Ten Years with The Weavers   A PERSONAL REPORT by The Weavers

In the Greenwich Village of Colonial days there was a stream called Minetta Brook, along whose winding course lads and lasses used to stroll, perhaps to pause and sing courting songs. We don’t know this for a fact, but the population has grown since then, so it’s reasonable to assume that they did.

The Weavers began their first rehearsing on that same spot, technically speaking. The brook was not the same pleasant stream it was. The aggradation of progress during the years had forced the aimless little creek underground, to find its own way through the pilings and basements of the Village.

We met in a damp basement on Macdougal Street above the brook which still ate away at the flooring in a constant effort to climb back into the sun, where little streams belong. More than once we would thoughtlessly tilt our chairs back, only to have the hind legs go through the floor. It seems to be as difficult to subdue a good brook as it is to forget the songs which were once heard along its banks.

The great thing about Greenwich Village and New York City generally is that you can always find other people interested in the same things you are, from aardvarks to zymurgy. We have not had much occasion to discuss the aardvark situation with anyone; but we and our friends have managed to keep the zymurgists working overtime. As to folk music, that is probably easier to find than anything else, in a big city made up of folks from every singing country in the world.

People have often taken The Weavers to be a family group and more than once we have been greeted with a "Hello, Miss Weaver," or "Howdy, Mr. Weaver." This is to be expected; there have been a number of singing families, such as the Hutchinson Family Singers of the Civil 3?ar Period, and the Carter Family of our times.

But none of us is named Weaver and no two of us are related. Most of the weaving we do is the toe-trodding moving in and out we do on stage. But we are a musical family, bound together by a love of the folk music of our own country and of all countries, and by our sure knowledge that as a group we can do more to bring "our" songs to people than we can do as individuals.

For the worth of a creative group is far more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the added perspective and taste which each of us derives from the years of experience of the others, there is also the fact that our repertory is more than quadrupled. Our repertory becomes larger than the total number of songs we know because the old songs keep giving birth to new ones.

We often talk about "our" songs. Sometimes we look at a song and conclude that it is not a Weavers’ song. Some years back, the producer of the motion picture High Noon brought the theme song to our dressing room; he thought we were the right artists to make the first official recording. He was considerably dismayed when we handed the music back to him with the comment that it was not a Weavers’ song. A year later, when the song High Noon was the hottest disc in the parade, the producer asked us whether we were sorry we had turned it down. We had said no, that it probably was the right song for its purpose, but that if we had sung it we would not have sounded quite honest.

We don’t mean to say that all of us are in quick agreement about every song we consider. Far from it. Our labors sometimes generate heat. A lot of refining and hammering goes on before a song shapes up to general satisfaction.

The Weavers were singing for fun, in those days of ’49, and it was not our conscious plan to aim for a professional career. We have often thought we were created by a vacuum, that is, by the lack of other song groups. There were dozens of guitar pickers and banjo players and solo singers, and an occasional chorus and folk dance group but no effective quartet in the field.

We began to sing in small gatherings, at People’s Songs Hootenannies, at places like the Brooklyn Museum and on the municipal radio station, WNYC, and we were surprised at the immediate response we got. In a short time we got so many invitations that we were forced to consider the problem of a name. We could not proceed as "the nameless quartet" as Oscar Brand used to introduce us.

But finding a name takes time. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had some experience with this problem when, in 1940, they formed a singing group with Woody Guthrie and Millard Lampell and went around the country singing folk and labor songs. This group was the Almanac Singers.

So we christened ourselves The Weavers, and our name meant that we were weavers of songs, if you pleased, or that we were inspired by the six weavers of Dorset, or by Hauptmann’s weavers, or whatever. We did not want a name that pinned us down to any one kind of song, like cowboy or hillbilly songs. We wanted to sing music of such wide range that no specific name could describe it all.

In time, our name acquired a meaning and our audiences began to expect of us just what we tried to give them, songs adapted to our own manner and ability. Such a repertory could become an aimless jumble, but we did find a theme to hold ourselves and our repertory together. When we search for a title for a concert we still come back to the same one we started with: A Musical Trip Around the World.

We don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking that we claim to be musical experts in the culture of many countries. There are many singers whose range of language is far greater than ours. Most of our songs are from our own country. What we try to do with our theme is to express great respect for the culture of all people, placing none above the others, and we sing as many songs of other peoples as we have the ability to sing. Without International Phonetics, to be honest, we could not sing nearly as many languages as we do, for we are not language students.

Fred Hellerman and Pete Seeger might be called world travelers, if not always by their own choice.

During the war Fred Hellerman was a guest of the U.S. Coast Guard on cruises that took him from Brazil to Ascension Island and the Azores to Greenland and Iceland and back to Brooklyn College. He first began to play guitar on shipboard. In college he found a number of students who were enjoying their first taste of folk music, and with them Fred began to sing and play at campus affairs and at wingdings and hoots. He also did some acting. His professional life began with The Weavers, with whom he developed a fine talent for writing words and music. During the past few years Fred has had a busy career as a songwriter (using the pseudonym of Fred Brooks), as an arranger and accompanist. He has arranged for Harry Belafonte, Theo Bikel, The Kingston Trio and many other singers and groups. He has been a guitar accompanist, conductor, arranger, and producer for well over fifty LPs in the past few years. Many of his songs have been recorded by Harry Belafonte and other artists.

Pete Seeger worked on Saipan during the war, with a little country jazz band, entertaining soldiers in the island bases. Hearing and learning the music of the people themselves led Pete to a conclusion he has been demonstrating ever since, that there are many similarities in the music of diverse cultures, often more than there are differences. Pete began his work in folk music as an assistant to Alan Lomax in the Archive of Folk Music in the Library of Congress. He began to travel around the country, sometimes with Woody Guthrie, with the Almanacs, or alone, singing his way in union halls and in mountains and valleys where he swapped songs with banjo players. He has been making a series of Films to record techniques for playing folk instruments. He went to Trinidad to film the making of the steel drum, a newly invented instrument.

As an indication of the growth of interest in folk music, Pete has found that his college concerts attract as many as two thousand, on campuses where, only a few years ago, only a hundred or two would attend. In January of 1958, with great reluctance, Pete resigned from The Weavers to devote full time to his personal concert career and to the many projects that have demanded his time and prevented him from working on even a limited schedule with The Weavers.

At sixteen Ronnie Gilbert left home in New York to live and work in wartime Washington, D.C. There a friend introduced her to a group of singers known as the "Priority Ramblers," who sang folk songs and war-effort ditties. "I was voted in by a very thin majority," Ronnie says. "They seemed to feel that my repertory of torch songs, Bach chorales and Gilbert and Sullivan roles wouldn’t be of much use to them." Actually, despite ten years of musical study and performance, Ronnie was only then getting acquainted with American folk music, hearing for the first time recordings of great early jazz singers and musicians, listening awestruck to Negro congregational singing and getting her first taste of American country music.

A few years and many hootenannies later, when The Weavers were formed, Ronnie brought to the group an abiding rapport and enthusiasm for all forms of folk music, including those of other countries. She was still a little timid about singing with performers about whom she heard so much, and it took a while to cure that – about three performances. To balance vocally with three bellowing males she simply had to belt it out, and she really did.

We’ve always been impressed by Ronnie’s bearing on stage. She’s not mannered and disdains the empty gestures that many singers are trained to use. To her the only important thing is to "get inside the song." Her songs have always been high points in our programs.

In the past few years Ronnie has been engaged in many non-Weaver enterprises, including an album for R.C.A. Victor, "The Legend of Bessie Smith." Vanguard Records is at this writing preparing LPs featuring Ronnie as a solo artist. In addition to performing and songwriting she is much involved with helping other performers over the hurdles of programming, repertory, and recording.

When Pete Seeger resigned, our problem was not to "replace Pete," but to seek a fourth Weaver who we felt could on his own make a contribution to our group both from an instrumental and voice point of view. We were unanimous in our selection of Erik Darling. Erik worked with the Tarriers, another folk-song group which has been heard on the hit parade. ED came from upper New York State to New York City, where he studied banjo and guitar and hoped to learn songs from the many young people who come to the big city from everywhere. Erik has been, with The Weavers long enough to write some new songs with us. On his own he has issued his own album, and has taken part in recording sessions with many other performers. Erik has recorded as an accompanist for many artists and has also made an LP of his own issued by Elektra records.

Lee Hays’ musical life began in Arkansas in the twenties, when he sang in country churches and at fish fries. He has often said that he did not know he was singing folk songs until he came to New York in the thirties and was informed of the fact by educated friends. As a child he used to visit Negro churches and sit in the back pew, and he used to visit the homes of Negro farmers, soaking up the richest musical sounds and harmonies that have ever come our way.

The Weavers sometimes kid him with the remark that no matter what he sings, Hebrew, Spanish, or Indonesian, it all comes out sounding like a Methodist hymn. Once you get foursquare harmony in your system, it is there to stay.

Lee has never regarded himself as a performer, in the sense that each of the others is a performer. Like the submerged nine-tenths of an iceberg, his chief interest is in the writing, preparation, and imagining that goes on before a song is ready to be made visible. Lee has been a writer of many mystery stories, some of which have appeared as prize selections in the top mystery magazines. He is a columnist for the Brooklyn Heights Press, his community paper, and is also one of the members of the "Baby Sitters Quartet" that have put out two LPs of folk material for children, issued by Vanguard Records.

We must mention other persons who have contributed to our work. We began our career with the help of Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, who negotiated our first night-club contract (she got us each fifty dollars a week and free sandwiches). We stayed in that club for six months and the pay went up as we went along, though we had to struggle to maintain our sandwich rights. It was there we met Gordon Jenkins, the popular composer, who fell in love with our songs and who steered us into our first recording contract. We remember the cynical advice of a recording company executive who said, "You’ve got to decide whether you want to be good or commercial." Our feeling and Gordon’s was that we should try to be good and commercial, for we saw no barrier between the two.

As our recordings began to take hold we found we needed a manager. We were lucky: we found two. They were Harold Leventhal and Pete Kameron, who had worked in the music business for some time. Their guidance kept us working on the right roads; for example, they would not let us appear in certain places until we had had more experience and were ready. If we had followed our own judgment we might have been detoured at the outset.

For admittedly we were greenhorns. When we were working in the Village Vanguard in New York, a man said to us, after a show, "You have a fine act." We said, with some astonishment, "It’s not an act, it’s real!" We thought of acts as dancing dogs, or acrobats; it never occurred to us that even a single singer is an act, in the trade.

We have worked most closely with Harold Leventhal, who is our personal manager and close friend, and the fifth Weaver. He has held us together during trying times. It is his creative role to bring us and our audiences together. When he reunited us for our Carnegie Hall concert in 1955, after a period of unemployment, we took as much pleasure from Harold’s deep satisfaction over the success of the occasion as we did from our own work.

We could not begin to name all the persons who have helped us. It was our privilege to sing with Huddie Ledbetter, who was called Leak belly, and we feel his presence whenever we sing. for his songs are always with us. Woody Guthrie is a significant name in folk music and his influence has been strong.

We are great admirers of Mahalia Jackson, and one of the honors we have enjoyed was singing with her and Richard Dyer-Bennett on a television show. We worked with the late Big Bill Broonzy, and with Sonny Terry, who plays beautiful harmonica music, and we have worked with almost every folk singer we could name.

The initial preparation of this book was interrupted when we left for a summer’s work in Israel and the British Isles. It was a musical trip halfway around the world, and we visited the home grounds of many of the songs we sing. We found that our songs had already begun to be known in Israel, as their exciting music is becoming known here, and that American folk songs have a greater audience in Europe than ever before. Folk singers like Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee are touring India and the Orient. The time is surely at hand when the word "strange" will be obsolete as applied to the folk culture of any of the peoples of the world.

As we have indicated before, we do not feel that our songs are truly ours until they have become yours. A song on paper means very little until you have given it life through your own voice and shaped it to your own feeling and style of singing. Fortunately you are not obliged to like every song in the book; but we hope you will find many that you do like well enough to make them your own.

As we end our first ten years of work, we feel that we are just beginning. Decades to come cannot he more exciting and rewarding then the first one. It is a privilege and honor to weave songs for you. -- from "The Weavers Song Book," copyright (c) 1960 by Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and Erik Darling; Harper & Row, Publisher, Incorperated, 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, NY.

The Weavers

Last revised: February 23, 2006.