The Almanac Singers was an American New York City-based folk music group, active between 1940 and 1943, founded by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, and Pete Seeger, later joined by Woody Guthrie. The group specialized in topical songs, mostly songs advocating an anti-war, anti-racism and pro-union philosophy. They were part of the Popular Front, an alliance of liberals and leftists, including the Communist Party USA (whose slogan, under their leader Earl Browder, was "Communism is twentieth century Americanism"), who had vowed to put aside their differences in order to fight fascism and promote racial and religious inclusiveness and workers' rights. The Almanac Singers felt strongly that songs could help achieve these goals.
History Cultural historian Michael Denning writes, "The base of the Popular Front was labor movement, the organization of millions of industrial workers into the new unions of the CIO. For this was the age of the CIO, the years that one historian has called 'the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history'".Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 1997) p. 6. "By the early 1940s," he continues, "the CIO was dominated by new unions in the metalworking industries--the United Autoworkers, the United Steel Workers, and the United Electrical Workers--and 'industrial unionism' was not simply a kind of unionism but a kind of social reconstruction".(Denning, 1997, p. 7) It is in the context of this social movement that the story of the Almanac Singers, which formed in early 1941, ought to be seen.
In late 1940 and early 1941 (before America entered World War II) rearmament was putting an end to a decade of unemployment; and labor was at its most militant. As the CIO fought racial discrimination in hiring, it had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership, particularly in the UAW plants in Detroit where white workers sometimes struck to protest the promotion of black workers to production jobs. It also worked on this issue in shipyards in Alabama, mass transit in Philadelphia, and steel plants in Baltimore. The CIO leadership, particularly those in more left unions such as the Packinghouse Workers, the UAW, the NMU and the Transport Workers, undertook serious efforts to suppress hate strikes and to educate their membership. Those unions contrasted their relatively bold attack on the problem with the timidity and racism of the AFL.(See "Growth During the Second World War" in Wikipedia's entry on the CIO)
Almanac members Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie began playing together informally in 1940 or 1941. Pete Seeger and Guthrie had met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath Evening, a benefit for displaced migrant workers, in March 1940. That year, Seeger joined Guthrie on a trip to Texas and California to visit Guthrie's relatives. Hays and Lampell had rented a New York City apartment together in October 1940, and on his return Seeger moved in with them. They called their apartment Almanac House, and it became a center for leftist intellectuals as well as crash pad for folksingers, including (in 1942) Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Ed Cray says that Hays and Seeger's first paying gig was in January 1941 at a fund-raising benefit for Spanish Civil War Loyalists at the Jade Mountain restaurant in New York City.Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: A Life of Woody Guthrie (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), pp. 218-219. David Dunaway, on the other hand, in The Ballad of Pete Seeger (New York: Villard Books), 2008, p. 82, gives a date of December, 1940. According to a 1965 interview with Lee Hays by Richard Reuss, Seeger, Hays, and Lampell sang at an American Youth Congress held at Turner's Arena in Washington, D.C., in February 1941, at which sponsors had requested songs constructed around the slogan "Don't Lend or Lease our Bases" and "Jim Crow must Go".Richard A. Reuss and Joanne C. Reuss, American Folk Music & Left Wing Politics 1927–1957 (Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2000), p. 150 and note, p. 175. The American Youth Congress of the previous year, a rally for jobs, had been held on the grounds of the White House. On that occasion, President Franklin Roosevelt had chided members for condemning only fascist dictatorships rather than all dictators (meaning Stalin), angering its members, who were still upset over his and Churchill's arms embargo against Loyalist Spain. Shortly after this, they decided to call themselves the Almanacs. They chose the name because Lee Hays had said that back home in Arkansas farmers had only two books in their houses: the Bible, to guide and prepare them for life in the next world, and the Almanac, to tell them about conditions in this one.""'Hold on', said Lee [Hays]. 'Back where I come from, a family had two books. The Bible to help 'em to the next world. The Almanac, to help 'em through the present world. We've got an Almanac. Of course, most Congressmen can't read it.' We became the Almanac Singers." (Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone [1993, 1997], p. 19.)
Performers who sang with the group at various times included Sis Cunningham, (John) Peter Hawes and his brother Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, Bess Lomax Hawes (wife of Butch and sister of Alan Lomax), Cisco Houston, Arthur Stern, Josh White, Jackie (Gibson) Alper, Burl Ives, (Hiram) Jaime Lowden and Sam Gary.
They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They wore street clothes, which was unheard of in an era when entertainers routinely wore formal, night-club attire, and they invited the audience to join in the singing. The Almanacs had many gigs playing at parties, rallies, benefits, unions meetings, and informal "hootenannies", a term Seeger and Guthrie learned on an Almanac tour of Portland and Washington.On the use of the term, Richard Reuss draws attention to Pete Seeger's article, "How Hootenanny Came to Be" in Sing Out! 5, no. 4 (Autumn 1955): 32–33. Cited in Reuss, 2000, p. 176.
On May day of 1941, they entertained a rally of 20,000 striking transit workers in Madison Square Garden, where they introduced the song "Talking Union" and participated in a dramatic sketch with the young actress Carol Channing.Ronald Cohen and Dave Samuelson, Songs for Political Action (Hambergen, Germany: Bear Family Records, 1996), p. 17.
Recordings and Reds The Almanacs' first record release, an album of three 78s called Songs for John Doe, written to protest the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Recorded in February or March 1941 and issued in May, it comprised four songs written by Millard Lampell and two by Seeger and Hays (including "Plow Under") that followed the Communist Party line (after the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), urging non-intervention in World War II.Pacifism, inspired by repugnance at the brutality of World War I, was still strong, and there was widespread non-interventionist sentiment among labor, as well as among the predominantly right-wing members of the isolationist America First Committee, who included not only Charles Lindbergh and the future U.S. president Gerald Ford, but also the anti-Communist socialist Norman Thomas. It was produced by the founder of Keynote Records, Eric Bernay. Bernay, who owned a small record store, was the former business manager of the magazine New Masses, which in 1938 and 1939 had sponsored John H. Hammond's landmark From Spirituals to Swing Concert.The Keynote label had debuted with the famous collection of Spanish Civil War songs, Six Songs for Democracy by Ernst Busch and chorus (1940). In addition to issuing records by Josh White and the Almanacs, Keynote drew on Cafe Society bands for a series of small group sessions, "nearly a third of which," Whitney Balliett has argued, "are among the best of all jazz recordings"; see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997), p. 338. Perhaps because of its controversial content, Songs for John Doe came out under the imprint "Almanac Records", and Bernay insisted that the performers themselves (in this case Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary, an interracial group) pay for the costs of production. Songs for John Doe attacked big American corporations (such as J.P. Morgan and DuPont), repeating the Party's line that they had supported German rearmament, and during the period of re-armament in 1941, were now vying for government contracts to build up the defenses of the U.S. Besides being anti-union, these corporations were a focus of progressive and black activist anger because they barred blacks from employment in defense work.
The album also criticized President Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft, insinuating that he was going to war for J.P. Morgan. Seeger later said that he believed the Communist argument at that time that the war was "phony" and that big business merely wanted to use Hitler as a proxy to attack Soviet Russia.See Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Musical Autobiography, edited by Peter Blood (Bethlehem: PA (1993, 1997)) pp. 19–22:Those were the days of Hitler's aerial blitz of Britain and Stalin's invasion of Finland. A large section of the American (and English and French) public was still hoping to sic Hitler on Stalin, and let the two rival dictatorships fight it out and leave the democracies alone. Harry Truman, then in the Senate (later succeeding FDR as U.S. President), is supposed to have said that we should try to get Hitler and Stalin fighting each other and then help the one that's losing. Then they'd both finish each other off. —Where Have all the Flowers Gone [1993,1997], p. 19. When Pete was preparing to write his autobiography, Helen Travis, a friend of his from that era, showed how Party members justified the changing line to themselves when she wrote :I remain convinced that it was a phony war at the outset. However we lefties weren't hep enough to note how it changed when popular resistance to the German onslaught began in Yugoslavia ... before the invasion of the USSR." (Where Have All the Flowers Gone [1993, 1997], p. 22). Bess Lomax Hawes, who was twenty at the time and did not sing on the John Doe album, writes in her autobiography Sing It Pretty (2008), that for her part, she had taken the pacifist oath as a girl out of repugnance for what she thought was the senseless brutality of the First World War (a sentiment shared by many) and that she took the oath very seriously. However, she said that events were happening so fast, and such terrible news was coming out about German atrocities, that the Almanacs hardly knew what to believe from one day to the next, and they found themselves adjusting their topical repertoire on a daily basis. Every day, it seemed, another once-stable European political reality would fall to the rapidly expanding Nazi armies, and the agonies of the death camps were beginning to reach our ears. The Almanacs, as self-defined commentators, were inevitably affected by the intense national debate between the "warmongers" and the "isolationists" (and the points between). Before every booking we had to decide: were we going to sing some of our hardest-hitting and most eloquent songs, all of which were antiwar, and if we weren't, what would we sing anyway? ... We hoped the next headline would not challenge our entire roster of poetic ideas. Woody Guthrie wrote a song that mournfully stated: "I started out to write a song to the entire population / But no sooner than I got the words down, here come a brand new situation".Bess Lomax Hawes (2008), p. 43. According to Ronald D. Cohen in Rainbow Quest (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 30, Guthrie had joined the Almanacs in the summer of 1941, greatly enhancing its repertoire.