Posted by Max H. Schwartz
on 10/30/2009, 6:58 am, in reply to "Weekend Videos: Lee Hays And "Lonesome Traveler""
Well Jim,
This is your best one by far.
I too read the book on Lee Hays.
I wrote some comments on this one, but they wouldn't fit.
I shortened what I wrote, and kept getting the "Message Too Long" message.
Which has frustrated me.
I've got work to do.
I'll get back with you on this later.
Max
--Previous Message--
: I mentioned a few weeks back in a post about "Shady Grove" that the other
: half of the Trio's medley - "Lonesome Traveler" - involved a somewhat
: darker and sadder story than did the traditional "Grove" song. That was
: because LT came from the pen and imagination of Lee Hays, a founding member of the
: first two real popular folk groups, the Almanac Singers and The Weavers, and his
: story is surprisingly sad, bordering even on the tragic.
:
: With his friend/opponent/collaborator/nemesis Seeger, Hays was easily the most
: prominent of the four Weavers because of his voice, his size, and the force of his
: personal presence. The son of a strict Methodist preacher from Arkansas, Hays spent
: most of his life in rebellion against any element of power that he felt stultified,
: cramped, or confined the hopes and aspirations of individuals as he felt his father
: had done to him. The deep and conservative religiosity of the father spurred Hays
: into the embrace of leftist agnosticism, though as even a casual acquaintance with
: his music indicates, he continued to frame his angry radicalizing in terms rooted in
: religious expression - he remained a great singer of spirituals and spiritual-based
: music, though like Woody Guthrie, who was Hays' friend and collaborator before
: Seeger met either of them, he often replaced "Jesus" in camp meeting songs
: with "union" and made similar transformations in other lyrics.
:
: Hays and Seeger were in the Almanac Singers together, and though their avowed
: purpose was to sing at union organizing meetings and other political rallies, what
: Seeger and Hays found that they had in common was a belief that the music that rural
: child Hays had grown up with and the urban and educated Seeger had adopted as his
: own had the potential to unite common people into a united front against what they
: perceived as the tyranny of capitalism. It was a Utopian ideal that the two held to
: so strongly that it drove them into affiliation with the Communist Party - oddly for
: Hays, since few other organizations have ever been as top-down authoritarian as the
: Stalin-era CP was. But as I noted a few years back in a piece on Seeger - the Utopia
: envisioned by Hays and Seeger wasn't the brutal collectivism of Stalin's USSR but
: more an almost Jeffersonian Arcadia of The People as imagined by Walt Whitman and
: Carl Sandburg and practiced by communal religious groups like the Amish.
:
: Hays and Seeger turned out some of the great songs of the era - "If I Had A
: Hammer," the arrangements we know today of "We Shall Overcome" and
: "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", and the Weavers' signature protest against
: McCarthyism, "Wasn't That A Time" (a rousing piece that NBD or NBJ would
: have rocked on). But there had always been a strain in their relationship - Seeger
: was far the more talented of the two, more articulate, and to Hays' chagrin, more
: knowledgeable about American folk music. In fact, when Seeger decided to leave the
: post-blacklist re-formed Weavers in 1957 - ostensibly over the group's 3-1 vote to
: sing on a radio commercial for a cigarette company (wouldn't I love to find that
: recording!) but actually to free himself from the commercial restraints of a
: pop-folk group - Hays complained that he took with him knowledge of over 300 songs
: that he, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert just didn't know and would find it
: nearly impossible to locate and arrange.
:
: Though Hays stayed with the Weavers through their post-Seeger reunion tours, he sank
: further into the related pits of depression and alcoholism that he had struggled in
: for his whole adult life. The diabetes brought on by the latter condition and his
: weight problem led to Hays' loss of both of his legs and eventually his life at the
: age of 67 in 1981.
:
: I'd bet that prior to Peter, Paul and Mary's stirring re-write of the Hammer song
: (and both Seeger and Hays acknowledged that the pop-folk trio had vastly improved
: their composition), "Lonesome Traveler" was probably Hays' best-known
: original composition and certainly the most widely covered. Everybody doing folk
: music took a swing at it - it just sounded so authentic, and it had that signature
: Hays combination of a cry for secular/political reform couched in camp--meeting
: religious terms.
:
: The Weavers naturally recorded it first, in 1950 on Decca, under the direction of
: producer/arranger Gordon Jenkins. As I've noted here before in other posts - it's
: downright strange to hear what the gifted Jenkins thought folk music should sound
: like, a mere eight years before the KT's Voyle Gilmore created a pop-folk genre that
: sounded so much more "authentic":
:
:
:
: Now listen to those crass commercializers, the Kingston Trio, offer their rendering
: as the second half of this medley. Which group fifty years later is considered the
: parent of modern roots/Americana/authentic folk music and recently won a Grammy for
: Lifetime Achievement? Hint: It's not the guys singing here:
:
:
:
: To be fair, even the urban traditionalist Greenwhich Village folkies had problems
: with the commercialism of the Weavers, especially after Seeger left. Sing Out!
: founder Irwin Silber lumped the Weavers in with the KT in decrying the "sallow
: slickness" of all pop folk music.
:
: The pop folkies just continued to pop on, though, and few with more wit and verve
: than the Limeliters, making their first appearance on my blog here after 61 posts -
: a shame because they were a great group, and one that probably got the most
: attention for singing LT - here as a reunion in 1988 at the Chabad Telethon in a 20
: years later reunion:
:
:
:
: The second generation Limes do the song justice as well:
:
:
:
: Skiffle legend and Beatle-influencer Lonnie Donegan released his version a year or
: two after the Kingstons:
:
:
:
: Finally, a folk-rock version from the mid-Sixties by Esther and Abi Ofarim, an
: Israeli married couple who had their greatest success in that decade in Germany -
: there's a story there that needs to be told:
:
:
:
: Makes you want to dig out those Carnaby Street fashions that have been lying in the
: attic for a few decades.
:
: Back a long time ago in a less benighted time, art was considered separable from
: artist. Van Gogh could send his ear to the lady who spurned him, Gaugin could abuse
: friend, foe, ladies, and alcohol with a savage disregard, Beethoven could roll in
: garrets and die in the gutter - but the sublimity of their creations suffered no
: taint as a consequence. Lee Hays was more tragic and less objectionable as a person;
: at nearly 30 years after his death, perhaps we can remember Hays' friend and
: biographer Don McClean's observation that "weathered faces lined with care/Are
: soothed beneath the artist's loving hand" - perhaps even the artist's own.
:
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