Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America

We sang the songs in elementary school music classes.

I Ride an Old Paint
Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill
Big Rock Candy Mountain
The Erie Canal
On Top of Old Smokey
Paddy Works on the Railway

And in scouts and church camp.

Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
Kumbaya 
If I Had a Hammer
Little Boxes

We heard the songs on the radio and played them on our record players and hi-fis and cassette players and CD players.

This Land is your Land 
Good Night, Irene
Turn! Turn! Turn!
Kisses Sweeter Than Wine
Tom Dooley
Guantanamo

Generations of musicians have recorded the songs.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Wimoweh
Sloop John B

I sang St. James Infirmary and Leatherwing Bat as bedtime songs.

On family trips we sang to Dangerous Songs, belting out Garbage and Beans in My Ears.

In a live concert at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, Pete Seeger taught the crowd The Garden Song.

The music sang and recorded by Pete Seeger definitely imparted certain values. And that is exactly what Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman intended. "Cultural equity and global harmony" were the suspect values lurking behind the Weaver's music. It doesn't sound dangerous, just mainstream liberal-progressive stuff. Except those values had led Pete and Ronnie and Lee and Fred to join the Communist party and although they had dropped out, they could not escape the association. And being pro-union, anti-war, globalists extolling the common man in those days was just as bad as wearing a big red "S" for Socialist.

Wasn't That a Time by Jesse Jarnow is the story of the Weavers and the early folk music scene, presenting their battles with the House Un-American Committee and Blacklisting.

It was an age of fear. President Eisenhower had denounced Communists as traitors and a threat. Idealists like Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, and Lee Hayes were attracted to the Communist party for its high ideals of equality. Events in the USSR disquieted American communists and they drifted away from the Party. But they held onto the values which in time became mainstream progressive liberal values.

Meanwhile, the Weaver brought Folk Music from square 'ethnic' music to mainstream, dominating the airwaves and influencing a generation of younger musicians, even while turning it into counter-culture protest music.

Music--Art--was a weapon, Pete Seeger believed. And his goal was to impact how Americans thought, through music, changing our values.

Although not strictly a biography, we learn about the Weaver's personal lives, their demons and struggles, the arc of their careers. We learn how their music changed as they struggled to walk the fine line between commercial success and staying true to their values. Pete left the group and several talented young men replaced Pete, but in the end, the group broke up.

So many folk singer's names appeared: Huddie Ledbetter, Josh White, Malvina Reynolds, Paul Robeson, Oscar Brand, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Alan Lomax, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Alan Arkin, Will Geer, Holly Near--and of course, Woody Guthrie and his son Arlo.

Seeger became an environmentalist activist with the Clearwater Hudson River restoration. We loved singing with the songs on the Clearwater album--"You can't eat the oysters in New Haven Harbor, you can't eat the oysters that live in the bay, 'cause New Haven sewage is dumping down on 'em, if I were an oyster I'd get out today."

As I read the book I realized how deeply the Weavers music changed America. I remembered the last time we saw Seeger live, thousands under a huge tent along the Delaware River, hanging on his every word, being taught new songs and singing along with his standards. We felt a community of spirit in the singing. How many of us knew or remembered that Seeger had appeared before the House and was convicted of perjury?

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America
by Jesse Jarnow
Perseus Books, Da Capo Press
Pub Date 06 Nov 2018
Hardcover $27.00 (USD)
ISBN: 9780306902079

read an article with Jarnow at
https://www.dacapopress.com/articles/a-talk-with-jesse-jarnow-author-of-wasnt-that-a-time/

from the publisher

The dramatic untold story of the Weavers, the hit-making folk-pop quartet destroyed with the aid of the United States government--and who changed the world, anyway.

Following a series of top 10 hits that became instant American standards, the Weavers dissolved at the height of their fame. Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America details the remarkable rise of Pete Seeger's unlikely band of folk heroes, from basement hootenannies to the top of the charts, before a coordinated harassment campaign at the hands of Congress's House Un-American Activities Committee and the emergent right-wing media saw them unable to find work and dropped by their label while their songs still hovered on Billboard's lists.

Turning the black-and-white 1950s into vivid color, Wasn't That a Time uses the Weavers to illuminate a dark and complex period of American history. Emerging while a highly divided populace was bombarded and further divided by fake news--and progressive organizations and individuals found themselves repressed under the pretenses of national security--the Weavers would rise, fall, and rise again. With origins in the radical folk collective the Almanac Singers and the ambitious People's Songs, both pioneering the use of music as a transformative political organizing tool, the singing activists in the Weavers set out to change the world with songs as their weapons.

Using previously unseen journals and letters, unreleased recordings, once-secret government documents, and other archival research, veteran music journalist and WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow uncovers the immense hopes, incredible pressures, and daily struggles of the four distinct and often unharmonious personalities at the heart of the Weavers. With a class and race-conscious global vision of music that now make them seem like time travelers from the 21st century, the Weavers would transform material from American blues singer Lead Belly ("Goodnight Irene"), the Bahamas ("Wreck of the John B"), and South Africa ("Wimoweh") into songs that remain ubiquitous from rock clubs to Broadway shows.

Featuring quotes about the Weavers' influence from David Crosby, the Beach Boys' Al Jardine, and the Byrds' Roger McGuinn, Wasn't That a Time explores how the group's innocent-sounding harmonies might be heard as a threat worthy of decades of investigation by the FBI--and how the band's late '50s reformation engendered a new generation of musicians to take up the Weavers' non-violent weaponry: eclectic songs, joyous harmonies, and the power of music.

The Life and Times of Folk Musician and Social Activist Peggy Seeger

Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics by Jean R. Freedman is the first biography of folk musician Peggy Seeger.

The Seegers are famous as musicians and musicologists. Peggy was half sister to Pete Seeger the famous banjo-strumming political troubadour, and sister of Mike Seeger who specialized in 'old time ' country music of the rural South.

Their father Charles was a folk music scholar and collector, taught at University of Berkeley, and was responsible for creating the first musicology course in the United States. Charles' first wife Constance was a concert violinist and taught at the Institute of Musical Art, which became Julliard. Their children included Pete Seeger.

After their marriage failed Charles met Ruth Crawford, a musician, composer and folk music anthologist. They married and their children included Peggy and Mike. The children grew up surrounded by folk music, pacifism, and a political bent supportive of the working class.

Peggy and Mike learned banjo from their half-brother Pete's book How To Play the 5-String Banjo.

Alan Lomax invited twenty-year-old Peggy to London for a job singing and playing the banjo. She had a sweet, clear voice. An older, established British folk singer, Ewan McColl, saw Peggy perform and their lives were changed unalterably.

Ewan McColl was "equal parts poetry and politics, artistry and activism," a collector and singer of Scottish folk songs with a remarkable baritone voice. The forty-one year old Ewan said his senses were "utterly ravished' when he heard Peggy play. McColl came from the poor, working class. His plays, songs, and radio theater addressed political issues of his day-- workers rights, human rights, fascism, and apartheid.

Ewan and Peggy fell in love, but it was years before Ewan was divorced. Peggy became a British citizen by marrying another singer so she could remain in England. They created the Radio Ballads documentaries, Festival of Fools, The Critics Group, and founded Blackthorne Records.

Ewan wrote Peggy a love song to use in concert, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, in 1957. When Roberta Flack covered the song in 1969 it became a hit. Suddenly McColl and Seeger were financially secure. You can hear Peggy sing the song at: https://secondhandsongs.com/work/31003

 Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in 1965. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns

As the times changed so did Peggy's music. She reflected the Women's movement with her most famous song, Gonna Be An Engineer. The song from 1979 begins with traditional social expectations for a girl:

Momma told me, Can't you be a lady
Your duty is to make me the mother of a pearl
Wait until you're older, dear, and maybe
You'll be glad that you're a girl

The girl does as she is told until she finally gets the job as an engineer. But she faces stereotypes at work:

You've got one fault, you're a woman
You're not worth the equal pay

To sum up, she sings,

I listened to my mother and I joined a typing pool
I listened to my lover and I put him through his school
But if I listen to the boss, I'm just a bloody fool
And an underpaid engineer
I've been a suck ever since I was a baby
As a daughter, as a wife, as a mother and a dear
But I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady

I'll fight the as an engineer


Ewan's later years were plagued by illness. Shortly before his death in 1989 Peggy and fellow singer Irene fell in love. In 2006 they had a civil marriage.

I was glad to learn more about Peggy, who I knew through the radio and recordings. She was an amazing woman, pioneering feminist, and accomplished artist.

I have long enjoyed Ewan McColl, especially his Broadside Ballads on which he sings King Lear and His Three Daughters (which you can hear at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vF7n-f72Ig). You can hear Peggy on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/PeggySeeger.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Peggy Seeger
Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
Publication March 13, 2017
$29.95 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-252-04075-7