Lee Elhardt Hays
Encyclopedia
Lee Hays was an American folk-singer and songwriter, best known for singing bass
with The Weavers
. Throughout his life, he was concerned with overcoming racism
, inequality
, and violence
in society. Hays wrote or co-wrote "Wasn't That a Time?", "If I Had a Hammer
, "and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", which became Weavers' staples. He also familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not be Moved".
, author of the bestselling Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales and Who Blewed Up the Church House?, among other works. Hays' social conscience was ignited when at age five he witnessed public lynchings of African-Americans.
He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas
, the youngest of the four children of William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, who before her marriage had been a court stenographer. William Hays's vocation of ministering to rural areas took him from parish to parish, so as a child, Lee lived in several towns in Arkansas
and Georgia
. He learned to sing sacred harp
music in his father's church. Both his parents valued learning and books. Mrs. Hays taught her four children to type before they began learning penmanship in school and all were excellent students. There was a gap in age of ten years between Lee and next oldest sibling, his brother Bill. In 1927, when Lee was thirteen, his childhood came to an abrupt end as tragedy struck the family. The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Lee's sister, who had begun teaching at Hendrix-Henderson College
, also broke down temporarily and had to quit her job to move in with their oldest brother in Boston
, Massachusetts
.
) in Arkansas, the Methodist school that his father and siblings had attended, but the expense of their mother's institutionalization and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929
meant that college tuition money was not available for Lee. Instead he moved to Cleveland, Ohio
, where his oldest brother, Reuben, who worked in banking, was now located. Reuben found Lee a job as a page in a public library. There the rebellious Hays embarked on an extensive program of self-education, in the process becoming radicalized:
, where he stayed for two years. Hearing about the activities of the radical white Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams
, a Christian Marxist, who had become converted to the cause of racial equality and was trying to organize a coal miners' union in Paris, Arkansas
. Hays decided to return to Arkansas and join Williams in his work. He enrolled at the College of the Ozarks
, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed. There he met a fellow student, Zilphia Johnson (later Zilphia Horton
), another acolyte of Williams, who was to become almost as important in Hays' life as Williams himself. An accomplished musician and singer, Zilphia had broken with her father, who was the owner of the Arkansas coal mine that Williams was trying to organize, and had become a union organizer herself. Hays moved in with Williams and his family: "I got to be his [Williams'] chief helper for quite a while", he later wrote. From 1934 to 1940, writes Doris Willens, "Williams was the dominant figure Hays' life—a surrogate father—a man of the cloth but with a radical difference". The following year, Williams was dismissed by the elders of his Paris, Arkansas, church for being too radical (i.e., for fraternizing with blacks) and was subsequently jailed, beaten, and almost killed when he tried to organize an interracial hunger march of tenant farmers in Fort Smith, Arkansas
, near the Oklahoma border. His life was only saved because his activities attracted newspaper publicity and the attention of northerners. One of these was Willard Uphaus, a professor of divinity at Yale University
, who had recently been appointed executive secretary of the National Religion and Labor Foundation
, and who became Williams' admirer and supporter. After his release from jail, Williams moved his family away from Fort Smith to Little Rock to get them out of harms way. Hays dropped out of school in order to follow them, living on odd jobs for a time. He then went to visit Zilphia, who had married Myles Horton
, a founder and the director of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education and labor organizing school in Monteagle, Tennessee.
At Highlander, Zilphia Horton directed music, theater, and dance workshops. During miner's union meeting in Tennessee, she recruited Hays as a song leader: "When Zilphia got up and said, 'Brother Lee Hays will now lead us in singing', I damn near dropped through the floor. There was no backing out; I had to take the plunge and I've been doing it ever since." Later, he wrote that "Claude [Williams] and Zilphia [Horton] did more to change and shape my life than any people I can recall."
In her drama classes at Highlander Zilphia borrowed the techniques of the New Theater League in New York, which encouraged participants to create plays out of their own experience, which would then be staged at labor conferences. It was a revelation for Lee to see how the arts could serve to empower people for social action. He decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.
Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church
. There, he and a friend, Alan Hacker, a talented photojournalist, raised funds to make a documentary film about the plight of Southern sharecroppers and about efforts at Highlander and elsewhere to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union
(STFU), one of the first racially integrated
labor unions in the United States. In preparation, Hays and Hacker took classes with photographer Paul Strand
, among others. They shot the film in Mississippi at an experimental Quaker-run cooperative inter-racial cotton farm. Even so they were harassed by local planters and their scripts and notebooks were stolen and had to be recreated from memory. The film, America's Disinherited, which, due to limited funds, was quite brief, premiered at the Judson Church in May 1937 and was shown in schools and other venues (a copy is now in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art
). It vividly demonstrates the use of singing in building a movement: "The turning point in the film is when an image of clenched black and white hands is followed by one of biracial strikers marching and singing 'Black and white together / We shall not be moved'". Shortly after it was completed, Alan Hacker died of an illness he had contracted during the filming.
During this period Hays also wrote a play about the STFU, Gumbo (a word used by the sharecroppers for their soil), which was produced at Highlander.
in Mena Arkansas, a labor organizing school, he hired Lee Hays to direct a theater program. The school newspaper, the Commonwealth Fortnightly, announced that:
While at Commonwealth, Hays and his drama group wrote and produced numerous plays, of which one by Hays, One Bread, One Body, toured with considerable success. He also compiled a 20-page songbook of union organizing songs based on religious hymns and spirituals. Playwright
and fellow student Eli Jaffe, said that Hays "was deeply religious and extremely creative and imaginative and firmly believed in the Brotherhood of Man." Waldemar Hille, the dean of music at Elmhurst College in Chicago, who spent Christmas of 1937 at Commonwealth, thought that Hays was the most talented person at the college and was particularly enchanted with the folk songs and singing he encountered there. But by the next year, however, another observer noted that the "brilliant" and hitherto energetic Hays appeared "disheveled" and was "sick all the time". Doris Willens, his biographer, speculates that Lee's physical and mental states were possibly a response to the ongoing tribulations of his mentor and of Commonwealth College.
Long subject to the virulent hostility of its neighbors and in dire financial straits, the embattled school was riven by internecine struggles between its more radical members and the more moderate socialists on its board. In 1940 the board expelled the avowedly Marxist Claude Williams for allegedly allowing Communist infiltration and for being excessively preoccupied with the issue of racial discrimination, and soon after, the institution was disbanded.
and his hospitable family turned into a long visit. The German-born Lowenfels, a highly cultured man and a modernist poet, who was fascinated by Walt Whitman and edited a book of his poetry, became another surrogate father to Hays, influencing him deeply. (Together the two men later wrote, perhaps Hays best song, "Wasn't That a Time?") Under Lowenfels' influence, Hays also began to write modernist poems, one of which was published in Poetry
Magazine in 1940. He also had pieces, based on Arkansas folklore, published in The Nation
, which led to his forming a friendship with another Nation contributor, Millard Lampell
.
Arriving in New York, Hays and Lampell became roommates. They were soon joined by Pete Seeger
, who like Hays was also contemplating putting together an anthology of labor songs. Together the trio began to sing at left-wing functions and to call themselves the Almanac Singers
. It was a somewhat fluid group that included Josh White
and Sam Gary and later Sis Cunningham
(a fellow Commonwealth College alumna), Woody Guthrie
, and Bess Lomax Hawes, among others. The Almanac's first album, issued in May 1941, was the controversial Songs for John Doe
, comprising six pacifist songs, two of them co-written by Hays and Seeger and four by Lampell. The songs attacked the peacetime draft and the big U.S. corporations which were then receiving lucrative defense contracts from the federal government while practicing racial segregation in hiring. Since at that time isolationism was associated with right-wing conservatives and business interests, the pro-business but interventionist
Time Magazine lost no time in accusing the left-wing Almanacs of "scrupulously echoing" what it called "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J. P. Morgan war" (Time, June 16, 1941). Concurrently, in the Atlantic Monthly, Carl Joachim Friedrich
, a German-born but anti-Nazi professor of political science at Harvard, deemed the Almanacs treasonous and their album "a matter for the Attorney General" because subversive of military recruitment and morale. On June 22, Hitler unexpectedly broke the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact and attacked Russia. Three days later, Franklin Roosevelt, threatened by black labor leaders with a huge march on Washington protesting segregation in defense hiring and the army, issued Executive Order 8802
banning racial and religious discrimination in hiring by recipients of federal defense contracts. The army, however, refused to desegregate. Somewhat mollified, nevertheless, labor leaders canceled the march and ordered union members to get behind the war and to refrain from strikes; copies of the isolationist Songs for John Doe were destroyed (a month after being issued). Asked by an interviewer in 1979 about his support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hays said: “I do remember that the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact was a very hard pill to swallow. . . . To this day I don’t quite follow the line of reasoning behind that one, except to give Stalin more time.” According to Hays's biographer, Doris Willens:
The Almanacs, who now included Sis Cunningham
, Woody Guthrie
, Cisco Houston
, and Bess Lomax Hawes
, discarded their anti-war material with no regrets and continued to perform at union halls and at hootenanies
. In June of 41 they embarked on a CIO tour of the United States, playing in Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. They also issued several additional albums, including one, Dear Mr. President (recorded c. January 1942, issued in May), strongly supporting the war. Bad publicity, however, pursued them because of their reputation as former isolationists who had become pro-war "prematurely" (i.e., six months before Pearl Harbor). As key members, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Woodie Guthrie joined the war effort (Seeger in the army and Guthrie and Houston in the Merchant Marine) the group disbanded. Hays was rejected from the Armed Forces because of a mild case of tuberculosis; and indeed, he felt sick all the time, missed performances, and developed a reputation for being a hypochondriac. Even before this, Seeger and the other Almanacs found Hays difficult to work with and so erratic that they had asked him to leave the group.
, later of the Weavers), whom he thought might be interested. He brought in his old friend Waldemar Hille to be music editor of the People's Songs Bulletin and solicited songs and stories from Zilphia Horton, who sent in her new favorite, "We Shall Overcome
". In its first year every issue of the People's Songs Bulletin featured a new song by Hays. One, written with Walter Lowenfels after a disastrous accident in a coal mine contained this verse:
Bernard Asbell, a member of People's Songs, who in 1961 wrote the best-selling book, When FDR Died, recalled:
Although the first year of People's Songs was very successful, once again his co-workers found Hays "difficult" and indecisive. At a board meeting in late 1946, Pete Seeger proposed Hays be replaced as executive secretary with energetic young friend of his, Felix Landau, whom Pete had met during his army days in Saipan. In retrospect, Pete confessed “I think it was a mistake. Lee’s perceptions were probably truer than mine.”
Crushed, Hays returned to Philadelphia to stay with Walter Lowenfels and family. From there he began contributing a weekly column to the People's Songs Bulletin aiming to educate younger people about Claude Williams and the labor and civil rights struggles of the 1930s.
In 1948, People's Songs put all of its efforts into supporting the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. Not long after Wallace's decisive defeat, People's Songs went bankrupt and disbanded. A spinoff, however, People's Artists, showed somewhat more vitality.
The Thanksgiving after Wallace's defeat, People's Songs decided to put on a fundraising Hootenanny
that included folk dances from many lands. A group of People's Artists, comprising Seeger, Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert
, worked up a musical accompaniment to the dances, which they called (in the "One World" spirit of the Progressive movement) "Around the World". It featured an Israeli song, the Appalachian "Flop-eared mule", and "Hey-lally-lally-lo" from the Bahamas. The audience went wild. In 1949 the new quartet began appearing at leftist functions and soon they were featured on Oscar Brand
's WNYC radio show as "The No Name Quartet". Four months later they settled on a name: The Weavers
.
People's Artists sponsored the concert given by Paul Robeson
and classical pianists Leonid Hambro
and Ray Lev
in Peekskill, NY, that sparked the Peekskill Riots
on September 4, 1949. The Weavers were present. Hays escaped in a car with Guthrie
and Seeger
after a mob claiming to be anti-communist patriots attacked the cars of audience and performers after the show. Hays wrote a song, "Hold the Line", about the experience, that the Weavers recorded on Charter records with Robeson and writer Howard Fast. If I Had a Hammer
", written with Pete Seeger and also recorded on the Charter label, dates from this embattled period.
A few months later, in December, The Weavers began an incredibly successful run at the Village Vanguard. One fan, Gordon Jenkins
, a bandleader who had had numerous hits under his belt and was a director of Decca
records, returned night after night. Born in Missouri, Jenkins was especially entranced with Lee Hays' folksy stage patter, laced with colorful Ozark anecdotes. Jenkins convinced his reluctant fellow executives at Decca to record the group. Jenkins backed them up with his own lush string orchestra and huge chorus, but tactfully and with care, so as not to obscure the words and musical personalities of the groups' personnel. To everyone's surprise, The Weavers, who seemed to fit into no musical category, produced billboard hit after billboard hit, selling millions of singles. However, the Korean War
had begun and the red scare was in full swing. In September 1950, Time magazine reviewed them this way:
and was placed on the entertainment industry blacklist
along with other members of the Weavers. Lee Hays was denounced as a member of the Communist Party during testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities by Harvey Matusow
, a former Communist Party member (he later recanted).
Their records dropped from Decca's catalog and from radio broadcasts, and unable to perform live on television, radio, or in most music venues, The Weavers broke up in 1952. Subsequently, Hays liked to maintain that another entertainer, called Lee Hayes, spelled with an "e" was also banned from entertaining because of the similarity of his name. "Hayes couldn't get a job the whole time I was blacklisted," he claimed.
Hays spent the blacklist years rooming with the family of fellow blacklist victim Earl Robinson
(composer of "The House I Live In
", "Ballad for Americans
", and "Joe Hill
"), in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the U.S. and Britain. In 1953, Hays' mother, whom he had seen only once since her entry into custodial care, died. In 1955 he was subpoena
ed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities: he declined to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment
. 1955 was also the year of a sold-out Weavers Carnegie Hall reunion concert. The Weavers had not lost their audience appeal—the LP of the concert, issued two years later by Vanguard, was one of the three top-selling albums of the year. This led to a tour (made difficult by Hays' invalidism and anxieties), another album, and more tours, including one to Israel.
, a group that included a young Alan Arkin
, the son of a family friend of the Robinsons. After the great financial success of Peter Paul and Mary's cover of "If I Had a Hammer" in the mid-1960s, Hays, whose mental and physical health had been shaky for years, lived mostly on income from royalties.
In 1967, he moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York where he devoted himself to tending his organic vegetable garden, cooking, writing, and socializing. He wrote to a friend that in his new surroundings he had no idea how to earn new money but that, "Having a listed number with no fear of Trotskyite crank calls is a huge relief". At the insistence of his old friend Woody
's son, Arlo Guthrie
, however, he did appear, playing himself as a preacher at a 1960 evangelical
meeting, in the film Alice's Restaurant
(1969), based on Arlo's hit song of that name.
Hays, who had always been overweight, had been diagnosed in 1960 with diabetes, brought on by alcoholism, depression, and the use of a strong drug, a condition the doctors thought he had probably suffered from, along with TB, for many years previously. (Source: Liner notes from Pete Seeger on the Weavers boxed tape collection: "Wasn't That a Time") This led to a heart condition and he was fitted with a pacemaker. Both his legs eventually had to be amputated. Younger friends, among them Lawrence Lazare and Jimmy Callo, helped to take care of him.
His bad health notwithstanding, Hays performed in several Weavers
reunion concerts, the last of which was in November 1980 at New York City
's Carnegie Hall
. His last public performance with the group took place in June 1981 at the Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park
. Two months later he was dead. The documentary film
The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!
, for which Hays had written the script, was released in 1982.
Near the end of his life Hays, wrote a farewell poem, "In Dead Earnest", inspired perhaps by Wobbly organizer Joe Hill
's lyrical "Last Testament"but with an earthy Ozark frankness:
He died on August 26, 1981 from diabetic cardiovascular disease
at home in Croton, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were mixed with his compost pile.
Bass (voice type)
A bass is a type of male singing voice and possesses the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C...
with 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...
. Throughout his life, he was concerned with overcoming racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, inequality
Economic inequality
Economic inequality comprises all disparities in the distribution of economic assets and income. The term typically refers to inequality among individuals and groups within a society, but can also refer to inequality among countries. The issue of economic inequality is related to the ideas of...
, and violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
in society. Hays wrote or co-wrote "Wasn't That a Time?", "If I Had a Hammer
If I Had a Hammer
"If I Had a Hammer " is a song written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. It was written in 1949 in support of the progressive movement, and was first recorded by The Weavers, a folk music quartet composed of Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, and then by Peter, Paul and Mary.- Early...
, "and "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", which became Weavers' staples. He also familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not be Moved".
Childhood
Lee Hays came naturally by his interest in folk music since his uncle was the eminent Missouri and Arkansas folklorist Vance RandolphVance Randolph
Vance Randolph was a famous folklorist who studied the folklore of the Ozarks in particular. He wrote a number of books on topics including the Ozarks, Little Blue Books, and juvenile fiction....
, author of the bestselling Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales and Who Blewed Up the Church House?, among other works. Hays' social conscience was ignited when at age five he witnessed public lynchings of African-Americans.
He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
, the youngest of the four children of William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, who before her marriage had been a court stenographer. William Hays's vocation of ministering to rural areas took him from parish to parish, so as a child, Lee lived in several towns in Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
and Georgia
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state located in the southeastern United States. It was established in 1732, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies. The state is named after King George II of Great Britain. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788...
. He learned to sing sacred harp
Sacred Harp
Sacred Harp singing is a tradition of sacred choral music that took root in the Southern region of the United States. It is part of the larger tradition of shape note music.- The music and its notation :...
music in his father's church. Both his parents valued learning and books. Mrs. Hays taught her four children to type before they began learning penmanship in school and all were excellent students. There was a gap in age of ten years between Lee and next oldest sibling, his brother Bill. In 1927, when Lee was thirteen, his childhood came to an abrupt end as tragedy struck the family. The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Lee's sister, who had begun teaching at Hendrix-Henderson College
Henderson State University
Henderson State University, founded in 1890 as Arkadelphia Methodist College, is a four-year public liberal arts university located in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, United States. It is Arkansas's only member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges...
, also broke down temporarily and had to quit her job to move in with their oldest brother in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
.
Teenage years
The period immediately following his father's death were so so painful that Lee Hays couldn't bring himself to talk much about it, even to Doris Willens, the writer he selected to be his biographer. His brothers, both recently married, sent him to Emory Junior College in Georgia from which he graduated in 1930 at sixteen (but already over six feet tall and looking much older than his years). He traveled alone to enroll at Hendrix-Henderson College (now Henderson State UniversityHenderson State University
Henderson State University, founded in 1890 as Arkadelphia Methodist College, is a four-year public liberal arts university located in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, United States. It is Arkansas's only member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges...
) in Arkansas, the Methodist school that his father and siblings had attended, but the expense of their mother's institutionalization and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929
Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 , also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout...
meant that college tuition money was not available for Lee. Instead he moved to Cleveland, Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
, where his oldest brother, Reuben, who worked in banking, was now located. Reuben found Lee a job as a page in a public library. There the rebellious Hays embarked on an extensive program of self-education, in the process becoming radicalized:
Every book that was considered unfit for children to read was marked with a black rubber stamp. So I'd go through the stacks and look for these black stamps. Always the very best books. they weren't locked-up books, just books that would not normally issued to children—D. H. LawrenceIn 1932, Hays moved out of his brother's house into a room at the Cleveland YMCAD. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, a number of European novels. Reading those books was like doors opening. Don't forget that the fundamentalist South was a closed, fixed society. The world was made in six days; everything was foreordained and fixed in the universe. . . . This was the time of the Great DepressionGreat DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. . . the whole country was in the grip of a terrible sickness, which troubled me as it did everyone else. And I didn't understand it until I started reading Upton SinclairUpton SinclairUpton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
and the little mag[azines]. . . Somewhere along in there I became some kind of Socialist, just what kind, I have never figured out.
YMCA
The Young Men's Christian Association is a worldwide organization of more than 45 million members from 125 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs...
, where he stayed for two years. Hearing about the activities of the radical white Presbyterian minister Claude C. Williams
Claude C. Williams
Claude Clossey Williams was a Presbyterian minister active for more than 50 years in civil rights, race relations, and labor advocacy. He worked with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded the People’s Institute for Applied Religion, and served as the national vice president of the American...
, a Christian Marxist, who had become converted to the cause of racial equality and was trying to organize a coal miners' union in Paris, Arkansas
Paris, Arkansas
Paris is a city in Logan County, Arkansas, United States, and serves as the county seat for the northern district of Logan County; its southern district counterpart is Booneville. The population was 3,707 at the 2000 census.-Geography:...
. Hays decided to return to Arkansas and join Williams in his work. He enrolled at the College of the Ozarks
College of the Ozarks
College of the Ozarks is a private, Christian liberal-arts college, with its campus at Point Lookout near Branson and Hollister, Missouri, United States. It is south of Springfield on a campus, overlooking Lake Taneycomo...
, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed. There he met a fellow student, Zilphia Johnson (later Zilphia Horton
Zilphia Horton
Zilphia Horton was American musician, community organizer, educator, Civil Rights activist, and folklorist. She is best-known for her work with her husband Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School where she is generally credited with turning such songs as "We Shall Overcome", "Keep Your Eyes on...
), another acolyte of Williams, who was to become almost as important in Hays' life as Williams himself. An accomplished musician and singer, Zilphia had broken with her father, who was the owner of the Arkansas coal mine that Williams was trying to organize, and had become a union organizer herself. Hays moved in with Williams and his family: "I got to be his [Williams'] chief helper for quite a while", he later wrote. From 1934 to 1940, writes Doris Willens, "Williams was the dominant figure Hays' life—a surrogate father—a man of the cloth but with a radical difference". The following year, Williams was dismissed by the elders of his Paris, Arkansas, church for being too radical (i.e., for fraternizing with blacks) and was subsequently jailed, beaten, and almost killed when he tried to organize an interracial hunger march of tenant farmers in Fort Smith, Arkansas
Fort Smith, Arkansas
Fort Smith is the second-largest city in Arkansas and one of the two county seats of Sebastian County. With a population of 86,209 in 2010, it is the principal city of the Fort Smith, Arkansas-Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area, a region of 298,592 residents which encompasses the Arkansas...
, near the Oklahoma border. His life was only saved because his activities attracted newspaper publicity and the attention of northerners. One of these was Willard Uphaus, a professor of divinity at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, who had recently been appointed executive secretary of the National Religion and Labor Foundation
Interfaith Worker Justice
Interfaith Worker Justice is a nonprofit, nonpartisan religious organization that educates and mobilizes the religious people of all faiths in the United States on issues important to working people....
, and who became Williams' admirer and supporter. After his release from jail, Williams moved his family away from Fort Smith to Little Rock to get them out of harms way. Hays dropped out of school in order to follow them, living on odd jobs for a time. He then went to visit Zilphia, who had married Myles Horton
Myles Horton
Myles Horton was an American educator, socialist and cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, famous for its role in the Civil Rights Movement . Horton taught and heavily influenced most of the era's leaders. They included Dr...
, a founder and the director of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education and labor organizing school in Monteagle, Tennessee.
At Highlander, Zilphia Horton directed music, theater, and dance workshops. During miner's union meeting in Tennessee, she recruited Hays as a song leader: "When Zilphia got up and said, 'Brother Lee Hays will now lead us in singing', I damn near dropped through the floor. There was no backing out; I had to take the plunge and I've been doing it ever since." Later, he wrote that "Claude [Williams] and Zilphia [Horton] did more to change and shape my life than any people I can recall."
In her drama classes at Highlander Zilphia borrowed the techniques of the New Theater League in New York, which encouraged participants to create plays out of their own experience, which would then be staged at labor conferences. It was a revelation for Lee to see how the arts could serve to empower people for social action. He decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.
Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church
Judson Memorial Church
The Judson Memorial Church is located on Washington Square South between Thompson and Sullivan Streets, opposite Washington Square Park, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City...
. There, he and a friend, Alan Hacker, a talented photojournalist, raised funds to make a documentary film about the plight of Southern sharecroppers and about efforts at Highlander and elsewhere to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union
Southern Tenant Farmers Union
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union was founded in 1934 as a civil farmer's union to further organize the tenant farmers in the Southern United States....
(STFU), one of the first racially integrated
Racial integration
Racial integration, or simply integration includes desegregation . In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely...
labor unions in the United States. In preparation, Hays and Hacker took classes with photographer Paul Strand
Paul Strand
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century...
, among others. They shot the film in Mississippi at an experimental Quaker-run cooperative inter-racial cotton farm. Even so they were harassed by local planters and their scripts and notebooks were stolen and had to be recreated from memory. The film, America's Disinherited, which, due to limited funds, was quite brief, premiered at the Judson Church in May 1937 and was shown in schools and other venues (a copy is now in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
). It vividly demonstrates the use of singing in building a movement: "The turning point in the film is when an image of clenched black and white hands is followed by one of biracial strikers marching and singing 'Black and white together / We shall not be moved'". Shortly after it was completed, Alan Hacker died of an illness he had contracted during the filming.
During this period Hays also wrote a play about the STFU, Gumbo (a word used by the sharecroppers for their soil), which was produced at Highlander.
Commonwealth College
In 1937, when Claude Williams was appointed director of Commonwealth CollegeCommonwealth College, Arkansas
Commonwealth College was started in 1923 to recruit and train people to take the lead in socio-economic reform and prepare them for unconventional roles in a new and different society. Although in the 1930s commonwealth was essentially orieneted towards training organizers for the rapidly growing...
in Mena Arkansas, a labor organizing school, he hired Lee Hays to direct a theater program. The school newspaper, the Commonwealth Fortnightly, announced that:
Lee Hays, a native of Little Rock, will join Commonwealth's faculty at the beginning of the fall quarter ... to teach Workers' Dramatics and to supervise Commonwealth's drama groups.The announcement noted that as former assistant to the drama director at Highlander Folk School and a member of the Sharecropper Film Committee which produced America's Disinherited: "Lee [Hays] brings with him to Commonwealth valuable experience and ability."
While at Commonwealth, Hays and his drama group wrote and produced numerous plays, of which one by Hays, One Bread, One Body, toured with considerable success. He also compiled a 20-page songbook of union organizing songs based on religious hymns and spirituals. Playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
and fellow student Eli Jaffe, said that Hays "was deeply religious and extremely creative and imaginative and firmly believed in the Brotherhood of Man." Waldemar Hille, the dean of music at Elmhurst College in Chicago, who spent Christmas of 1937 at Commonwealth, thought that Hays was the most talented person at the college and was particularly enchanted with the folk songs and singing he encountered there. But by the next year, however, another observer noted that the "brilliant" and hitherto energetic Hays appeared "disheveled" and was "sick all the time". Doris Willens, his biographer, speculates that Lee's physical and mental states were possibly a response to the ongoing tribulations of his mentor and of Commonwealth College.
Long subject to the virulent hostility of its neighbors and in dire financial straits, the embattled school was riven by internecine struggles between its more radical members and the more moderate socialists on its board. In 1940 the board expelled the avowedly Marxist Claude Williams for allegedly allowing Communist infiltration and for being excessively preoccupied with the issue of racial discrimination, and soon after, the institution was disbanded.
The Almanacs and World War II
As the clouds gathered around Commonwealth College, Hays headed north to New York, taking with him his collection of labor songs, which he planned to turn into a book. But a short stayover in Philadelphia with the poet Walter LowenfelsWalter Lowenfels
Walter Lowenfels was an American poet, journalist, and member of the Communist Party USA. He also edited the communist newspaper the Daily Worker.-Early career:...
and his hospitable family turned into a long visit. The German-born Lowenfels, a highly cultured man and a modernist poet, who was fascinated by Walt Whitman and edited a book of his poetry, became another surrogate father to Hays, influencing him deeply. (Together the two men later wrote, perhaps Hays best song, "Wasn't That a Time?") Under Lowenfels' influence, Hays also began to write modernist poems, one of which was published in Poetry
Poetry (magazine)
Poetry , published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. Published by the Poetry Foundation and currently edited by Christian Wiman, the magazine has a circulation of 30,000 and prints 300 poems per year out of approximately...
Magazine in 1940. He also had pieces, based on Arkansas folklore, published in The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, which led to his forming a friendship with another Nation contributor, 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....
.
Arriving in New York, Hays and Lampell became roommates. They were soon joined by 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...
, who like Hays was also contemplating putting together an anthology of labor songs. Together the trio began to sing at left-wing functions and to call themselves the Almanac Singers
Almanac Singers
The Almanac Singers were a group of folk musicians who, as their name indicates, specialized in topical songs, especially songs connected with the labor movement...
. It was a somewhat fluid group that included 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....
and Sam Gary and later 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...
(a fellow Commonwealth College alumna), 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...
, and Bess Lomax Hawes, among others. The Almanac's first album, issued in May 1941, was the controversial Songs for John Doe
Songs 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...
, comprising six pacifist songs, two of them co-written by Hays and Seeger and four by Lampell. The songs attacked the peacetime draft and the big U.S. corporations which were then receiving lucrative defense contracts from the federal government while practicing racial segregation in hiring. Since at that time isolationism was associated with right-wing conservatives and business interests, the pro-business but interventionist
Interventionism
Interventionism may refer to:*Interventionism is a political term for significant activity undertaken by a state to influence something not directly under its control....
Time Magazine lost no time in accusing the left-wing Almanacs of "scrupulously echoing" what it called "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J. P. Morgan war" (Time, June 16, 1941). Concurrently, in the Atlantic Monthly, Carl Joachim Friedrich
Carl Joachim Friedrich
Carl Joachim Friedrich was a German-American professor and political theorist....
, a German-born but anti-Nazi professor of political science at Harvard, deemed the Almanacs treasonous and their album "a matter for the Attorney General" because subversive of military recruitment and morale. On June 22, Hitler unexpectedly broke the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact and attacked Russia. Three days later, Franklin Roosevelt, threatened by black labor leaders with a huge march on Washington protesting segregation in defense hiring and the army, issued 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...
banning racial and religious discrimination in hiring by recipients of federal defense contracts. The army, however, refused to desegregate. Somewhat mollified, nevertheless, labor leaders canceled the march and ordered union members to get behind the war and to refrain from strikes; copies of the isolationist Songs for John Doe were destroyed (a month after being issued). Asked by an interviewer in 1979 about his support of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hays said: “I do remember that the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact was a very hard pill to swallow. . . . To this day I don’t quite follow the line of reasoning behind that one, except to give Stalin more time.” According to Hays's biographer, Doris Willens:
That the pact gave Stalin more time was the story then put out; millions around the world didn’t buy it [in part because of Stalin’s 1939 attack on Finland] and at that point lost faith in the Soviet Union . . . (Many others had lost faith earlier, during the Moscow purge trials.) But as a disciple of Claude [Williams], Lee in 1940 held firm with those who continued to believe that America and Britain were maneuvering not to defeat Nazi Germany, or rather, not just yet, but first to turn Hitler to their desired end of destroying the Soviet Union. ....
In short, 1940 was a bad time to say a good word for “peace.” Worse, the only other voices opposing the war emanated from the extreme right, particularly America FirstersAmerica First CommitteeThe America First Committee was the foremost non-interventionist pressure group against the American entry into World War II. Peaking at 800,000 members, it was likely the largest anti-war organization in American history. Started in 1940, it became defunct after the attack on Pearl Harbor in...
, a group suspected of harboring the hope that Hitler would eventually triumph . . . . Whatever uneasiness the Hitler-Stalin pact churned up, Lee hoped to submerge by throwing his vast energies into the service of the dynamic Congress of Industrial OrganizationsCongress of Industrial OrganizationsThe 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...
[(CIO)] — the challenger to the fat and lazy and bureaucratic old American Federation of LaborAmerican Federation of LaborThe American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
. A singing labor movement, that was the goal. If you got the unions singing, peace and brotherhood had to follow. It seemed so clear and simple.
The Almanacs, who now 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...
, 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...
, 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....
, and 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:...
, discarded their anti-war material with no regrets and continued to perform at union halls and at hootenanies
Hootenanny
Hootenanny is an Appalachian colloquialism that was used in early twentieth century America to refer to things whose names were forgotten or unknown. In this usage it was synonymous with thingamajig or whatchamacallit, as in "hand me that hootenanny." Hootenanny was also an old country word for...
. In June of 41 they embarked on a CIO tour of the United States, playing in Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle. They also issued several additional albums, including one, Dear Mr. President (recorded c. January 1942, issued in May), strongly supporting the war. Bad publicity, however, pursued them because of their reputation as former isolationists who had become pro-war "prematurely" (i.e., six months before Pearl Harbor). As key members, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Woodie Guthrie joined the war effort (Seeger in the army and Guthrie and Houston in the Merchant Marine) the group disbanded. Hays was rejected from the Armed Forces because of a mild case of tuberculosis; and indeed, he felt sick all the time, missed performances, and developed a reputation for being a hypochondriac. Even before this, Seeger and the other Almanacs found Hays difficult to work with and so erratic that they had asked him to leave the group.
People's Songs
When the war ended, however, a group of songwriters gathered in Pete Seeger's in-laws' apartment in Greenwich Village and founded People's Songs, "organized to create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American people". They elected Pete Seeger president and Lee Hays executive secretary. In his new position Hays found some of his old energy returning. He wrote to friends, old and new (a new one was Fred HellermanFred Hellerman
Fred Hellerman, born in Brooklyn, New York and educated at Brooklyn College, is an American folk singer, guitarist, producer and song writer, primarily known as one of the members of The Weavers, together with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Ronnie Gilbert...
, later of the Weavers), whom he thought might be interested. He brought in his old friend Waldemar Hille to be music editor of the People's Songs Bulletin and solicited songs and stories from Zilphia Horton, who sent in her new favorite, "We Shall Overcome
We Shall Overcome
"We Shall Overcome" is a protest song that became a key anthem of the African-American Civil Rights Movement . The title and structure of the song are derived from an early gospel song by African-American composer Charles Albert Tindley...
". In its first year every issue of the People's Songs Bulletin featured a new song by Hays. One, written with Walter Lowenfels after a disastrous accident in a coal mine contained this verse:
Do you know how the coalminers die
To bring you coal from the earth?
They die by the hundreds and they die by the thousands
And that is what your coal is worth.
Bernard Asbell, a member of People's Songs, who in 1961 wrote the best-selling book, When FDR Died, recalled:
When I think of that period I think of Pete and Lee. Lee and Pete. Lee’s deep bass singing "Roll the Union On”. He and Pete are the two guys who made folk music serve political purposes. .. . Lee was the one with the sense of history, who tied it all together. He was the one who brought the sharecroppers in, and the union songs based on hymns. His images inspired us... convinced us that the Left was the great continuum of the American tradition, or at least that it was part of the mainstream of the American tradition. Lee thought in terms of events, history; he saw large, and that rubbed off on the rest of us. He was the philosopher of the folk music movement. He stretched the canvas. And he was funny—and God, we needed that. There wasn’t much humor around.
Although the first year of People's Songs was very successful, once again his co-workers found Hays "difficult" and indecisive. At a board meeting in late 1946, Pete Seeger proposed Hays be replaced as executive secretary with energetic young friend of his, Felix Landau, whom Pete had met during his army days in Saipan. In retrospect, Pete confessed “I think it was a mistake. Lee’s perceptions were probably truer than mine.”
Crushed, Hays returned to Philadelphia to stay with Walter Lowenfels and family. From there he began contributing a weekly column to the People's Songs Bulletin aiming to educate younger people about Claude Williams and the labor and civil rights struggles of the 1930s.
In 1948, People's Songs put all of its efforts into supporting the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. Not long after Wallace's decisive defeat, People's Songs went bankrupt and disbanded. A spinoff, however, People's Artists, showed somewhat more vitality.
The Thanksgiving after Wallace's defeat, People's Songs decided to put on a fundraising Hootenanny
Hootenanny
Hootenanny is an Appalachian colloquialism that was used in early twentieth century America to refer to things whose names were forgotten or unknown. In this usage it was synonymous with thingamajig or whatchamacallit, as in "hand me that hootenanny." Hootenanny was also an old country word for...
that included folk dances from many lands. A group of People's Artists, comprising Seeger, Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert
Ronnie Gilbert
Ronnie Gilbert is an American folk-singer. She is one of the original members of the Weavers with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman.-Career:...
, worked up a musical accompaniment to the dances, which they called (in the "One World" spirit of the Progressive movement) "Around the World". It featured an Israeli song, the Appalachian "Flop-eared mule", and "Hey-lally-lally-lo" from the Bahamas. The audience went wild. In 1949 the new quartet began appearing at leftist functions and soon they were featured on Oscar Brand
Oscar Brand
Oscar Brand is a folk singer, songwriter, and author. In his career, spanning over 60 years, he has composed at least 300 songs and released nearly 100 albums, among them Canadian and American patriotic songs...
's WNYC radio show as "The No Name Quartet". Four months later they settled on a name: 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...
.
People's Artists sponsored the concert given by Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson
Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...
and classical pianists Leonid Hambro
Leonid Hambro
Leonid Hambro was an American concert pianist and composer.-Life:He was the son of immigrant Russian Jews; his father was a pianist accompanying silent films....
and Ray Lev
Ray Lev
Ray Lev was an American classical pianist. One year after her birth in Rostov na Donau, Russia, her father, a synagogue cantor, and mother, a concert singer, brought her to the United States.-Life:...
in Peekskill, NY, that sparked the Peekskill Riots
Peekskill Riots
The Peekskill Riots were anti-communist riots with anti-black and anti-Semitic undertonesthat took place at Cortlandt Manor, Westchester County, New York in 1949. The catalyst for the rioting was an announced concert by black singer Paul Robeson, who was well known for his strong pro-trade union...
on September 4, 1949. The Weavers were present. Hays escaped in a car with 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...
and 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...
after a mob claiming to be anti-communist patriots attacked the cars of audience and performers after the show. Hays wrote a song, "Hold the Line", about the experience, that the Weavers recorded on Charter records with Robeson and writer Howard Fast. If I Had a Hammer
If I Had a Hammer
"If I Had a Hammer " is a song written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays. It was written in 1949 in support of the progressive movement, and was first recorded by The Weavers, a folk music quartet composed of Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, and then by Peter, Paul and Mary.- Early...
", written with Pete Seeger and also recorded on the Charter label, dates from this embattled period.
A few months later, in December, The Weavers began an incredibly successful run at the Village Vanguard. One fan, Gordon Jenkins
Gordon Jenkins
Gordon Hill Jenkins was an American arranger, composer and pianist who was an influential figure in popular music in the 1940s and 1950s, renowned for his lush string arrangements...
, a bandleader who had had numerous hits under his belt and was a director of Decca
Decca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....
records, returned night after night. Born in Missouri, Jenkins was especially entranced with Lee Hays' folksy stage patter, laced with colorful Ozark anecdotes. Jenkins convinced his reluctant fellow executives at Decca to record the group. Jenkins backed them up with his own lush string orchestra and huge chorus, but tactfully and with care, so as not to obscure the words and musical personalities of the groups' personnel. To everyone's surprise, The Weavers, who seemed to fit into no musical category, produced billboard hit after billboard hit, selling millions of singles. However, the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
had begun and the red scare was in full swing. In September 1950, Time magazine reviewed them this way:
Last week a group of four high-spirited folksters known as the Weavers had succeeded in shouting, twanging and crooning folk singing out of its cloistered corner into the commercial big time...
After the war the four met in Greenwich Village get-togethers, and decided that their voices, plus Pete's banjo and recorder, and Fred's guitar, made just the right blend. Sponsored by Red-tinged People's Songs, they got enthusiastic but unremunerative backing from fellow travelers who have long claimed folk songs as their particular province.
The Weavers and the Red Scare
In 1950, Pete Seeger was listed as a probable subversive in the anti-communist pamphlet Red ChannelsRed Channels
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television is an anti-Communist tract published in the United States at the height of the Red Scare...
and was placed on the entertainment industry blacklist
Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...
along with other members of the Weavers. Lee Hays was denounced as a member of the Communist Party during testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities by Harvey Matusow
Harvey Matusow
Harvey Matusow was a U.S. Communist who protected himself from HUAC by providing evidence against his former left-wing colleagues. His false accusations led to his own perjury conviction and to being blacklisted...
, a former Communist Party member (he later recanted).
Their records dropped from Decca's catalog and from radio broadcasts, and unable to perform live on television, radio, or in most music venues, The Weavers broke up in 1952. Subsequently, Hays liked to maintain that another entertainer, called Lee Hayes, spelled with an "e" was also banned from entertaining because of the similarity of his name. "Hayes couldn't get a job the whole time I was blacklisted," he claimed.
Hays spent the blacklist years rooming with the family of fellow blacklist victim 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"...
(composer of "The House I Live In
The House I Live In
The House I Live In is a ten-minute short film written by Albert Maltz, produced by Frank Ross and Mervyn LeRoy, and starring Frank Sinatra...
", "Ballad for Americans
Ballad For Americans
"Ballad For Americans" is an American patriotic cantata with lyrics by John La Touche and music by Earl Robinson. Originally titled "The Ballad for Uncle Sam", it was originally written for a WPA theatre project called Sing for Your Supper. Sing For Your Supper opened on April 24, 1939. Congress...
", and "Joe Hill
Joe Hill
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle , and also known as Joseph Hillström was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World...
"), in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the U.S. and Britain. In 1953, Hays' mother, whom he had seen only once since her entry into custodial care, died. In 1955 he was subpoena
Subpoena
A subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
ed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities: he declined to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment
Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, protects against abuse of government authority in a legal procedure. Its guarantees stem from English common law which traces back to the Magna Carta in 1215...
. 1955 was also the year of a sold-out Weavers Carnegie Hall reunion concert. The Weavers had not lost their audience appeal—the LP of the concert, issued two years later by Vanguard, was one of the three top-selling albums of the year. This led to a tour (made difficult by Hays' invalidism and anxieties), another album, and more tours, including one to Israel.
Later life
In 1958, Hays began recording a series of children's albums with The Baby SittersThe Baby Sitters (folk group)
The Baby Sitters was a music group that recorded four albums of children's folk songs from 1958 until 1968. Its original members were Alan Arkin, his then-wife Jeremy Arkin, Lee Hays, and Doris Kaplan, although Jeremy Arkin was later replaced by Barbara Dana....
, a group that included a young Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin
Alan Wolf Arkin is an American actor, director, musician and singer. He is known for starring in such films as Wait Until Dark, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Catch-22, The In-Laws, Edward Scissorhands, Glengarry Glen Ross, Marley & Me, and...
, the son of a family friend of the Robinsons. After the great financial success of Peter Paul and Mary's cover of "If I Had a Hammer" in the mid-1960s, Hays, whose mental and physical health had been shaky for years, lived mostly on income from royalties.
In 1967, he moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York where he devoted himself to tending his organic vegetable garden, cooking, writing, and socializing. He wrote to a friend that in his new surroundings he had no idea how to earn new money but that, "Having a listed number with no fear of Trotskyite crank calls is a huge relief". At the insistence of his old friend Woody
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...
's son, Arlo Guthrie
Arlo
Arlo is a given name for males. There are several origins of the name. From Old English, it is a variation of Harlow /HA-low/, derived from the Anglo-Saxon here 'army, troops; war-' and hlaw 'mound, cairn, hill,' thereby meaning 'army hill.' In Italian it can be a variant of Carlo, Karlo,...
, however, he did appear, playing himself as a preacher at a 1960 evangelical
Evangelism
Evangelism refers to the practice of relaying information about a particular set of beliefs to others who do not hold those beliefs. The term is often used in reference to Christianity....
meeting, in the film Alice's Restaurant
Alice's Restaurant (film)
Alice's Restaurant is a 1969 American comedy film co-written and directed by Arthur Penn. It is an adaptation of the 1967 folk song of the same name by singer and songwriter Arlo Guthrie...
(1969), based on Arlo's hit song of that name.
Hays, who had always been overweight, had been diagnosed in 1960 with diabetes, brought on by alcoholism, depression, and the use of a strong drug, a condition the doctors thought he had probably suffered from, along with TB, for many years previously. (Source: Liner notes from Pete Seeger on the Weavers boxed tape collection: "Wasn't That a Time") This led to a heart condition and he was fitted with a pacemaker. Both his legs eventually had to be amputated. Younger friends, among them Lawrence Lazare and Jimmy Callo, helped to take care of him.
His bad health notwithstanding, Hays performed in several 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...
reunion concerts, the last of which was in November 1980 at New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
's Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
. His last public performance with the group took place in June 1981 at the Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park
Croton Point
Croton Point is a Westchester County park in the village of Croton-on-Hudson.The park has several public attractions including:*Miniature Aircraft airport*Boat launch*Cabin Rental*Cross country skiing*Fishing*Group picnicking*Hiking/walking*Museum...
. Two months later he was dead. The documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!
The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!
The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time! is a 1982 documentary film about the blacklisted folk group The Weavers and the events leading up to their 1980 reunion concert at Carnegie Hall.The film was the inspiration for the 2003 mockumentary film A Mighty Wind....
, for which Hays had written the script, was released in 1982.
Near the end of his life Hays, wrote a farewell poem, "In Dead Earnest", inspired perhaps by Wobbly organizer Joe Hill
Joe Hill
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle , and also known as Joseph Hillström was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World...
's lyrical "Last Testament"but with an earthy Ozark frankness:
In Dead Earnest
If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take:
Put them in the compost pile
To decompose a little while.
Sun, rain, and worms will have their way,
Reducing me to common clay.
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishes in the seas.
When corn and radishes you munch,
You may be having me for lunch.
Then excrete me with a grin,
Chortling, "There goes Lee again!"
Twill be my happiest destiny
To die and live eternally.
He died on August 26, 1981 from diabetic cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease
Heart disease or cardiovascular disease are the class of diseases that involve the heart or blood vessels . While the term technically refers to any disease that affects the cardiovascular system , it is usually used to refer to those related to atherosclerosis...
at home in Croton, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were mixed with his compost pile.