Transit worker rally, Madison Square Garden, May 21, 1941, where the Almanac Singers introduced Talking Union. Photo courtesy of TWU. Click to enlarge.

The Almanac Singers were a group of folk musicians who, as their name indicates, specialized in topical songs, especially songs connected with union organizing. 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. According to writer Joe Klein, Seeger, Hays, and Lampell wowed audiences at an American Youth Congress in Washington, D.C., in February 1941 [?] and 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.

The Almanac Singers perform for Harry Bridges; from left: Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Mill Lampell, Pete Seeger, 1941 (People's World). Click for pop-up.

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, and Sam Gary.

The Almanacs 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. 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 coined by Arkansas native, Lee Hays. 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.

Recordings and Redbaiting

The Almanacs' first record release, an album of 78s called Songs For John Doe, recorded in February or March 1941 and issued in May, comprised three records of songs written by Millard Lampell that followed the Communist Party line (after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact), urging non-intervention in World War II. 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 The New Masses, which in 1938 and 39 had sponsored John Hammond's landmark "Spirituals to Swing" Concert. 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) pay for the costs of production. Songs for John Doe attacked big corporations such as DuPont, some of which had armed and financed Nazi Germany and which, during the period of re-armament in 1941, were vying for defense contracts. 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 Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft, insinuating he was going to war for J.P. Morgan. Pete 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. 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 repugnance for 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".

On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and attacked Russia, and Keynote promptly destroyed all its inventory of Songs for John Doe. The Communist Party now urged support for Roosevelt and the draft, and it forbade its members from participation in strikes for the duration (angering some on the extreme far left).

Newspaper account of May 21, 1941, rally which featured the Almanac Singers' first live performance of Talking Union. © New York Times. Click to enlarge.

On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt, under pressure from black leaders, who were threatening a massive march on Washington against segregation in the army and the exclusion of blacks from factories doing defense work, signed Executive Order 8802 (The Fair Employment Act) banning racial discrimination by corporations receiving federal defense contracts. The racial situation, which had threatened black support for the peacetime draft, was now somewhat diffused (even though the army still declined to desegregate) and the march was canceled.

The Almanac's second album, Talking Union, also produced by Bernay, was a collection of six labor songs: "Union Maid", "I Don't Want Your Millions Mister", "Get Thee Behind Me Satan", "Union Train", "Which Side Are You On?", and, of course, the eponymous "Talking Union". This album, issued in July 1941, was not anti-Roosevelt but was redbaited in a review by Time magazine, nevertheless. It was reissued by Folkways in 1956 with additional songs and is still available today. The Almanacs also issued two albums of traditional folk songs with no political content in 1941: an album of sea chanteys, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads (sea chanteys, as was well known, being Franklin Roosevelt's favorite kind of song) and Sod-Buster Ballads, which were songs of the pioneers. Both of these were produced by Alan Lomax on General, the label that had issued his Jelly Roll Morton recordings in 1940. When the USA entered the European war after Germany's post-Pearl Harbor declaration of war in December 1941, the Almanacs recorded a new topical album for Keynote in support of the war effort, Dear Mr. President, under the supervision of Earl Robinson that included Woody Guthrie's "Reuben James" (1942).

The title song, "Dear Mr. President", was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his life-long credo:

Now, Mr. President,
We haven't always agreed in the past, I know,
But that ain't at all important now.
What is important is what we got to do,
We got to lick Mr. Hitler, and until we do,
Other things can wait.

Now, as I think of our great land . . .
I know it ain't perfect, but it will be someday,
Just give us a little time.
This is the reason that I want to fight,
Not 'cause everything's perfect, or everything's right.
No, it's just the opposite: I'm fightin' because
I want a better America, and better laws,
And better homes, and jobs, and schools,
And no more Jim Crow, and no more rules like
"You can't ride on this train 'cause you're a Negro,"
"You can't live here 'cause you're a Jew,"
"You can't work here 'cause you're a union man."

 

So, Mr. President,
We got this one big job to do
That's lick Mr. Hitler and when we're through,
Let no one else ever take his place
To trample down the human race.
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done.

The Almanacs were never allowed to forget their repudiated John Doe album, however. In 1942, Army intelligence and the FBI decided the Almanacs and their former anti-draft message were still a seditious threat to recruitment and the morale of the war effort among blacks and youth, and they were hounded by red-baiting reviews and gossip items in the New York tabloid press for the rest of their performing career. Eventually they had to change their name, resurfacing in 1950 with some new personnel, as The Weavers.

As a performing group, the Almanacs lasted a mere two or three years, in itself not a bad run for a group. Their influence, however, has been long and deep. Their mission was continued after the war in the organization People's Songs, and later through their numerous imitators, not excluding their more famous and less overtly political offshoot, The Weavers.

Personnel: Pete Seeger, vocals, guitar; Eric Bernay, producer. From Talking Union, Sel. Smithsonian Folkways 5285, provided courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, © 1947 Stormking Music.