Posted by mikey burns
on 10/30/2009, 11:44 am, in reply to "Weekend Videos: Lee Hays And "Lonesome Traveler""
Not my favorite tune but another grand report! Kudos to you Jim! Hey, while I've got your attention, c'mon down and play banjo for us on Nov 7th...Jim Snow will be outa' town & we could use ya!!! aloha, mikey
--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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