The Weavers were straight-ahead folksingers with a genius for simplicity. Founded in 1948 by Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, the group recorded their first release for Decca Records in May 1950. The 45 had “Tzena Tzena” (an Israeli soldiers’ tune) on one side, backed by “Goodnight Irene,” a ballad written by a black ex-convict named Leadbelly. Within weeks they were stars. By June, Decca couldn’t press the vinyl fast enough to supply the demand. The Weavers had their choice of the country’s nightclubs and were offered a weekly television spot on NBC.
Within two years, the Weavers were banned from the air and blacklisted from nightclubs and county fairs. Haunted by the FBI, they were eventually hauled before the musical critics of HUAC. The folksingers were obvious heretics—Pete Seeger’s banjo had been an antifascist weapon since the 1930s, and after all, they had played at Peekskill with Paul Robeson. Individually, they had also been associated with leftist labor unions and a variety of progressive causes. Now their tunes were considered seditious. Congressional inquisitors gravely analyzed the lyrics of “The Rock Island Line” to determine if it wasn’t really the Communist Party line. “If I Had a Hammer” was blasted as Red propaganda for celebrating such subversive notions as “justice” and “freedom,” to say nothing of “love between all of my brothers, all over this land.”
The Weavers never did beat the blacklist, although Seeger broke though to a television appearance on The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968. Still they continued singing, inspiring along the way the folk revival of the 1960s and a new generation of activists.
As an uncopperative witness, Pete Seeger made a command performance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. The witness offered to sing—but only folk songs—and was quickly charged with ten counts of contempt of Congress. His sentence of two concurrent five-year prison terms was finally overturned in 1962.
When Lee Hays and I and Mill Lampell formed the Almanac Singers, we got a lot of publicity in the Communist Daily Worker and were singing all around New York and then across the country. Woody Guthrie soon joined us. As Communists we were singing for trade unions and singing for peace in early 1941. But in the fall of ’41 we were singing to support the war effort. In January of ’42, the Almanacs were on a coast-to-coast network show directed by Norman Corwin called This Is War. The next day a headline in the New York World-Telegram said, “Commie Singers Try to Infiltrate Radio,” and that was the last radio job that Woody Guthrie and I got in 1942. In ’43 he went in the Merchant Marine. In July ’42 I went in the Army. People who participate in radical politics assume that you’re going to lose jobs—it is nothing unusual. What happened in the 1950s, though, was a more extreme form of it: if you knew somebody who knew somebody, you got blacklisted.
For example, my older brother is politically rather conservative, but he was a scientist, a radar astronomer. He kept getting offered good jobs around the year 1951 and then the job would suddenly be canceled on him. Finally he decided the only way he could get a job was to leave the country. He went to Sweden and Holland and worked there for ten years until things cooled down here and he came back.
If he had been willing to condemn me in public or something like that, he probably could have kept a job, but he didn’t feel like doing that, so he had to take the punishment. It was a lot harder on him than me. I just kept doing what I’d always done, but he had his career come to a dead stop in the United States.
People who were concerned about our influence must have been rather thunderstruck when in 1950 all of a sudden the Weavers had a best-selling record. They thought that we were just reaching a few hundred people here and a few hundred people there. All of a sudden we were reaching millions with “Goodnight Irene” and then “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” and “Wimoweh.” They probably said, “How did we let those Commie so-and-sos slip through our fingers?” There were a whole batch of people who wanted to blacklist us. Some were in it just for the money. Some believed sincerely that it was a showdown between the Soviet Union and the United States of America and as patriots they must expose anybody who had friendly feelings towards the Soviet Union, whether they were Communists or not. They started chopping the Weavers down and succeeded in doing it in a couple of years.
Anything’s “subversive” if you want it to be. That’s the silliness of these situations. I was in Italy recently and learned that five hundred years ago some Pope declared that a diminished chord was the “devil’s chord” and wouldn’t allow anybody to play it in church.
“If I Had a Hammer” was considered subversive ’cause it talked about freedom and hammers. I sang it at the Peekskill concert in September ’49, where Robeson had asked me to sing some songs at the beginning of his concert. In 1950 the song was published in Sing Out. A man wrote in, “Cancel my subscription, all you left out of that song was the sickle.”
The Weavers had made a little record of the song in ’49, before we were well known. It’s a collector’s item. No one but collectors ever got it. However, seven years later, three young people,1 as you know, changed my melody, and the words had been slightly changed by the women radicals, “all of my brothers” became “my brothers and my sisters,” and with these slight changes it became a worldwide hit in the late fifties.
The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee became concerned about a song called “The Midnight Special,” because I had once introduced it saying we are all in a sense waiting for that midnight special’s light to shine on us, all of us in the world are in a prison of our ignorance, and one day if the light shines on us maybe we will go free. It was a millennial way of thinking, I confess, but it was still a good song.
Up here in the country we knew our neighbors and we knew the people in town. Occasionally there was a few problems. When I was called up for questioning, the neighbors got scared, and I quit having a little singing group. I used to go down to the one-room schoolhouse my children went to and led singing with ten or fifteen kids. Then at Christmastime we’d go sing Christmas carols around the community. And the parents got scared in ’55, and said I’d better not try and do that anymore. However, a year later the principal of the local school sent a letter to all the teachers saying, “If anybody makes it hard on the Seeger children because of this publicity about their father, please let me know.” It was a very decent thing for her to do.2
She was the wife of a local plumber and a working person and she just didn’t figure that was fair. Curiously enough, the most hellish time I had in my hometown was years later in 1967 when a headline in the local paper said, “Seeger Sings Anti-American Song in Moscow.” Well, it wasn’t true, I sang a rather sad lament for a soldier killed in Vietnam. But as the editor agreed when I wrote him, this was not necessarily anti-American. I said if somebody in Germany had written a letter about a German soldier killed when Germany took over Austria in 1938, would he have been anti-German or anti-Hitler?
Anyway, Toshi and I were almost run out of town. But we hung on. This led me to be more active in my hometown. I had treated my hometown like a hotel. I went down, got my groceries and my mail, and went back to my home on the mountain. But the Clearwater campaign3 forced me to change my ways. I got a nice brass plate from the town for good citizenship a few years ago.
During that blacklist era I did what I’d done all my life, I sang for schools and summer camps and little left-wing fund-raising parties. My income had never been high. Right now I’m making a better income than I ever did in my life, because songs I wrote forty years ago are still selling and royalties keep coming in. But in those days we raised a family on beans and potatoes and we drove cheap cars and made ’em last as long as we could. I did do something my father advised me to when I was quite young. He said, “Keep in mind a rich man can live cheaper than a poor man.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, take rent, for example. The average poor person pays more out in rent every year than somebody who’s rich enough to own their own land and house.” So I scraped up enough money back in 1949 to buy a few acres of land, one hundred dollars an acre, that was cheap even then, way up on the side of a mountain, and built a log cabin for all of nine hundred dollars. We raised a family in it. So I kept my expenses down. My wife and I have always pinched pennies. She was used to doing it as a child. As a matter of fact, my parents were pinching pennies in the Depression too.
Things fade into history, and my guess is the average young person doesn’t even know this Red Scare period existed. It’s worth having these stories written down, because the establishment, needless to say, would like to forget about it. For some people still believe in America über alles.
To a certain extent, people’s organizations have to start from the bottom again. Exactly how, no one’s quite sure. People are charging off in this direction and that direction. There was a strong, viable socialist movement in the U.S. at the beginning part of this century. It’s mostly gone now. My guess is that, sooner or later, there’s going to be people pulling together a coalition of working people again.
I urge people, take the long view of it. For thousands of years, people from time to time have spoken up, said, “This is wrong, it’s unjust.” All around the world this happens. From ancient times around the Mediterranean right through the Middle Ages up to modern times, people striving for a more just society would organize and they’d win a few gains sometimes and then they’d get burnt at the stake or slapped down in some way. But along comes another generation learning from them.
During the civil war in England between Cromwell and King Charles there was chaos. Some dozens of people that were starving went into the lords’ lands and started gardens and built little cottages, probably out of stone or thatch or sod, and were doing very well for themselves. But finally the establishment took over again. The troopers were sent and they burnt the cottages down and destroyed the gardens and kicked all the people off because it was not their property. But their leaders put down some beautiful words, and Leon Rosselson in England put them into this song, called “The World Turned Upside Down” [sings]:
You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share.
My guess is that there will be people who perhaps right now are in diapers who twenty years from now will be doing some extraordinary things. I won’t be around to see it. But the American soil gives rise to all sorts of different movements. Long live the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution.
A tall, rangy man, energetic and passionate. A music publisher now, he writes scores for film and theater.
Why the Weavers? I’m the wrong one to ask about that. You have to ask the sons of bitches on the other side! We didn’t do anything. We just sang some songs. Songs we cared about. I don’t think the issue was what we were singing—nobody gave a damn about that. I don’t think they were attacking the teachers because of what they were teaching, or the plumbers for the way they were doing their plumbing. The aim of the exercise was to shut people up. And the Weavers no more than [sighs], than anyone else who was speaking up.
The first time we were attacked was in June of 1950 when the very first copy of Red Channels came out. And actually it was Pete that was singled out there. We were just finishing up a long run of our first big job, which was at the Village Vanguard. We were about to get a TV summer replacement show for Van Camp’s Beans, and we were all buddy-buddy with them and chummy-chummy and they were sending us all cases of their goddam Van Camp Beans! And then the day after Red Channels came out, the whole thing was off and a whole lifetime supply of beans went down the drain! So that was the end of that. So we were among the early victims of Van Camp Beans. [Laughs.]
I think it was Harvey Matusow1 who actually named us a group. He claimed to be friends of ours. And, in point of fact, we did know him. I knew Harvey. I guess Pete knew him. I’m not sure whether Ronnie knew him or not.
From there on out, it was just part of our existence, whatever work we did was attacked with American Legion pickets or threats of pickets. At first, the record companies and club owners didn’t pay much attention to it. But very quickly, the club owners got an education from it, oh yeah. A lot of very decent guys. They’d start out very indignant. [His voice rises as he mimics an angry club owner.] “I’ve got a list from these people. What the hell? Where do these people get off telling me how to run my business and who I can have in my club?” A few weeks later, they’d come by very sheepishly and say, “Hey, you know, they’re threatening to cut off my beer supply and the papers won’t take my ads. And you know . . . ” They got a lesson in the way things work. [Laughs.]
At one point, we happened to have been in Ohio at the precise time that Harvey Matusow testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Harvey was a big-time local boy there because he graduated to the House committee after working for the Ohio State Un-American Activities Committee. The papers were whipping up hysteria, and the atmosphere was really thick and heavy. We left the next day. I had the feeling that we left an hour ahead of the posse. We were receiving threats. I guess the closest thing I can liken it to was being at Peekskill,2 where the violence actually erupted. That was a very frightening experience. So I don’t have great memories of Ohio! [Laughs.] Not one of my favorite places.
The blacklist followed us around. Almost every job we ever got was in spite of the blacklist. It was a cumulative effect. At first the stations wouldn’t play our records, and then as a result of that Decca dropped us. If you have no record, you have no play, no one will hire you. By the end of 1952, it was clear that we really couldn’t go on anymore. At least in the venues that we were in, which were nightclubs.
It was at the end of 1955 that Harold Leventhal, our manager and friend, got us back together to do a concert at Carnegie Hall. Back then, a concert was a longhair affair. Period. And when Harold went to Carnegie Hall to book us, they said, “You mean the recital hall?” He said, “No, I mean the main hall.” They’d never heard of such a thing. And Harold was not very sure whether anybody would show up. And of course, it was a big thing. And then at the end of the year someone said, “Hey, can you do it in Chicago?” Well, sure, okay. “Hey, can you do it in Boston?” Yeah. And before we knew it, we were back doing concerts. But not through the channels of the ordinary concert people, but by local friends. These people had never run a concert before. And Harold would say, “Okay, you get the hall and these are the kinds of ads you place . . . ” And so they were all being done by amateurs.
We were doing concerts in San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., and so on. And people were coming. There may have been bomb threats but people were coming. And after a while, the commercial promoters said, “Hey, this is worthwhile.” So they began taking it over.
We weren’t recording for Decca anymore. When we did the Carnegie Hall concert, we recorded it ourselves. And we ended up making a deal with Vanguard for the tapes. But no record company would’ve recorded us at the time. I’m not trying to detract from Vanguard, because they went out on a limb at that particular time.
But in a sense what happened was that we created our own concert world. It’s funny, it only dawned on me recently, and it sounds like such a big statement to make that I can’t believe that it’s accurate. But someone had asked me recently, “Well, who else was doing concerts at that time?” and I couldn’t think of anybody. We may have been one of the very first of the popular performers to do concerts.
The FBI would come around periodically. The first few times I was a little curious, but after that I really got very annoyed with them. I said, “Look, I really don’t want to talk to you. If I’ve broken the law, then arrest me. If I haven’t, then get the hell away from me.”
The fact is, neither I nor most people who were charged with some terrible thing ever did anything wrong. We never did anything illegal. We cared, we went out on picket lines. But what the hell was wrong about that? What do I have to apologize for? That I made mistakes that I wouldn’t make now? Jesus Christ! Everybody makes mistakes. The American people elected Richard Nixon, for Christ’s sake—twice! They elected George Bush and Dan Quayle. I mean, everybody’s entitled to their mistakes.
I’m not real sure that the blacklist ever did end for the Weavers. I think even at the time that we disbanded in ’60—whenever it was—the blacklist was still going. Because a few years after that, for example, ABC had their Hootenanny show, on which just about anyone who played a guitar appeared—with the exception of Pete Seeger. A lot of people raised a fuss about it, but Pete was still never on the show. So for the Weavers the blacklist never really ended.
Politically, it didn’t inspire me to raise the ante. At the same time, it didn’t cause me to shut up either. You know, the architecture of a church is fantastic—in terms of function. It does what is meant: you walk into a church and you automatically speak in hushed tones. Nobody speaks in a normal voice in a church. It’s meant to overawe you and to make you humble. Church architecture is wonderful in terms of cause and effect and what it aims to do.
In the same way, you walk into a U.S. courthouse and that architecture also humbles you. You feel the whole force of the government of the United States of America arrayed against you! You saw how some people behaved up there, and you had to question yourself. When push comes to shove, how am I going to react? Better people than me have cracked. But the fact is that when that moment of truth came, you looked at all these sleazebags sitting in front of you and you say, “Am I going to align my life with them?” And so it was a very easy decision. Surprisingly easy.
One of the things that puzzles me is, we hear a lot of liberal talk, about all the innocent people who were hurt, and so on, without making any reference to so-called “guilty” people. “Isn’t it terrible that a person was accused of being a Communist and they weren’t!” I mean, that’s really terrible. But now how about the people who were Communists? What the hell were they guilty of?
Nowadays having been blacklisted is a badge of honor. I was talking to Ring Lardner, Jr., recently. He told me how the Hollywood Ten has somehow become the Hollywood Ten Thousand. [Laughs.] Everybody thought he was blacklisted.
There was a guy—he didn’t quite name names or anything, but I remember at the time he was really trying to cover his tracks. He was writing letters saying, yeah, he used to hang out with a lot of left-wing people, but he had big arguments with them—trying to distance himself as much as possible. And over the last few years I see him, and I overhear him talking about how he was blacklisted. You know, you just have to shake your head and laugh at it a little bit.
We talk across the dining-room table in a modest home in the Berkeley hills above the San Francisco Bay. An ebullient, charming woman; her laughter is contagious and warm.
My interest in the Weavers was political as well as musical. We sang for unions. We sang for the Henry Wallace campaign.1 I was all of eighteen or nineteen at the time. My background was political. My mother was a rank-and-file unionist, belonged to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and she was a singer. She taught me all the songs. So I come from a very proud, political union background. That was part of my nature and my life, you know. I still sing political songs. There’s a different style and shape, I’m not so much a “folksinger” as I was then. I sing a wide variety of musical styles. But the lyrics that attract me are lyrics about something.
We incubated most of our material at the Village Vanguard. We were there for six months. It was a small club in New York that did all kinds of stuff, radical stuff, nonradical stuff, jazz. Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Judy Holliday, and Al Hammer performed there as an act called “The Revuers.” They were full of political material.
We sang everything that we sang later on. But we were very aware that we were entertainers. We would never even think of singing a song that wasn’t good fun to do. Sure, we sang Spanish Civil War songs, one or two of them, ’cause they were musically exciting. And we would refer to them and say that this was a song that was written during the Spanish Civil War, and that perhaps if Hitler had been turned back during that war, we would never have had World War Two. We said really “subversive” things like that. And every now and then we’d sing something that related to a union. Very subversive, you know. You bet, that’s the kind of thing we did. But when we appeared on television, we knew that we were singing for a very broad audience that wouldn’t sit still for the explanation of a song. The song had to be directly of interest to them, and we sang what we thought was best in American folk music, and that was what we represented.
The Weavers were headline-makers. We were the hottest thing to come along in a long time in the music industry. I’ve often thought about this. I don’t think it occurred to any of us that we would be making commercial records. We sang because that was what we did. Had we not made “Good-night Irene,” had we not become hot performing artists, it’s very possible that we would never have been caught up in the blacklist, because we wouldn’t have been worth anything to anybody.
I mean, why are entertainers picked up in a blacklist like that? ’Cause they made headlines for the committee. The headlines you see in these old movies from the thirties—the Criminal or the Hunted Person comes into a hotel lobby, and everybody’s reading the papers: “So-and-So Wanted,” you know? Well, that actually happened to us. We were playing a nightclub engagement in Springfield, Illinois. And we came into the hotel lobby, and there were people reading the newspaper, and it said “Weavers Named Reds!” [Laughs.] And there we were!
It all started with a guy by the name of Harvey Matusow. He claimed we were all friends. He claimed a lot of things! [Laughs.] But I did not count myself a friend of Harvey Matusow at any time. The last I had seen of Harvey Matt, as he called himself, he was making a nuisance of himself selling the Daily Worker in the cafeteria, going from table to table, getting subscriptions and interrupting everybody’s conversations and generally making an ass of himself. That was what I knew about Harvey Matusow. Evidently he knew something about me, ’cause he told the committee that he had seen me at Communist Party meetings—which of course was a total lie, and he later recanted that. But it didn’t make any difference, we were out anyway.
We were being followed all the time. I remember walking down the street in some place in Ohio, it might have been Akron, with these two guys following us behind. I was terrified. By that time it was very scary, because it involved groups like the American Legion, the Catholic War Veterans, and a very patriotic kind of macho. I was present at Peekskill, at the Paul Robeson concert, where people were badly injured by rock-throwing goons, with the police standing by doing absolutely nothing. So I knew that kind of thing could happen very easily. These guys followed us a long ways. I stopped and turned around and confronted them. One of them seemed very surprised, and he said, “Well, do you want your subpoena here, or in the club, while you’re performing?” I said, “I’ll take it now!” [Laughs.]
That first subpoena was for the House committee. This was early on and we never went. Because at that time the committee was not sure of its legal grounds. If they forced you to break a commitment they might be in some kind of trouble, so they let us go and said they would pick up on us at another time.
I never did get subpoenaed again. Very quickly our work came down to nothing, there was no work to be had. We stuck together as long as we possibly could, and then it was pointless. Decca was not going to do any more recording. Decca was in the red when we recorded for them and we pulled them right out. It didn’t help. It didn’t make them loyal to us. [Laughs.] The music industry is the music industry. The Weavers were merchandise. Our songs were merchandise, just the way people are now.
My then husband and I had been planning to go and live on the West Coast. And it looked like there was no reason why not. So we went off. We made an automobile trip through Mexico. I got pregnant, which was another thing I wanted to do, and had a baby in California. And then we came back after two years, for the concert at Carnegie Hall, which was what brought the Weavers back together again during the blacklist time.
A few months later we did a follow-up concert to that. I traveled again from California to New York. There was a phone call from a woman who worked for the committee, and she said, “Oh, Miss Gilbert! I want you to know that you girls can’t hide from us!” [Laughs.] You girls! She used that phrase. She said, “Now we understand that sometimes girls don’t like their husbands to know what they’ve been up to. We can promise you total secrecy.” So I had to decide whether I was going to talk to the committee, and I decided I would not. But I did call them and I said, “By the way, I’m not hiding. My name is in the phone book. I live in Los Angeles. You can find me there anytime you want.” And I went home. They never did call, and so I never appeared before the committee. Of course, for a long time I was very glad of that, but now I wish I had. In hindsight, one imagines one would have been heroic. [Laughs.]
My husband was a dentist, and the FBI annoyed him with visits to his office. I have read that people had friends who deserted them and betrayed them, but it wasn’t true among my friends. But what did happen was that some of the people that I had known well, wondered. There was a period before the Weavers got tagged, when our records were still up there—it was only a matter of time, of course. But there were people from the old People’s Songs2 who wondered why we were still up there. Some of them suspected that we had come to some kind of terms with the committee.
I was incensed by that idea. It made me very angry and very bitter. I felt like we couldn’t have made it easier for the enemy, turning on each other that way. And as a result, I’ve had very little to do with those folks after that. Years ago, I met one of them, a woman that I had admired very much. She had cancer and she was dying. And I was really very glad to see her again—I didn’t know she was sick—it just felt like it was time to let go of all that junk. The minute I saw her, she threw herself into my arms and cried. And how many years was that? More than thirty years. She said that she never forgave herself for being part of that.
“Wasn’t That a Time” was a song that Lee Hays wrote with Walter Lowenfels, who was a poet. A terrific song about freedom and freedom of expression. And it started out [begins to sing in a beautiful, clear voice]:
Our fathers bled at Valley Forge
The snow was red with blood
Our faith cried out at Valley Forge
Our faith was brotherhood
Wasn’t that a time?
Wasn’t that a time?
A time to try the soul of man
Wasn’t that a terrible time?
We won’t talk about the patriarchal “man” and “our fathers,” but for the time it was a wonderful song. It was a poetic song, a really good tune. It was what we felt about this blacklisting and the witch-hunting that was going on. It was cited during Lee and Pete’s testimony before the committee as “this subversive song,” but they would not let Pete sing it. After his testimony he sang it to a bunch of reporters, and it went out over television. But that song figured prominently in the HUAC hearings.
The silence that was imposed on this country by those times. That infiltrated everything in our lives. People simply don’t know how things lead to other things. It’s like you start all over again, as if nothing ever happened. It’s incredible to think that there are young people today who don’t know about Vietnam. I’m not very articulate about these things, but it seems to me that is the price we’ve paid for what’s now called the McCarthy Era, when everybody went silent and left the field to the boys to play in.
Not everybody did. There were people who stood up and said, “You have no right to inquire into my political beliefs.” Pete tried to do it on the basis of the First Amendment. It didn’t work, but at least he has the satisfaction that he did it.
1The group Peter, Paul, and Mary (Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers).
2Once, while shopping in town during the worst of his political troubles, Seeger encountered the local hardware man, who looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t know what your politics are, young man, but this is America—you got a right to your opinion.”
3The Clearwater campaign was an effort to clean up the Hudson river, long polluted by industrial waste and public water usage. The campaign was kicked off in 1969 with the launching of the Clearwater, a 106-foot sloop, that was to be used for fund-raising and environmental education.
1A onetime aide to Joe McCarthy, notorious informer, and paid government witness, Matusow recanted in 1955, confessing that his anti-Communist career had been based on lies. He served five years in prison for perjury—not for his previous testimony, but for his disavowal of it. See his story under “Hounds.”
2For more on this story, see “The Peekskill Riot.”
1Former Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt, Wallace ran for President in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket.
2Founded by Pete Seeger in 1946 with a loan of $155, People’s Songs, Inc., aimed to provide the labor movement with a muscular musical arm—providing singers for picket lines, publicity, and building attendance at meetings. Out of this grew People’s Artists, a booking agency, and Sing Out! magazine, which became the bible of the folk movement. In May 1947, the U.S. Army’s Weekly Domestic Intelligence Summary cited People’s Songs as a Communist front.