Today’s episode is all about the first of the two 20th century waves in the folk music movement and how that movement rallied people behind some big themes to help them fight for social justice.
As a people, Americans are inclined towards optimism and a belief that if things aren’t working, they can be fixed. How improvement is defined, which issues get the focus, and how those improvements are managed comes down to party philosophy. Practically speaking, America has been a two-party system with a number of other minor parties that represent the people that don’t line up with everyone else. On the ‘left’, we’ve had three parties, progressives, socialists and communists.
Woody Guthrie, and a number of ‘folkie’ musicians like Pete Seeger, Josh White, Burl Ives and others, did something that hadn’t been done before in American music; they used it as a weapon against the things they thought were wrong in the world. For instance, Woody Guthrie’s guitar had the words “This machine kills fascists” on it.
They taught a nation to sing powerful songs about hope – Woody Guthrie did that – and when you do, you may sow the seeds of change in future generations, like the way Guthrie stood as Bob Dylan’s musical mentor. But music is just the drum beat that the rest of us have to march to. If we don’t like how things are going, we’re still Americans. We can still change it. We need to act on it. Ghandi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
When we do, we’ll see that just like things improved in working conditions, and minimum wage laws, and many other ways, the world can become a better place. Our country belongs to the people, not the tiny fraction on top. And this is a country that promises equality, but that equality is something we have to continuously protect
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Today’s episode is all about the first of the two 20th century waves in the folk music movement and how that movement rallied people behind some big themes to help them fight for social justice.
As a people, Americans are inclined towards optimism and a belief that if things aren’t working, they can be fixed. How improvement is defined, which issues get the focus, and how those improvements are managed comes down to party philosophy. Practically speaking, America has been a two-party system with a number of other minor parties that represent the people that don’t line up with everyone else. On the ‘left’, we’ve had three parties, progressives, socialists and communists.
Woody Guthrie, and a number of ‘folkie’ musicians like Pete Seeger, Josh White, Burl Ives and others, did something that hadn’t been done before in American music; they used it as a weapon against the things they thought were wrong in the world. For instance, Woody Guthrie’s guitar had the words “This machine kills fascists” on it.
They taught a nation to sing powerful songs about hope – Woody Guthrie did that – and when you do, you may sow the seeds of change in future generations, like the way Guthrie stood as Bob Dylan’s musical mentor. But music is just the drum beat that the rest of us have to march to. If we don’t like how things are going, we’re still Americans. We can still change it. We need to act on it. Ghandi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
When we do, we’ll see that just like things improved in working conditions, and minimum wage laws, and many other ways, the world can become a better place. Our country belongs to the people, not the tiny fraction on top. And this is a country that promises equality, but that equality is something we have to continuously protect
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Welcome back to American Song – today we find ourselves in the first decades of the 20th Century. The early decades of the 1900’s were a time of social changes and unrest. The poet W.H. Auden wrote his epic poem, The Age of Anxiety, about the isolation, loneliness, sense of purposelessness and spiritual emptiness that he saw everywhere. Try this quote from it:
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
People living in those days were really unhappy in a world that had changed so much. Major events, like the Industrial Revolution, WW I, massive migration to city living, and all the technology – like cars, planes, radio, and television made them feel powerless and alienated. For a lot of people, trusted institutions that had always provided comfort – like religion and democracy – weren’t providing the answers people were looking for any more. In music, no one made their points better than Woody Guthrie.
In these years, Guthrie, and a number of ‘folkie’ musicians like Pete Seeger, Josh White, Burl Ives and others, started doing something that hadn’t been done before in American music; they used it as a weapon against the things they thought were wrong in the world. For instance, Woody Guthrie’s guitar had the words “This machine kills fascists” on it.
As a people, Americans are inclined towards optimism and a belief that if things aren’t working, they can be fixed. How improvement is defined, which issues get the focus, and how those improvements are managed comes down to party philosophy. Practically speaking, America has been a two-party system with a number of other minor parties that represent the people that don’t line up with everyone else. On the ‘left’, we’ve had three parties, progressives, socialists and communists.
Progressives believe that science, technology, economic development and social organization can be used to improve the human condition. Progressives believe that the main block in improving the lives of the middle and lower classes is the economic inequality between the rich and the poor. Socialists and communists go a step further, and they believe that the only way to level the playing field is to abolish private ownership.
At the dawn of the 20th century, America was like a thoroughbred racing stallion, restless in the gates, every muscle tensed to explode into motion. We’d already become almost unrecognizable from what we’d been just a short century ago. Like the passengers on the Titanic, we did not see the various icebergs looming in the fog of the future.
Since just after the Civil War, we’d gone from being a mostly rural, farming nation with pockets of industry in a few northern cities, to a nation where industrial giants like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie started off poor, built massive wealth and powerful corporations in oil, railroads and steel, respectively. It was an unregulated era, no controls on whatever greed-oriented decisions might do to harm consumers, workers, or – as we’re contending with now – the environment. Government and the industrial tycoons were deeply in each other’s pockets. So, what you got were tragedies like the garment factory fire at the Triangle Shirt Waist Company. The building caught fire, and the women workers, who were locked in a room on an upper floor of the burning building either died directly in the fire, or jumped to their deaths to escape it. There was no OSHA, no worker-safety regulations in place. Authors like Upton Sinclair wrote books that peeled the gold gilding (to use a phrase Mark Twain created) right off of industry, exposing capitalism’s ugly under-belly where immigrant workers lost their lives in nightmarish stock yards and slaughter houses, where the sole goal – profit – kept workers in inhumane working conditions, consumers purchased products that caused more harm than good and the government’s official position was “Caveat Emptor” – latin for “Let the Buyer Beware”. But, as a result of the public outcry created by guys like Sinclair, and others who were labeled ‘radicals’ and ‘communists’, laws slowly began to change in directions ‘less favorable for business’ but better for everyone else. And this is an important point; whenever big business starts getting forced to do things that people with an actual social conscience would do - because it’s the right thing to do - they start labeling the people working for change as ‘radicals’, ‘agitators’, ‘reds’, and lately ‘snowflakes’.
As the ‘oughts’ and ‘teens’ of the 20th century gave way to the roaring twenties, and America’s economy was super-heated. Regular folks started investing in corporations for the first time ever, and putting their money in the banks. Consumerism became almost like the national religion. Got a problem, buy a gadget and fix it! Nirvana (not the band) and ecstasy (not a pill) are just one more purchase away! And then, just when it seemed like the party would never end, the get-rich-quick train everybody was riding on smashed into a brick wall. People living on farms got wiped out when the prairie soil, no longer nourished and plowed by the hooves of 60 million buffalo gave out and the winds of the dustbowl blew the topsoil in all directions. Farms that their grandfathers and fathers had lived and died on were repossessed by bankers who thought only about profits and nothing about people.
The ride was over, and we were now in the Great Depression. As Americans lay their reeling, trying to get over the economic bed-spins that the jazz age bathtub gin binges led to, they wondered how they were going to recover. A new sense of disappointment and betrayal began to settle in.
People were promised that the banks and corporations would bring everyone a better life; all they had to do was give up who they were, and what they’d traditionally stood for and things would be wonderful.
But they found out they’d put their faith in a false messiah. Sound familiar?
A lot of angry people felt like capitalism had done them wrong, and a new voice was out there, offering solutions that seemed better and fairer for regular people; a different approach than what people thought had led them to the brink, with 25% of the country out of work, and people losing their homes, and living in shacks.
Unemployment Insurance was just one example of some of the economic plans proposed to help the millions who suddenly found themselves in these dark situations, teetering on homelessness. Initially, the American Federation of Labor linked the idea to the Communist Party and voted the proposal down. When profit is king, nothing else matters.
America’s minorities were the hardest hit by the depression. In response, the CIO (Congress for Industrial Organizations) was formed to start organizing black workers into labor unions for the first time ever. Of course, social justice became an important part of what the CIO worked on and their platform called for a national anti-lynching law, an end to “legal” segregation and disenfranchisement in the South, as well as the elimination of racist policies and practices throughout society. Of course, the segregationist power structure saw these activities as a threat to their kind of world and they labeled those activities as harmful to their traditional version of that ‘down-home’ way of life – you know, grandma, grandpa, apple pie and lynchings…. However, Communists and those who joined in the struggle for greater equality started promoting a new message that “Black Lives Matter” as much as the lives of any American. As I said, progress in America seems to move slowly sometimes.
In America today, you and I are protected as regular individuals against some economic forces that threatened our ancestors. For instance, unemployment insurance. Today, we can count on it. It’s not a lot, to be sure, but if you’re in a situation where you suddenly find yourself out of a job, you can rely on it to carry you through until you’re back in the green again. We can still make our rent, and put food on the family table. That wasn’t always true.
Imagine you’re a minority, living in a place where some people don’t like you because your skin isn’t the ‘right’ color. Someone decides to accuse you of a crime you never committed. There have been – and in some places still are – times when guilt or innocence is determined by the color of your skin. Effective legal defense is sometimes hard to find. But the good news today, as long as we protect and defend the changes that have been made, is that there are more laws, and groups, and associations to protect regular folks, especially minorities.
These all seem like great wins for the ‘little guy’, don’t they! They’re the kinds of things we love about America, right? I mean, America’s the land of equality and justice for all…. And everyone has a fighting chance to succeed. And these kinds of laws are the sorts of ideas and protections that come from believing in the American Way, democracy and capitalism, right?
Actually, no. If you look into how many of the laws, protections, and financial support systems that common, ordinary citizens have won over the last hundred years or so, the American Way fought against them tooth and nail every inch of the way.
In the first decades of the 20th century, more people were starting to notice that the land of milk and honey was a place where workers got milked, and there was very little honey to go around. And that frustration, and a desire to create an America that resembled the promise that the people had been given, could be heard in the music more and more.
In a lot of ways, things here in the old US of A have improved since those days. For sure, there’s been more regulation. We’ve got a minimum wage law now. Working conditions are safe, and living standards in America are much better than they were a hundred years ago.
When we look through the years, we can see that things got better because a lot of people, from different political philosophies invested their lives in making it that way – including members of the two major parties. Many times, change has been pushed from the minor parties until it became an important rallying point and the Dems or Republicans backed those movements.
Today’s episode is all about the first of the two 20th century waves in the folk music movement and how that movement rallied people behind some big themes to help them fight for social justice – a phrase we’re hearing so often in the news again today. To some people, including musicians like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Josh White and others, Socialism and Communism seemed like the solution. There was even a slogan that said “Communism is 20th Century Americanism”.
Thankfully, our heritage, national character, and our values system were important guard rails during many of those years and we never experienced the bloody revolutions, gulags, dictatorships or party purges that other nations did. Welcome to American Song episode eleven – Folk Music Stood For America.
Woodie Guthrie was one of the great folk music artists during the first folk movement His music championed some of the great causes of his time and he said, “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.” Let’s meet Woody in person.
The 1930’s folk movement was very political. The people making and promoting the music were energized by more than just love of the music. For them, the music was an instrument to recruit and organize the working people in the country behind political change; capitalism was the root cause of the social problems of the day, and the world still hadn’t seen the worst that communist systems could produce – like gulags and dictator states - so a lot of people were very attracted to the promises that communism presented. Years ago, Dylan wrote a song called Union Sundown. One line from that song rings appropriate here; “It sure was a good idea, til greed got in the way.” And so it went with communism, a system that took everything from everybody – unless you happened to be a party boss. Don’t believe me? Do some homework on where China’s Princelings – the children of the Chinese party leaders - go to university, and where they hold jobs, and what their lifestyles are like….
Anyway, back to our story; you might say there were two types of people involved in this first folk phase; musicians who wanted to preserve what we called ‘old time’ or ‘mountain’ music in an earlier episode of American Song, and another politically minded, intellectual elite that saw it as a form of propaganda that could be used for their aims. To capture the second group’s idea of a singable lyric, try this:
We are the builders, we build the future
The future world is in our hands.
We
swing our hammers, we use our weapons
Against our foes in many lands ...
And we, the workers, who are the builders,
We fight, we do not fear to die.
"All power and freedom unto the workers!"
Is our defiant battle cry.
Um, no. Not exactly a campfire song is it? Not unless the campfires are started by people throwing Molotov cocktails!
Guthrie, like the composers of that song, had read writers like Marx and Hegel and found truth in their own experiences with the communist philosophy that said that the “mode of production,” in Capitalist economies, such as the United States, led to people’s oppression and that Communism was the cure to the disease.
I think you’d have to agree with the first statement; however, history has shown us that communism never delivered on its promises.
Anyway, the intellectual leadership of the movement changed their tune once they noticed that these songs were not getting picked up by the masses. The Communist Party of America dropped its militancy and made peace with FDR’s New Deal administration because it was the closest thing going to the kind of uptopian government the leadership envisioned. The New Deal was putting people back to work - a major departure from the traditional approach in which government didn’t lift a finger to help the ‘little guy’ if the economy spun out of control. At its high point, right before WW II, the party had 90,000 members.
The Folk musicians in this period included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Earl Robinson, and the American Square Dance Group of New York City.
In another great quote from Guthrie, he tried to explain the basically political nature of the folk music movement when he said, “I think real folk stuff scares most of the boys around Washington. A folk song is about what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be whose hungry and where their mouth is, and whose out of work and where the job is or whose broke and where the money is or whose carrying a gun and where the peace is - that's folk lore and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work.”
Guthrie was the real deal in the folk music movement. He looked like he could have been the brother of Tom Joad, from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Early on, he’d been a country music radio announcer in LA, but he quickly outgrew the limitations that playing other people’s music posed and he had a natural connection with the kinds of folks that saw the music as a rallying point for a communist political movement. They loved Guthrie’s rural, straight-forward, home-spun approach. Most of all, they recognized that Woody was politically aligned with them.
Early on, Woody was a member of a folk group called The Almanac Singers. It also included Pete Seeger, and a couple other guys whom mainly have been forgotten. In the years leading up to WW II, they sang traditional folksongs, and songs about union building and left-wing political themes, performing for just about every radical group associated with the Left. The Almanac Singers saw themselves more like singing social organizers than what we’d call a band. They were about trying to drive people to go out and support union drives, collective labor activism, and anti-fascism.
Their song “Which Side Are You On” is a great rallying cry of a protest song, designed to get people to make a commitment to the movement. The Almanacs for most of their career never pursued any kind of commercial success. Instead, their focus was totally on trying to create a separate people's culture; one that was authentic to artistic and aesthetic expression of the working-class. The song has had a long life, being covered by some major artists through the decades, including Billy Bragg, Natalie Merchant, Tom Morello, Elvis Costello, and the Kronos Quartet among a long list of others. This is just one example of the long-lasting imprint Guthrie’s songs have had on music, American or otherwise.
By now you might be getting the notion that Woody Guthrie was the spokesperson for this movement, and. unofficially, you’re probably right because he also said, “The biggest parts of our song collection are aimed at restoring the right amount of people to the right amount of land and the right amount of houses and the right amount of groceries to the right amount of working folks.” In today’s era of the 99% and the 1%, where so much of our country’s wealth is in the hands of such a tiny fraction of our citizens, and the middle class is becoming just a memory, his vision just might be worth recapturing.
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger first met on March 30, 1940 at a “Grapes of Wrath” benefit concert for victims of the Oklahoma Dustbowl. Pretty soon afterwards, they began touring together, performing across the country for various labor groups. And then, In February 1941, they formed with three others - including Bess Lomax sister of Alan Lomax, whom we’ve talked about a few times in earlier episodes, and they formed-the Almanac singers - ultimately, the most important political folk-song group of this first wave of folk revival.
If you’re a WW II buff, you’ll remember that early on in the war, Hitler had allied with Stalin, and then, without provacation, suddenly turned on him, ordering the Nazi troops to attack the USSR – this was probably the point where he lost the war and the rest was just a demolition exercise to see how much blood could actually be spilled in a four year window. Seeing an opportunity, Great Britain and the U.S. formed an alliance with the USSR. With the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the Soviet Union under siege, the CPUSA and its sympathizers, including the Almanac Singers, were transformed from pacifists into warriors almost overnight. The head of the CPUSA coined the slogan "Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism," and he added Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR to the European list of Communist heroes Marx, Lenin, and Stalin – strange pairing to be sure!
The Almanac Singer’s set list changed to match the times, you’d have thought you’d walked into a Boy Scout sing-along, or a 4H meeting they were so patriotic! In the new "common front" against fascism, the group performed songs such as "The Ruben James" ("... tell me what were their names, did you have a friend killed on the good Ruben James"), about an American ship sunk by a German U-boat in the early days of the war. Once branded as traitors in the commercial press and banned from the radio, they were transformed from public enemy to friend of the people.
An unintended consequence of this was the surge in the popularity – I mean radio, mostly - of their music. Suddenly, they had many more chances to perform for non-leftist audiences, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger each got opportunities to perform individually at the White House.
Alan Lomax was hugely important in cultivating American folk music and without him, a lot of the folk revival movement may not have happened, or at least the way it did. He was the son of John Lomax, who was also an anthropologist that recorded authentic American music. We’ve talked about him in earlier episodes. Listen to Alan talk about his earliest memories of his father and their shared search for folk music and musicians, in this 1991 60 Minutes interview with Charles Kuralt.
No one did more to make folk music a national trend than Alan Lomax. We’ve talked about him before, in earlier episodes; he was vital in preserving a lot of the authentic blues, and folk music that could still be heard in many rural pockets of America; especially in the South. He was also the host of a CBS radio show for kids called "American School of the Air" that ran from 1939 to 1941. Lomax had a whole-family audience, too.
His show, "Hootenany " started in 1940, and his regular guests were guys like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, Pete Seeger and many others. Through his show, Lomax was able to introduce a large number of folk musicians to a large, national audience. One of them was the great blues guitarist and singer, Muddy Waters.
Unfortunately, he never found a sponsor - probably because of the political material and because it broke the color barrier by including both black and white artists. Lomax also sponsored a series of very popular “Town Hall” concerts that also promoted folks music. There was a second folk music White House concert, in March of 1941, where the cast of Hootenany performed at a military-themed “command performance” before an audience that included the Secretaries of War, Navy, and the Treasury, and their wives.
Like most of the first-revival folk artists, Alan’s politics definitely leaned to the left – which made him naturally empathetic with the topics and concerns that the artists cared about. Lomax did as much as anyone to make the first revival successful. He discovered some of the artists, helped them book shows, arranged for recording sessions, exposed them to the deep well of authentic songs he’d documented around the country, and helped them build an audience by giving them really valuable, national airtime on the CBS network. Also, Alan Lomax personally encouraged the political motivations of these artists. Because of him, artists like Leadbelly, Josh White, Burl Ives, the Golden Gate Quartet, and especially Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had successful careers in music.
I mentioned looming icebergs that could sink seemingly unsinkable ships at the top of this episode. By the start of the 1950’s, Senator Joe McCarthy and his House Un-American Anti Communism Committee was one of those icebergs, and the lives of many people in the entertainment field were wrecked by it.
Alan Lomax was one of those whose ships were wrecked. He came under the watchful eye of HUAC, and reading the times for what they were, he decided he’d be better off outside the country. So, he took off for England where he built a new life in the budding English and Irish folk-revival, inspired by what had been happening in the USA. Don’t forget about Lomax though; we’ll see him again in the early 1960’s during the Second Folk Revival.
Burl Ives was one of those musicians that Lomax had given a powerful boost to. Besides being a major first-wave folk artist, he also had an impressive acting career. However, he achieved his success at the expense of a lot of people who’d thought he was their friend and colleague. His reputation, because of this, got pretty murky as a result.
During the McCarthy era, he was one of those individuals who traded his conscience for a steady paycheck while a lot of other folks just like him got blacklisted. Being blacklisted meant you were indicted for subversion by the HUAC, the industry basically dropped you from any consideration of future work; it was an ‘every man for himself’ era.
But we’re kind of starting in the middle of Burl’s story. Let’s go for a ride on the way-back machine. Early in his career, Ives had been knee-deep in the socialist movement, working alongside Seeger, Guthrie, and the Almanac Singers – back in their pre-patriot/ anti-war days. He even went as far, in the late forties, as signing a petition circulated by a Hollywood list of Who’s Whos called the Committee for the First Amendment.
The committee’s purpose was to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of another Hollywood group known as the Hollywood Ten.
This committee was organized by two important film directors, William Wyler and John Houston and two actors, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Wyler directed some really important films like Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday, and The Best Years of Our Lives. Houston’s distinguished career included great movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, China Town, the Asphalt Jungle, and Prizzi’s Honor. Bogart – one of the biggest leading men of his era – was in such films as the Maltese Falcon, Casa Blanca and the African Queen. Often paired with Bogart, Lauren Bacall was the star of To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Key Largo.
Anyway, these four powerful Hollywood people had come to the aid of a group of writers, directors and producers who had refused to answer any of the questions posed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Eventually, they were jailed for being in contempt of Congress and had to serve ten years time. The consequnces of their brave stand sent waves through the entertainment industry. The Hollywood entertainment executives convened a meeting in New York to announce their patriotic decision – or was it just a weak-kneed capitulation to the hysteria and paranoia of the times - not to hire anyone suspicious or controversial.
Here’s something I want to make sure I emphasize; to be labeled a subversive, it’s not like you had to have committed any crimes. You didn’t need to participate in the rabble mob storming of the US capital building, or lie about election results, or plan an insurrection…. All you need to have done was hold favorable opinions about communism, or have made positive public statements about it, or voted for socialist or communist candidates. No actual crimes were committed. Do that, and you could do ten years jail time, or lose your career, or both!
The next domino to fall was Congress passing the McCarran and Smith Acts which revoked the passports of anyone labeled subversive and barring them from any travel outside the country. In that hot-house climate, Burl Ives found himself listed by HUAC as a suspected Communist sympathizer. And this raises another parallel with things I see happening today. Given how weak these cases were, and the kinds of things people were losing so much over, it’s frightening to see the kinds of laws that were passed at the time. Restricting travel is something that we usually think happens in dictator-type states, not fully fledged democracies with a Bill of Rights and 200 years of Democracy and a Constitution and most people today look at these times with shock and discomfort. So then what’s happening with all these Voter Suppression laws? What are we becoming? What happened in 2020, when voting participation surprised a nation that is used to political apathy has GOT to continue. We’ve got too many people in power who don’t value America the way they need to . This is a time to heed the reminders that have come before us, like this song by another first wave folkie, Earl Robinson and his song, Keeping Score in ’44.
Back to Burl Ives; what came next is why I said his reputation has been forever tarnished.
Even though Ives had been sympathetic to left-wing politics, he denied ever having had any Communist sympathies or relations. What was worse, he eventually provided the names of dozens, if not hundreds of people he knew who did have similar leanings, and whose careers were ruined, such as another folk group, the Weavers. Remember this when we talk about Pete Seeger in a little while.
Trading his respectability, personal conscience, and decency for money seems to have been a pretty good business move for ‘ol Burl though. ( Just ask Rudy Giuliani.)
While his friends and associates were steadily going broke and losing their careers, Ives was making out really well for himself with a steady stream of acting and record contracts. But he’d revealed who he really was, and people who were paying attention saw it. For instance, the great Southern playwrite, Tennessee Williams wrote a role in his play “Cat On a Hot Tin Roof” specifically for Ives who played the part of Big Daddy, a cynical, overly-macho “realist.” On the outside, Big Daddy was all fat and bravado, but inside, he was rotting away from cancer. His character was written to symbolize America’s hypocrisy. He was such a natural in that part that he resumed it when the movie version was made. This is Ives, with Paul Newman, in a scene from that movie.
He likewise had big parts in The Big Country, Show Boat, East of Eden, Desire Under the Elms, Our Man in Havana, and he finally played his last role in a 1980’s film called White Dog, where he played a really nasty racist. He had a role in the hugely important Roots miniseries and for sure, you’ll remember his narrator role as Sam the Snowman in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. While Rudolph’s nose was red, Burl’s was mostly brown, way up to the bridge.
His music career was just as lucrative, although in a lot of ways, he’d sold out on his music just as much as he had on his social conscience. The guy that once told Alan Lomax that he only chose songs that ‘rang true’ for him, ended up singing just about any damn thing people paid him to. He had a string of country hits In the early 1960s with totally forgettable songs like “A Little Bitty Tear,” “Call Me Mr. In-Between,” and “It’s Just My Funny Way of Laughin’.
When the second folk revival came along he tried – but failed – to break into it, too, by forming a group called Burl Ives and the Folksingers Three. In an age where Dylan was the folk-music prophet of the younger generation, they even sang a cover of “The Times They Are A-Changing,” If you’ve got kids, or grand kids, or just a memory of when you, yourself, still believed in Santa, you’ll probably remember the songs “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas,” and “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer”. Yep, that was Burl too. He continued to stay active in folk through the end of his music career – but chose to focus on the historical, not the social aspects by putting out mostly irrelevant collections of sea songs, religious music, and historical collections.
It’s not hard to guess that Burl Ives’ outing of his fellow folk musicians soured relationships between himself and that crowd. Here’s an example of what followed. In 1957, Pete Seeger was asked to write a review of Ives album of sea shanties that I mentioned earlier. In the review, he called Ives ‘gross, and gargantuan’, and he pointed out that Ives had ‘fingered, like any common stool pigeon, some of his radical associates of the early 1940’s, because he wanted to preserve his lucrative contracts’. Seeger went on to say that Ives was ‘not quite intelligent enough to be honorable.’
Josh White was a blues singer, and, like Huddie Ledbetter, is also considered an authentic blues artist. This is Josh singing one of the earliest known recordings of this well loved song, House of the Rising Sun. His range covered every major genre of the time; included pop, jazz, gospel, and even some jazz. He’s thought of as one of the best, and most famous black guitarists and singers of the 1930s and '40s.
Born in Greenville, South Carolina, his musical heritage was deep and authentic in spirituals, prison songs and black folk music. His grandfather had been a slave of the Mauldin family, and, a pleasant surprise, the descendents of that family continued to support White, acting as patrons, and providing and offering housing, food and protection.
White took those songs and made them popular in unexpected places, like New York nightclubs and finally among European audiences. While he wasn’t a very original artist – not like Robert Johnson for instance – he was popular with white audiences and introduced a lot of people to the Blues. In fact, his work influenced future artists too. Zeppelin fans will remember In My Time of Dying from Physical Graffiti. This is the version that inspired them.
He cut his first record in 1928, playing rhythm guitar behind a blind blues guitarist named Blind Joe Taggart. Then, he moved to New York City and his career began to take off. Pretty soon, he got a gig playing live on radio. He found an interesting way to have dual careers in the Christian music market and in the secular blues market. As a blues-man, he recorded under the name Pinewood Tom.
White grew up in a very strict, Christian, household. His father was a Methodist minister and ran his household in an ultra-conservative way. To get a feel for it, the only acceptable drinks were buttermilk, milk and water; the only allowable social event was going to church service, and spirituals were the only music permitted in the home.
So, it’s not surprising that blues-man Pinewood Tom had an alter-ego in his career; Christian artist Josh White, the Singing Christian. One of his songs as Josh White was “There’s a Man Goin’ Around Taking Names”. Like Burl Ives, he also had a dual career in acting and had roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. FDR invited White to play at the White House, and he toured Mexico on behalf of the U.S. State Department – just like a lot of other major artists from that period – check out episode 10 for more on that subject.
Like Seeger, and Guthrie and a lot of other artists in entertainment at that time, he took a strong stand against social injustice and racial prejudice. Doing the right thing is never easy, even in a country that supposedly respects freedom of speech. So, like you might guess, Hoover’s FBI had their eyes on him the whole time, eventually building a file that ran to 473 pages.
Obviously, White’s strong stand for social justice was partly a product of his race. But it was also the result of the hardship he’d gone through after his father was unjustly imprisoned in a state asylum.
Pastor White had beat up a white man, who having been invited into the White’s home, refused to remove his hat and spat on the Minister’s wife. After that, the family struggled economically. Josh White became his family's wage earner at the young age of six, by traveling the countryside with several blind musicians and backing them up on rhythm guitar. At night he’d sleep under the stars, catch meals where he could, and was usually dressed in rags. He was exposed to a lot of stuff kids should never be; by the time he was eight, he’d already witnessed a lynching.
At the same time, the years on the road gave Josh the experience he needed to become the great musician that he did. He played all over the country, memorized hundreds of songs and learned to play the guitar at a really professional level.
By 1940, he’d made it a long way from those rough beginnings. People thought he was handsome, loaded with charisma and obviously talented. He was gigging at a bi-racial nightclub called Café Society where he entertained high-society types like debutantes and visiting royalty. He sang with Leadbelly, and co-starred with his good friend and actor Paul Robeson in a Broadway musical.
He also had a number of major hits including "Chain Gang," "One Meat Ball," "Free and Equal Blues," "Strange Fruit," "St. James Infirmary," "The House I Live In" and "Waltzing Matilda."
Having come through what he had, he also sang a lot of protest songs about poverty and racism, and got tight with the folk music crowd, like Alan Lomax and that ilk. In 1941, he played at FDR’s inaugural gala, held at Constitution Hall, and again at the Library of Congress and, even a third time in a command performance, at the White House. You need to remember that in the 1930’s and 40’s, when FDR was President, the country was still heavily segregated, and the White House is technically in the South, where Jim Crow was the law of the land. So these were subtle, but important statements that FDR was making.
White was FDR’s unofficial go-to on race issues, and – get this - Eleanor Roosevelt – the First Lady - was the godmother of White’s third child. I mean, you just don’t get much bigger than that. But wait! There’s more! In 1945 he was the first Black artist to do a nationwide concert tour. He received an honorary doctorate from an HBCU, Fisk University, and in 1950, he joined Eleanor Roosevelt on a goodwill tour of European capitals.
But those icebergs that were out there, waiting to sink ships – White’s ship hit one too. Just like Seeger, and Guthrie, and the Hollywood Ten and many others, he fell under the hateful eye of the House Un-American Activities Committee and was interrogated by the FBI. White was no communist, but he had righteously protested America’s racism and the inequalities he’d seen all his life, and he did know communists. He found himself in a no-win situation. His friends on the left were royally pissed off when he testified for the HUAC and at the same time, the right-wingers – who probably had been waiting for an opportunity to knock this black man down a few pegs, blacklisted him. He couldn’t find work for over a decade after that – not in America, the land of the free, and the home of the brave. Oh no, not here. It’s worth listening to a bit of his friend Paul Robeson, in front of HUAC. I love the strength and absolute conviction he showed in front of that powerful group. To do that, visit the American Song Podcast page on Facebook.
We’ve got time to talk about one more of the First-Wave folk musicians, someone we’ve mentioned already a few times but who is so important to the movement that he needs his own space.
Besides Woody Guthrie, the other memorable musician from the Almanac Singers was Pete Seeger. Outspoken, passionate, and a marvelously giften musician and composer, Seeger once said "Music is propaganda - always propaganda - and of the most powerful sort. Our group’s special task in the Worker's Music League is developing music as a weapon in the class struggle."
Here he is singing a Lead Belly song called Good Night Irene. Interestingly, Alan Lomax was the one who introduced Lead Belly and Pete Seeger to each other. Over the following years, they played live shows together many times.
Social action was something Pete Seeger believed in his entire life. “My job,” he said, in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”
He was born in Manhattan on May 3, 1919. His parents were musicians; his dad Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and his mom, Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, was a concert violinist. They eventually divorced, and his father remarried Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer, arranger, pianist, teacher and the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Music. As if that wasn’t enough, she was also a collector and transcriber of rural American folk music. His background practically guaranteed the kind of career he was going to have.
Seeger’s earliest musical experience was playing ukulele while a student at a private boarding school in Connecticut.
Pete discovered the 5-string banjo when his Dad took him to a square-dance festival in North Carolina. It was love at first site. It became his major instrument.
He attended Harvard University and was in the same class as JFK. His original plan was to become a journalist. He founded a radical, student newspaper and he joined the Young Communist League. Seeing more of a future in music than the law, Seeger dropped out of college after his Sophomore year, and like Josh White, headed for New York City. In New York, he met Alan Lomax, who introduced him to Lead Belly and other blues and folk musicians. In a biography of Seeger’s life written years later by David Dunaway, Seeger was quoted as saying, “I liked the strident vocal tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing. The words of the songs had all the meat of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.” Lomax also got Pete a job cataloging and transcribing music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The songs Pete discovered in that job eventually became a big part of his set list in live concerts.
Around that time, Seeger also met Woody Guthrie, an event that was going to have major impact in his life for sure. Their first connection was playing at a benefit concert for migrant California workers. The two hitched up and traveled across the United States, hitchhiking, hopping freights and trading songs. It sounds like an exciting, adventurous life for a young 20-something doesn’t it? If you’ve read Steinbeck’s accounts of California and the migrant workers, you’ll get a real sense for why Communism struck such a major chord with guys like Guthrie and Seeger. If you haven’t, check out In Dubious Battle or the Grapes of Wrath. Such a great writer!
Guthrie and Seeger eventually started a group called the Almanac Singers, which also included Bess Lomax (the wife of Alan Lomax), Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. After the Almanac Singers ran out of steam for reasons we’ve already talked about, Pete was drafted into WW II in 1942 and assigned to a unit of performers.
After the war, he went back to New York and founded People’s Songs Inc., which published political songs and presented concerts for several years but the company went bankrupt. He had a nightclub career, too. He used to play shows at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village – which was also a hot spot for a lot of jazz artists. And, of course, he was p0litically active; for instance, he toured with Henry Wallace – a Progressive Party presidential candidate - in 1948. Here’s his campaign song from 1948.
In 1949, Pete teamed up again with Lee Hays, from the Almanac Singers days, and two other folkies, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman to form the group, the Weavers. Gordon Jenkins, an A&R guy who was also an arranger for a lot of Frank Sinatra’s backing charts, signed them to a contract with Decca Records.
The Weavers made a bunch of popular records like “If I Had a Hammer”, a South African song called, “Wimoweh” (it should have been “Mbube”, but Seeger heard the original African recording wrong, an Israeli soldiers’ song called, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” and he even did songs in Spanish, such as Guantanamara. Oh, and I shouldn’t leave out the Weaver’s cover of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” – (we heard Pete’s solo version of it a little earlier) In fact it topped the charts for six months!
Seeger, with the Weavers, had some pretty big hits in ’50 and ’51 with “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” and a cover of his old buddy, Woody Guthrie’s song, “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” Eventually, the Weavers sold an amazing four million singles and albums during those two years.
Another iceberg; Things were going really well for Seeger and the Weavers, until the House Un-American Activities Committee set their sites on the group – and here’s how it all went down.
The Weavers were targeted as a possible Communist threat. The FBI started building a file on the band and its individual members, and a special Senate subcommittee started investigating the group for sedition. In ’52, a former employee of People’s Songs was questionned by HUAC, and he named three of the four members of the Weavers as Communist party members. TV appearances started being canceled, so did live shows, recording opportunities and more.
To fill the canceled dates in his performance schedule, Seeger started playing solo shows at college coffeehouses, churches, schools and summer camps – and he built a new audience for folk music with the younger audience. With this focus on younger audiences, it’s easy to see the way the second revival in the sixties was being set-up. Folk music is so idealistic, you can see how the ‘60s generation was heavily influenced by what Seeger was doing. He was paving a path for the new artists that were coming just around the ccorner – like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.
Remember how I said that Pete Seeger’s original ambition before music was to be a journalist? Well, during those years, he also put his writing talent to work, writing a long-running column for a folk-song magazine called Sing Out! And he left a big library of recordings he did for the Folkways label – like Burl Ives around the same time, Seeger also recorded a super broad array of songs; everything from children’s songs to Spanish Civil War anthems.
But just like the original Salem Witch Trials, the House Un-American Activities Committee hurt a lot of great people before it was all over. In ’55, Seeger was subpoenaed. In his powerful testimony, and showing way more integrity than Burl Ives before him had, Pete told the committee, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature. I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”
Here’s Seeger, 1965, talking about his testimony in front of HUAC.
Seeger even offered to sing the songs that had been listed by HUAC in their inquisition of Seeger – and I’m using that word, “inquisition”, with intent.
It seems to me that, as bright as we are, we humans have an awfully hard time remembering the lessons we should have learned from our prior mistakes. Haven’t we seen these same kinds of mistakes before? There’s such a long history. The Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Conquest of Latin America. The Salem Witch Trials. The Armenian Genocide. The Native American Genocide. The Jewish Holocaust. The Rwandan Genocide. Stalin’s purges. American slavery. McCarthyism. American racism. The Conservative Christian movement and it’s intolerance of everyone outside that camp. The resurgence of voter suppression in the USA – land of equality, and home of democracy. In my opinion, the running themes through this list are intolerance, fear, racism, objectification of our fellow humans, and a willingness to do anything to anyone as long as some supposedly ‘higher objective’ is the excuse. Usually there are a lot of ‘doers’ and just a handful of master puppeteers who are pulling the strings because they think they have something personal to gain. Whether it’s Incan gold, or lebensraum, or a big, fat man with an orange complexion, a psychopathic lack of a moral compass, an inability to feel any remorse and the uncanny ability to play all the dumb pawns in our society for his own gain. I wonder if we can ever overcome this terrible side of our nature?
So, in 1957, in his show-down against Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Anti Communism Committee, Pete Seeger was indicted on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. During the five-year gap between the indictment and jail, Seeger continued to play concerts – shows that were usually picketed by far-right groups including, but not limited to, the John Birch Society – sister organization to the KKK. I told you how Pete like to include South African and Israeli songs in his set list, right?
After a four-year legal fight, Seeger was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison. Thankfully, one year later, a court of appeals dismissed the indictment as faulty. You’ve got to love Seeger’s unwavering belief in his audience and in his message. About those pickets, he said, “All those protests did was sell tickets and get me free publicity. The more they protested, the bigger the audiences became.” Isn’t this proof that Lincoln’s statement ‘you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time’, remains true? If y0u don’t agree, how would you explain the 2020 US election results?
The best art reflects, and in some ways can even change, society – even if its just one person at a time. The first folk movement shows us that. Sometimes the cost of change comes at great personal cost, like the time that Pete Seeger, and the Hollywood 10 served in prison. Great artists are capable of turning personal hardship into something beautiful, like Josh White’s painful childhood which he turned into a platform for social justice. You can teach a nation to sing powerful songs about hope – Woody Guthrie did that – and when you do, you may sow the seeds of change in future generations, like the way Guthrie stood as Bob Dylan’s musical mentor. But music is just the drum beat that the rest of us have to march to. If we don’t like how things are going, we’re still Americans. We can still change it. We need to act on it. Ghandi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.” When we do, we’ll see that just like things improved in working conditions, and minimum wage laws, and many other ways, the world can become a better place. Our country belongs to the people, not the tiny fraction on top. And this is a country that promises equality, but that equality is something we have to continuously protect – there are always people that think they’re more equal than others. We can’t let them take it from us. Democracy is hard work, and it doesn’t last if you don’t participate. There are too many people who prefer to live by “mendacity”. We must rise to the occasion.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this latest episode of American Song, Folk Music Stood for America. You can learn more about the people and events discussed in this episode when you visit our Facebook page; search for American Song Podcast. We’ll see you soon!