The premises are tiny and dark and cigarette smoke is an ingredient without which conversation could hardly be expected to ferment. Surrealistic murals defy description and definition. The music is soft and dreamy. The travail of the day is almost forgotten and the pleasures of relaxation make a strong bid to be remembered. There is a “private world” atmosphere surrounding each table which will not abide intrusion.
The music stops, the diminutive stage is spotlighted, and the master of ceremonies announces, simply, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Village Vanguard takes pleasure in presenting The Weavers, a group of artists who will entertain you with some folk songs, blues and ballads.”
Stepping out on the stage is sweaterish Ronnie Gilbert, lanky Pete Seeger plus banjo, preacherish Lee Hays and studious Fred Hellerman plus guitar. A rousing first number—“When the Saints Go Marching In”—and couples relax their hand-holding, start beating time on tables while their feet hit the floor rhythmically. The ice has been broken. Gone is the subdued aura. Here is solid humanity bursting out in song. Here is down-to-earth stuff done with honesty, with buoyancy and sparkle.
It’s hardly what you’d expect in an intimate cafe. Where’s the funnyman to give with the clever, satiric verbiage? And where’s the thrush, in teasing decollete, to coax patrons with her warble-talk? Instead, four young people, in street clothes attire, harmonizing in high spirits and in unaffected tones. It’s showmanship of a kind rarely associated with a night club and the applause that follows the first number assures you that it’s paying off.
SOURCE The Daily Compass, January 27, 1950.
Oddly enough, what Vanguard patrons have just listened to is a hymn. As Seeger explains, “In the great religious revivals of 1800, songs like ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ were widely sung by a people who did not yet have printed hymn books. The traveling evangelist found it easy to teach hymns which were built on very simple patterns, with perhaps only one line, or sometimes only one word changed from verse to verse. Out of these camp meeting hymns grew the spirituals of the slaves, and then the blues. Louis Armstrong was not very far off home base when he took this hymn for one of his most exciting pieces of music.”
Then The Weavers go into “The Midnight Special,” a song identified with the late Leadbelly who once occupied the very same rostrum. Tradition in Southern prisons is that if the light from the midnight train falls on a prisoner, he is bound to go free.
Ronnie obliges next with “Every Night When the Sun Goes Down”—a very old blues about a girl who’s about to have a baby and wishes she were dead “with the green grass growing over me.”
The Weavers then tackle “Wimoweh,” a one-word Zulu song transcribed by Seeger from a South African recording. It is highlighted by Seeger’s peculiar, high-wailing sounds.
By this time, the patrons have shed their hideaway complex. Minstrelsy has brought them together and as one, they join in the choruses.
It’s a one-act show that proprietor Max Gordon is presenting to his Vanguard patrons. Just The Weavers who pack in a lot of entertainment in the 40 or more minutes that they’re on. Seven encores an evening is not unusual. All of which is indeed a tribute to their distinctive type of artistry.
Just as their numbers are unique, so are their careers singular. Cherubic Lee Hays used to be an Arkansas preacher. The simplicity of his song interpretations belies his creative powers—he’s the author of mystery stories for the Ellery Queen magazine. Ronnie is an ex-secretary over at CBS. Seeger spent two years at Harvard before he decided on a more extensive education in riding the rods and singing in saloons. One of his less precarious jobs was assistant to Alan Lomax in the Archive of American Folk Songs of the Library of Congress. And Hellerman was just graduated from Brooklyn College.
Pete Seeger and the other members of The Weavers sing folk songs, blues and ballads nightly at the Village Vanguard.