordings by the Almanac Singers.-Reception:Bruce Eder, writing for Allmusic wrote of the compilation "there isn't a bad song here" but regarding the liner notes commented "The notes are the only flaw, presenting an oversimplified history...
(MCA, 1996) - Songs of Protest (Prism, 2001)
- Talking Union, Vol. 1 (Naxos, 2001)
- The Sea, The Soil & The Struggle (Naxos, 2004)
Further reading
- Cohen, Ronald D. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940-1970. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
- Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 2007.
- Denisoff, R. Serge. "'Take It Easy, but Take It': The Almanac Singers," Journal of American Folklore:, vol. 83, no. 327 (1970), pp. 21–32.
- Hawes, Bess Lomax. Sing It Pretty. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
- Lieberman, Ronnie. "My Song is My Weapon" : People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
- Reuss, Richard A. and Joanne C. Reuss. American Folk Music & Left Wing Politics 1927–1957. Lanham, Maryland and London, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Finished posthumously by Joanne C. Reuss from her huband's manuscript.
- Willens, Doris. Lonesome Traveler: A Life of Lee Hays. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.