or Mussolini was invading
Ethiopia. Thus, while the songwriters around the CP had some magnificent moments, they were unable to exploit the full range of their experience, and their compositions ended up being as obsessively focused on one subject (politics) as the commercial music they despised was on another (romantic love).
My purpose is not to chart the fortunes of the Almanacs and their various heirs and assigns through the 1940s, but only to note that their influence was fundamental and continued to grow. People’s Songs was formed as a sort of central clearinghouse for progressive folksingers, and it published a regular bulletin that was the direct ancestor of Sing Out! magazine. Then, in 1948, the Weavers reached the top ten on the Hit Parade, putting the folk revival squarely into the mainstream of American music. By this time, a good deal of ideological mellowing had been going on, and the group was—dare one say it—fun.
It is impossible to determine what further evolutions the Weavers’ success might have sparked if the Cold War and its attendant anti-Communist hysteria had not intervened. The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s involved this country in one of the most disgracefully psychotic episodes in its history, and the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures—people in government and the entertainment world—but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a messenger , for chrissake, and I have already mentioned Lenny Glaser being fired from his job as a waiter after the FBI came around and asked the restaurant manager some pointed questions about his political affiliations. The right-wing press—which is to say, almost all of it—was running stories like “How the Reds Control Our Schools,” and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison, and a couple (the Rosenbergs) executed pour encourager les autres . Thus the cheery atmosphere of the Golden Fifties.
When I began haunting the Village, I knew from radical politics like a dog knows his grandmother. I had read about the Wobblies and thought of them as my spiritual forefathers, but assumed that the IWW had vanished along with the five-cent beer. (As it happened, I could have found them by simply looking in the phone book: they kept a hall down on lower Broad Street.) The contemporary left was a vague and mysterious concept to me—but with McCarthy, Nixon, and their sleazy band of creeps rampaging across the land, it was clear that whatever radicals remained were in deep shit. This appealed to my contrarian streak, and I could hardly wait to get involved.
The Communist Party was the first and most obvious candidate for my attention: it had a certain underdog appeal, and its minions were relatively easy to locate—they were as hard to find as Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon. The young CP-ers, called the Labor Youth League or LYL, would be spread out all across the park, five-string banjos and nylon-string guitars in hand, singing what they called “people’s songs.” They were very serious, very innocent, and very young, and except for talking (and singing) a lot about “peace,” their political opinions were generally indistinguishable from those of liberal Democrats. They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists. I remember once coming across a covey of them sitting cross-legged around a bespectacled banjoist who
Ethiopia. Thus, while the songwriters around the CP had some magnificent moments, they were unable to exploit the full range of their experience, and their compositions ended up being as obsessively focused on one subject (politics) as the commercial music they despised was on another (romantic love).
My purpose is not to chart the fortunes of the Almanacs and their various heirs and assigns through the 1940s, but only to note that their influence was fundamental and continued to grow. People’s Songs was formed as a sort of central clearinghouse for progressive folksingers, and it published a regular bulletin that was the direct ancestor of Sing Out! magazine. Then, in 1948, the Weavers reached the top ten on the Hit Parade, putting the folk revival squarely into the mainstream of American music. By this time, a good deal of ideological mellowing had been going on, and the group was—dare one say it—fun.
It is impossible to determine what further evolutions the Weavers’ success might have sparked if the Cold War and its attendant anti-Communist hysteria had not intervened. The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s involved this country in one of the most disgracefully psychotic episodes in its history, and the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures—people in government and the entertainment world—but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a messenger , for chrissake, and I have already mentioned Lenny Glaser being fired from his job as a waiter after the FBI came around and asked the restaurant manager some pointed questions about his political affiliations. The right-wing press—which is to say, almost all of it—was running stories like “How the Reds Control Our Schools,” and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison, and a couple (the Rosenbergs) executed pour encourager les autres . Thus the cheery atmosphere of the Golden Fifties.
When I began haunting the Village, I knew from radical politics like a dog knows his grandmother. I had read about the Wobblies and thought of them as my spiritual forefathers, but assumed that the IWW had vanished along with the five-cent beer. (As it happened, I could have found them by simply looking in the phone book: they kept a hall down on lower Broad Street.) The contemporary left was a vague and mysterious concept to me—but with McCarthy, Nixon, and their sleazy band of creeps rampaging across the land, it was clear that whatever radicals remained were in deep shit. This appealed to my contrarian streak, and I could hardly wait to get involved.
The Communist Party was the first and most obvious candidate for my attention: it had a certain underdog appeal, and its minions were relatively easy to locate—they were as hard to find as Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon. The young CP-ers, called the Labor Youth League or LYL, would be spread out all across the park, five-string banjos and nylon-string guitars in hand, singing what they called “people’s songs.” They were very serious, very innocent, and very young, and except for talking (and singing) a lot about “peace,” their political opinions were generally indistinguishable from those of liberal Democrats. They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists. I remember once coming across a covey of them sitting cross-legged around a bespectacled banjoist who
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