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The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds Reese, Brian 2019

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The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds

Brian Reese

A Thesis

Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee

of Lehigh University

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Master of Arts

English

Lehigh University

January 20, 2019

ii Thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English.

The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds.

Brian Reese

Date Approved

Dr. Seth Moglen Thesis Director

Dr. Dawn Keetley Department Chair

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis began as an argument concerning depictions of patriotism in Edgar

Lee Masters’s landmark work of American Modernist poetry Spoon River Anthology. It has obviously changed considerably since its conception. Through all of its many convolutions, pitfalls, resurrections, and redirections, I have had the consistent and enthusiastic support of my advisor, Seth Moglen. He is a natural teacher, a master editor, and a true comrade.

Graduate education can often be daunting, lonely, and disheartening. I was fortunate to have had Mareesa Miles as my friend and office mate during my time at

Lehigh. Her thoughtfulness and passion for learning were an inspiration, and they helped me through many days when I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Without the help and patience of my wife, Brigid, and the laughter and wisdom of my daughter, Evelyn, nothing would be possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract 1

The Red Menace in the Cellar 2

Afterward 28

Selected References 34

Vita 36

ABSTRACT

Art holds an unparalleled power to encapsulate and carry political aspirations forward in time. Perhaps no art form does this as effectively as music. This essay explores how one particular work created at the height of the Red Scare—Pete Seeger’s

1953 album, Folksongs and Ballads: A Pete Seeger Concert—preserved and then transmitted the Popular Front ideology of the Communist Party of the United States to the author in 1990. Through a mix of personal reflection and critical analysis, this essay examines the album’s meaning at the time it was created, when the author encountered it in 1990, and within the context of our current political moment and beyond.

THE RED MENACE IN THE CELLAR

Except for the answer I have already given you, I have no answer. The answer I gave you you have, don’t you? That is, that I am proud that I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity, and that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir. —Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 18, 1955

So I think I’ll stick with communism, in spite of its mistakes and excesses. I still feel that the basic Marxist analysis of history is correct. —Pete Seeger in a 1956 letter to his unborn grandchildren marked “Not to be opened ‘til after death of both C.L. Seeger II and Peter Seeger. Or around the year 2000 A.D.”

The basement smelled like kitty litter, mildew, and bong water. It hardly seemed a likely place for a transformative experience. It was the winter of 1990 and I had graduated from high school in June. My comrades and I regularly gathered in the evening at our friend Angelo’s house. After his kids were in bed, we would creep down to the cellar and sit on the musty couches that he had set up in one corner. We smoked pot and talked about art, music, films, and politics and laughed at the absurdities that emerged from our drug-scrambled brains. Among the clutter in the basement was a shelf of LP records. We took turns playing DJ and entertaining one another with the sundry titles in

Angelo’s eclectic record library. One night, when it was my turn to choose, I unearthed a box set of five LPs that was titled An Anthology of Folk Music. The cover bore a painting of a man singing expressively and strumming an acoustic guitar, and the names of the folksingers contained in the collection were listed down one side. One name in particular caught my attention: Pete Seeger. My youthful interest in folk had been returning lately, and his was a name that I seemed to come across wherever I looked. I placed his record onto the dusty turntable and dropped the needle. After the initial hiss, pop, and crackle,

2 there was silence. Then a lone voice—high and reedy—rang out unaccompanied: “‘Well met, well met, my old true love. Well met, well met,’ cried he. ‘I’ve just returned from the salt, salt sea, and it’s all for the love of thee . . .’” Then the galloping strum of the banjo kicked in, and the course of my life irrevocably shifted.

It was not the likely choice in 1990 for a teenager in Scranton, Pennsylvania to develop a passionate interest in folk music. Folk was something that had happened in the

60s. Whatever bite it once had had since been James Taylor-ed out of it. In the 1980s, my friends and I were skateboarding punk rockers. We rolled through the streets of our crumbling post-industrial city trying to make sense of a world of AIDS, crack, and

Reaganomics that we had inherited. The music that spoke to us was made by punk and hardcore bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys. These bands—almost exclusively male and white—howled their lyrics at breakneck tempo accompanied by shrieking electric guitars and crashing drums. The music matched the rage that we felt at the injustice and inequality around us, and the lyrics expressed our growing sense of nihilistic pessimism that we were dominated and controlled by powers we could never fully understand or overcome. I appreciated the politics in punk and hardcore. It helped me to understand my gut reactions to both my conservative high school and to the bleak streets of my dying coal town. I learned a great deal from the music and often felt understood and validated by much of its content, but it never wholly satisfied me. It was too violent and bleak to be sustaining. I craved music that allowed for more subtlety and range of expression and which offered some hope and direction.

By the start of the nineties, most of my friends left punk behind and drifted off into several different camps of musical counterculture. Some were drawn to hip hop. I

3 liked much of what I heard, and, at its best, hip hop’s poetic and musical craft is astonishing, but I felt that too much of it was also burdened by the celebration of violence and a pervasive misogyny. Many of the artists seemed to want only material wealth and celebrity themselves rather than to transform society as a whole to make it better for everyone. To my mind, that would merely perpetuate most of the problems that hip hop often purported to address. (I must admit, too, that as a white kid from the suburbs, I seldom felt that hip hop was made with me in mind.) Other friends were drawn to electronic acid house dance music and rave culture. Fueled by ecstasy and cocaine, they attended exclusive and illicit parties in warehouses where they danced for hours to the numbing thump of a techno beat. I was never a dancer, and the mechanistic and repetitive quality of electronic club music left me cold. Moreover, what I witnessed of the gushing,

MDMA-inspired love among ravers struck me as false and vapid. Their guiding motivation appeared to be solely the next dance party and hit of E. The eternally touring

Grateful Dead enjoyed resurgence in popularity in the late 80s. Many of my friends became second-wave Dead Heads. They wore patchouli and tie-dyed t-shirts, took scads of LSD, and sermonized at length about the hidden meanings that Jerry Garcia had embedded in the set list from the latest Veterans’ Stadium show. I liked some of the

Dead’s music, but their fan base looked to me like a slavish cult that was divorced from any reality outside of the endless tour. By 1990 I was hungry for music that was both engaging and engaged and that said something valid about a world that seemed rapidly to be going to the dogs.

The union of music and politics was something that I was exposed to in my youth.

My parents were older than my friends’ and classmates’. Theirs were baby boomers who

4 introduced them to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. Mine were of the Silent Generation.

They played LPs by some of the more commercial acts from the folk revival of the late

1950s and early 60s: the Kingston Trio, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Harry

Belafonte. Also in the mix were records by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem.

Though not as politically radical as Luke Kelly and the Dubliners, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem drew on centuries of Irish protest songs for much of their repertoire.

The Irish rebel songs were filled with wit, cutting criticism, and tragic heroism, and the

Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem delivered them with an energy and enthusiasm that made them infectious. Before I was ten years old, I knew key points in the history of

Ireland’s struggle against English oppression and could describe landmark battles and rebel martyrs all from songs I had heard. The history fascinated me, the music thrilled me, and the subversion—for some reason—spoke to me. I memorized the lyrics and melodies and could sing most of my favorites through, start-to-finish.

By the time I entered my teens though, I had left the folk music of my childhood behind. This was due in part to the multitude of new worlds available to discover, but it was also due to my adolescent sensitivity to peer judgement. The musical canon that was acceptably cool to my classmates was narrow and definitely did not include folk songs. A performance by a band called the Washington Squares when I was fourteen rekindled my interest. The Washington Squares were one of the acts that comprised what was left of the New York folk scene in the 1980s. The three members of the band had gravitated together from defunct punk and new wave bands and decided to learn a repertoire of folk standards to present in slightly rocked-up arrangements. Their schtick was they dressed and spoke like cartoon beatniks from the 1950s. They wore berets and dark sunglasses

5 and black turtlenecks or striped sailor shirts. The two men in the group had goatees. Their post-postmodern performance of beatnik culture intrigued me, and I soon began reading all of the Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti I could find. I also started rummaging through my parents’ LP collection for their Peter, Paul, and Mary records. The Washington Squares opened the gateway for me to find my way back to folk. I subsequently discovered artists like British singer Billy Bragg and the Irish band the Pogues who bridged the worlds of folk, punk, and politics and showed me that one could, indeed, love folk music in the 1980s and be cool.

Most importantly, what those bands drove home was that folk music had been— and could be—edgy and dangerous. It was not always the insipid and self-absorbed domain of the singer-songwriter. The political thread that those bands picked up in the

80s traced back to earlier generations. My parents’ record collection served to start my exploration, but I soon exhausted its contents. In those days before the internet, I was compelled to forage in libraries, record shops, used book stores and Salvation Army thrift stores for whatever recordings, books, or magazines I could find to learn more about the genealogy of folk music. I moved beyond the more commercial folk revival acts from my parents’ records to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Dave Van Ronk. I learned what

I could about the late 50s-early 60s scene in Greenwich Village and folk singing in the

Civil Rights Movement. As I gained a perspective on that era, I found that there had been older singers from the 1930s and 40s who had planted the seeds for the revival during the

Depression and the war years. A few names seemed ubiquitous. I encountered folklorist

Alan Lomax repeatedly. He appeared to be folk music’s relentless champion— performing, collecting field recordings, disseminating songs, facilitating concerts, and

6 promoting artists. The singer Woody Guthrie was another. Nearly everyone hailed him as

America’s greatest folk balladeer and cited him as an inspiration and influence. And then there was Pete Seeger. His reputation preceded him before I found his record in Angelo’s basement. Like Lomax and Guthrie, his connection to the folk revival was mentioned everywhere. I didn’t know all that much about him when I discovered the album, but I knew enough to understand that most people thought he was either some kind of saint or an extremely dangerous character. I couldn’t wait to hear that record.

To everything (Turn, Turn, Turn) There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn) And a time for every purpose, under heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose A time to rend, a time to sew A time of love, a time of hate A time of peace, I swear it's not too late —Pete Seeger, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

At the time of this writing, I am forty-five years old. Pete Seeger died in 2014 at the age of ninety-four. Over the years I saw him perform many times and spoke with him briefly on a couple of occasions. I became friends with his half-sister Peggy—herself a master folk-singer and songwriter—and helped to edit her memoir First Time Ever which

Faber and Faber published in 2017. In 1991, I got my first five-string banjo and began learning how to play using the book, How to Play the Five-String Banjo, that Pete Seeger wrote in 1948. Since then, I have played my banjo and sung folksongs for audiences in bars, coffeehouses, grade schools, universities, theaters, churches, on floating boats, rolling trains, and live television. My devotion to folk music has coincided with an

7 unwavering belief in the promise of left-wing politics—much of which was also inherited from Pete Seeger.

As a young man in my twenties, I was fascinated with Pete Seeger’s life and music. He lived in a log cabin he had built with his own two hands. He had stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He used his music to fight for the causes of labor, civil rights, peace, and the environment. Unlike the punk rock and hardcore music that I had heard in my teens, Seeger’s brand of folk music offered me hope. It was connected with concrete political action, and its overarching message was that if people worked together they could create a more just world.

I have a two-year-old daughter. Her laughter and smiling face can make my heart feel as if it will burst with love, but they can also plunge me into despair. It is hard to feel any hope in the present moment. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report gives the human race a decade to radically alter its ecological impact before the balance is irrevocably tipped toward environmental catastrophe (we have even less time to reverse the eradication of biodiversity). The global divide between rich and poor has reached unprecedented proportions, and economists predict that the next worldwide meltdown of capitalism is imminent. In recent years, one nation after another—the U.S. included—has given over to fascistic right-wing regimes. And everywhere, war and waste and hate seem to proliferate endlessly.

So, in the midst of it all, I have decided to pause and look back at the moment when I dropped that Pete Seeger record on Angelo’s dusty turntable. It is my hope that by examining what that particular record was and what it meant—at the time that I found it and at the earlier moment of its creation—I might gain perspective on the present and

8 recapture at least some of the hope and enthusiasm that I felt when I first heard it. For, while the current situation may look bleak, it is not the first time that things have looked that way.

(Turn, Turn, Turn)

The record that I found that night in Angelo’s basement did not begin life in Sine

Qua Non Records’ An Anthology of Folk Music. That anthology was produced sometime in the 1970s; the Seeger recording was older than that. I have since encountered it under numerous titles on a host of different obscure record labels. For the purpose of this writing, I purchased one of its latest incarnations, a CD produced by Collectables

Records Corp. where it is combined with another old Seeger album. These much-traveled recordings actually began their journey on an album titled Folksongs and Ballads: A Pete

Seeger Concert that was produced by Stinson Records in 1953. The Stinson Record

Company formed in 1939 to sell records from the Soviet Union at the New York World’s

Fair. The owners were affiliated with the Communist Party, and much of their early catalog was material from the U.S.S.R. In the 1940s they began to record American folksingers and partnered for several years with Moses Asch who ultimately founded the venerable Folkways label. None of this history behind the recording is apparent when one encounters the rather generic Seeger record in the 1970s anthology or any of its other iterations, but it is highly significant.

Throughout his long life, Pete Seeger was a communist (though his official membership in the Communist Party was rather brief). His father, Charles Seeger, was born into wealth, a descendant of a New York patrician family. Charles was a music scholar, composer, and one of the founders of the discipline of musicology. He studied music at Harvard and in Germany, and he became the youngest full professor hired by the

University of California, Berkeley. During his time in California, however, he became radicalized through his contact with progressive colleagues and with the Industrial

Workers of the World. He was eventually dismissed by the university for his opposition to World War One. During the early 1930s, he was a member of the Composers

Collective. The Collective was comprised of many of the leading avant-garde composers of the period who shared his progressive views. They worked with the Communist Party to create a workers’ music that could be used as a weapon in the class struggle, but most of the work that they produced was too abstruse to be of much use in Party organizing or on picket lines. Just entering his teens, young Pete absorbed his father’s radical views and pored over issues of New Masses. The plainspoken columnist Mike Gold quickly became his idol.

In the middle of the decade, the Party’s reaction to the spread of fascism in

Europe caused a shift in ideology. While the Party had previously been rigidly doctrinaire in its opposition to social democratic and liberal political formations, the rise of fascism compelled the party to open wide its embrace to any and all on the progressive left. This new period in the Party’s history became known as the era of the Popular Front. A key ideological aspect of the Popular Front was the promotion communism through national identity. The Party sought to link communism with each country’s democratic traditions

10 and history. This approach is what inspired CPUSA leader Earl Browder’s often-quoted slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” They portrayed figures from

American history such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as people’s heroes and associated them with Marx and Lenin. One significant result of this shift was that the

Party began to promote folklore and folksong as the true mode of expression among the masses. The Party’s use of folk culture as a tool for organization rose in tandem with an international surge of interest in folk arts. Much of the cultural work performed by the programs of Roosevelt’s New Deal dealt with the collection and curation of folk song and folklore.

Shortly after taking Pete on a trip to a folk festival in Asheville, North Carolina where he first heard the five-string banjo, Charles introduced him to the young firebrand folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax had recently been placed in charge of the Library of

Congress’s nascent Archive of Folk Song. He shared many of Pete’s sympathies with the radical left and worked to promote folk music as a weapon in the class struggle. Seeger had begun to attend Harvard in 1936, but he found the experience empty and his interest in politics more compelling. He joined the Young Communist League in 1937 and eventually dropped out of school in 1938. After he left school, Seeger worked for a time with Lomax in the Archive. There he was able to absorb some of the best examples of

American folk-song and build his repertoire. Through Lomax, he was also introduced to a growing circle of left-leaning folksingers who used their music to promote progressive causes. In the years leading up to the war, Seeger traveled the country and learned the five-string banjo firsthand from rural masters. In 1940, he teamed up with Lee Hays and

Millard Lampell in Manhattan to form the Almanac Singers (many other members drifted

11 in and out of the group as well, including Woody Guthrie, Josh White, and Bess Lomax).

The Almanacs were the first modern urban folk group in the United States. They reworked traditional folk-songs with lyrics that promoted Party ideology and trade unionism.

Following his service in the army during the war, Seeger returned to New York with the idea of creating a national organization to foster singing in labor unions. With the help of Lomax and the circle of musicians and activists he had known before the war, he founded People’s Songs. The organization built a roster of performers across the country to sing for unions, published a regular newsletter and a songbook, and actively supported Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948. Seeger was an active member of the Communist Party throughout the late 1940s and People’s Songs was affiliated with the Party, but the Party never took any serious interest in the organization or the idea of promoting folk singing in unions. Though the Party may not have given People’s Songs much attention, the FBI did. Seeger and his colleagues were unprepared for the backlash against the left as the Cold War commenced. The FBI constantly surveilled People’s

Songs and planted informants inside the organization to gather information on the ties between the Communist Party and folk-singing.

When People’s Songs finally dissolved in 1949, Seeger formed a new singing group with Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. They called themselves the

Weavers. The group began a long residency at the Village Vanguard, and, as word of their talent spread, their popularity grew. Eventually, they came to the attention of

Gordon Jenkins of Decca Records and he signed them to the label. Much to their surprise, their first records became national hits. In 1949 and 1950, the Weavers were one of the

12 most popular musical groups in the country. They toured extensively and sang to sold-out audiences in some of the nation’s most expensive and exclusive nightclubs. Their recordings of “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and “Goodnight Irene” were inescapable on radios and jukeboxes everywhere. Though the Weavers still sang songs that reflected their ideals and political philosophy, the lifestyle of a tony nightclub singer did not sit well with Seeger. If he wished for a way out of the gilded cage in which he found himself, it came in the form of the blacklist.

In the summer of 1950, the pamphlet, Red Channels: The Report of Communist

Influence in Radio and Television published the names of 151 people in the arts and broadcasting who were accused of being communists. Seeger’s name was included, though by this point he had ended his official membership in the Party. Almost instantly, the Weavers’ access to audiences and mass media was cut off. When finding any venue willing to book them became nearly impossible, they decided to disband. As the blacklist and federal investigations of communist subversion gained momentum, the once close- knit folk community was torn apart. One by one, folksingers who had associated or were suspected of having associated with the Communist Party were investigated, harassed, interrogated, or subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities

Committee. Careers, friendships, and lives were devastated as singers were faced with the choice either cooperating with or defying the investigations. Though Seeger was not officially summoned to appear before HUAC until 1955, the blacklist ensured that he was kept out of all mainstream venues and media. Throughout the early 50s, Seeger shifted gears and commenced a relentless solo tour of grade schools and universities across the country. The blacklisters apparently did not see his concerts for young people as a threat,

13 and he traveled from school to school planting the seeds that would blossom into the major folk revival of the later 50s and early 60s.

I think as I please, and this gives me pleasure My conscience decrees, this right I must treasure My thoughts will not cater to duke or dictator No man can deny: Die gedanken sind frei!

Tyrants can take me and throw me in prison My thoughts will burst forth like blossoms in season Foundations may crumble and structures may tumble But free men shall cry: Die gedanken sind frei! —Trad. German, “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”

It is from this specific moment that Folksongs and Ballads: A Pete Seeger

Concert comes—the height of the Red Scare, the Cold War, the blacklist, and

McCarthyism. People’s Songs was gone, the Weavers were disbanded, and Seeger was denied all access to large audiences and mass media. The left was on the run, and the lives of Seeger, his friends, and his colleagues were fraught with fear, suspicion, and betrayal. The Peekskill Riots of 1949 made widespread violent suppression of the left seem imminent (the Ku Klux Klan in collaboration with local police stoned the vehicles of departing artists and audience members from a concert in Peekskill, N.Y. featuring

Seeger and Paul Robeson). Seeger was aware that it was only a matter of time before he was called to testify before Congress. Taken by itself, Folksongs and Ballads is not a particularly remarkable recording in Seeger’s catalog. It is one among hundreds of records that he made—many of which have more familiar and popular songs and better sound quality. His most enduring and bestselling albums are those that he recorded for

Folkways and Columbia in the later 50s and throughout the 1960s. His record, We Shall

Overcome, captures his historic Carnegie Hall concert in 1963 at the apex of the folk revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and his ability as a performer and song-leader. By that time, he had been acquitted of his 1957 charge of contempt of Congress for his refusal to be a friendly witness before HUAC and McCarthyism was on the wane. In

1953, however, everything was still up in the air.

But, in 1990, I didn’t find one of Seeger’s better-known or better-produced records from a more stable point in history. I found Folksongs and Ballads. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it found me, because that is how it feels. It was like a time capsule or a satellite that was shot off into space containing a small flame of hope from a dark and treacherous age. Listening to it, then and now, that is how it sounds. Even on

CD, the recordings are tinny, distorted, marred with pops and scratches. They sound as if they have traveled a long time over great distance. The words and melodies of the songs reinforce this effect as most are folksongs that actually have crossed countless years and miles passed from singer to singer. It is both mundane and extraordinary that that record was waiting there for me that night. It is mundane because, on one hand, it was simply one shard of the material culture of late capitalism amid the random and abundant clutter of Angelo’s basement. But the existence of the record at all is also extraordinary. It is a

Communist work of art, distributed by Communists, largely for Communists at a time when even being associated with communism in the United States placed one in peril.

Producing it, possessing it, or listening to it were acts of rebellion against ruthless forces of political and cultural oppression. Powerful interests had done their best to ensure that record would not reach my hands—and yet, there it was. Part of the record’s allure to me in 1990 was that it still carried some trace of that danger. The subtlety of its subversion

15 was also infinitely more appealing than the aggressive sturm und drang of punk and hardcore.

The album is a live recording from one of Seeger’s countless small concerts in the early 1950s. It is not clear exactly where or when the album was recorded, but it is probably from a performance at a college in the northeastern U.S. Throughout his career, many of Seeger’s albums were recorded live. His greatest talent was his ability to inspire audiences to sing. He could deftly teach an audience of strangers a new song and organize them into a chorus to sing three or four-part harmony with him in a matter of minutes. Audience participation was fundamental to Seeger’s art. Showing an audience that they could work cooperatively and sing together, he believed, was one tangible step toward mutual understanding and collective political action—a practice inspired by

Popular Front ideology. Moreover, if people were able to see that they did not have to admire commercially produced culture passively but could make their own music, they might see that there were many other aspects of their lives over which they could similarly exercise active control. While this method of education via entertainment was most effective in person, the live recording transmits some of this to the listener outside of the auditorium. The live recording presents Seeger at work. It offers the opportunity to share some of the original audience’s experience, and the listener is included, in a sense, in that community. During the days of the blacklist, it must have been a comfort to some isolated on the left to feel part of a community again—if only through hearing a record.

Forty years later, the community’s embrace still had the power to envelop me.

The sound editing on the Stinson recording is by no means smooth or slick. The rough cuts combined with the low-quality sound and informality of the live recording

16 constantly bring the work’s seams to the fore. While these would ordinarily be seen as a flaws in a commercially produced recording, they are part of what makes Folksongs and

Ballads effective. These characteristics operate like Brechtian alienation devices that constantly dispel the illusions we are taught to associate with creative work. Highly produced and flawless recordings distance us from the creative act and make it seem practicable by only a select few. The recordings on Folksongs and Ballads point to the human effort in the project and invest it with a do-it-yourself aesthetic. This aspect was vital to the album’s appeal to me in 1990. While many records may have made me wish that I could make music myself, this one made me feel like I could. Of course, Seeger was a master musician with a vast knowledge of musical theory. The purpose of his work, however, was not ostentatiously to display his abilities but to encourage participation. He had inherited from his father the view that the worth of a society’s musical culture was not determined by the number of virtuosos it produced but by the number of people who actively participated in making music. Within months of hearing

Seeger’s album, I had an instrument in my hands for the first time and was enthusiastically learning the rudiments of music.

The content of Folksongs and Ballads largely reflects the main concerns of the

Communist Party in the early 50s: peace, international goodwill (with an emphasis on cooperation among socialist countries), civil rights, and, as always, the struggles of working people. Seeger’s selection of songs, their thoughtful presentation and juxtaposition, and his carefully crafted—though spontaneous sounding—introductions all illustrate his enduring commitment to Popular Front belief in the viability of folk culture as a tool to build solidarity and fight oppression. “Greenland Whale Fisheries,” Paddy

Works on the Railroad,” and “Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues” offer successive depictions of the exploitation of workers and the hard lives their respective industries forced them to lead. Placing together the stories of an early nineteenth-century whaler, an Irish immigrant railroad worker from the later 1800s, and a twentieth-century mill hand from a

North Carolina cotton mill together, Seeger powerfully illustrates the enduring replication and repetition of the abuse of workers under a capitalist system. Though the dates and specific industries might be different, the struggle between labor and management under a capitalist economic system remains the same. Next to this, he places a medley of excerpts from three nineteenth-century courting songs that forms an equation comparing labor relations to marriage. The violently misogynist humor of “I had a wife and got no good of her,” I which a husband joyfully murders his wife, is of a kind common in traditional folk song. The widespread misogyny in folk songs did not come under critical scrutiny until feminist scholars questioned it in the late twentieth century. Seeger, however, sings the song against a floating verse used in several folk ballads: “Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind / They’re always controlled, they’re always confined /

Controlled by their parents until they are wives / Then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.” Voicing the suffering of women in patriarchal and capitalist society twenty years ahead of second-wave feminism’s surge demonstrates Seeger’s early awareness of the necessity of gender equity in the fight for social justice—an inheritance from the more radical and lofty historical minds of the political left.

The geographical scope of the music on Folksongs and Ballads is not limited to

American or Anglo-American songs; it spans countries and continents. The album begins with the traditional English ballad “The House Carpenter” which operates as a kind of

18 home base for Seeger and allows him to anchor himself in his own traditions before beginning his musical journey. One selection that follows is a medley of four melodies from different places played on the recorder. Seeger asks the audience to guess where they think each tune originated. One is from Japan, one from Ireland, one from Israel, and the last is an Inca melody from Peru. Apart from their wordlessness, the difficulty in determining their provenance comes from their marked similarity. The exercise succinctly demonstrates the human universality of music and highlights our commonality regardless of race or nationality. Seeger juxtaposes another Israeli song, “The Road to

Eilat,” with a German folksong “Die Gendanken Sind Frei” that celebrates freedom of thought. This choice of programming performs a multilayered and complex operation.

Obviously, pairing an Israeli song with a German song is a gesture toward healing the then still-fresh wounds of the Second World War. It is also a strike against enduring anti- semitism and an acknowledgment of the new nation of Israel. Historically, much of the

CPUSA membership was Jewish and fighting anti-semitism was inextricably linked with the aims of the Party. Indeed, among those strongly opposed to the left, to call a person a

Jew or a Communist was nearly synonymous. Including a German song, however, was also fairly controversial. Less than ten years prior, the Germans had been the United

States’ enemy: to sing a German song was to move beyond enmity and look toward the future. One must also recall that at the time of the performance, half of Germany was a socialist republic. The song’s inclusion was at once a nod and a democratic challenge to

East Germany as well. Moreover, the lyrics of “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” which are a testament to the unstoppable power of freethinking, are an undeniable denunciation of

McCarthyism’s repression. The Caribbean calypso song, “Money is King,” critiques the

19 corruption of wealth and greed, and “Bayeza,” a South African choral piece demonstrates the brilliance of African song and provides Seeger the opportunity to demonstrate his mastery as a song-leader by organizing his audience into an impromptu chorus. In a world that was becoming increasingly divided by the Cold War, Seeger’s musical internationalism points toward our commonality and shows how songs can transcend borders and languages.

The issue of race is at the center of Folksongs and Ballads. Placing African and calypso music alongside the traditional music of white Europeans and Americans aptly illustrates the equal—and often superior—quality of black musical culture. Several of the remaining selections on the album come from African-American traditions. “Long John” and “Go Down, Old Hannah” both come from the tradition of black song in the prisons of the southern United States. “Long John” celebrates an escaped convict with an almost supernatural ability to evade capture. “Go Down, Old Hannah” is a work song that prisoners used to pace themselves while performing grueling manual labor. The song’s repeating melodic structure offers singers the opportunity to complain about their condition through improvised verses. Two other pieces Seeger performs, “In the Evening

When the Sun Goes Down” and “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” were learned from Lead

Belly. Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) was a formidable blues singer and master of the twelve-string guitar who had himself served time in Southern prisons for murder. He was discovered in prison by John and Alan Lomax who recorded him and helped to secure his release. Alan Lomax introduced him into the circle of urban leftist folksingers, and he became one of its most popular performers until his early death in 1949. Seeger’s choice to include examples not just of African-American song, but songs that cast light on the

20 brutal and racist prison system of the American South, highlights the enduring suffering of black Americans in the generations after emancipation. Folksongs and Ballads was released while the United States was still legally and fully segregated. Seeger’s open acknowledgment, inclusion, and elevation of black musical culture is a testament to the importance of the work of the CPUSA in the struggle for civil rights.

Oh, my countrymen, why are your voices hushed? Only the waterfalls and fountains sing free. —Trad. Korean, “Ariran(g)”

Folksongs and Ballads thrilled me when I first heard it in 1990. The album touched on so many of the controversial issues of its moment—and they were issues that seemed no less dire or pressing in 1990. What is more, Seeger was able to make his points without screaming like an adolescent and slamming an electric guitar. He made music with simple beauty that got to the heart of things directly with incisive wit, and his audience participated in its creation. No less important than the songs themselves were the introductions with which Seeger framed them. He offered history, stories, and commentary that placed the songs in context and in certain cases worked to repurpose a song so that it meant something different than it might have otherwise. The overall effect of the introductions and the singing was like a highly creative lecture and political rally.

The performance straddled the boundaries between education, entertainment, and political organization, and it charted a course that I have striven to follow for ever since.

It revealed a way to use art to educate and to foster social justice.

One piece from Folksongs and Ballads stuck out to me at the time and has remained with me since: “Ariran.” “Ariran” is an old Korean folk song with countless variant versions. (The title is actually more properly transliterated as “Arirang,” but since

Seeger uses “Ariran”—and, as I will show, that difference is significant—I will use that title here.) The choice to perform a Korean song in 1953–let alone include it on an album—always struck me as being particularly radical. The Korean War was ongoing when Folksongs and Ballads was recorded and produced. (In fact, it is still ongoing as no peace treaty has yet been signed.) This is the introduction with which Seeger prefaces the song:

About 400 years ago, there was a very despotic emperor in Korea. He was hanging people, right and left, who opposed him. And the legend has that 10,000 people were hung by him from the top of a tall pine tree on the top of the hill of Ariran, which is outside Seoul. One of the men condemned to death—as he marched his last mile—he sang a song saying how much he loved his country, how beautiful it was, how he hated to say goodbye to it. It was picked up by the other prisoners, and it became a tradition in Korea that any man ever condemned to death had a right to sing this song before his execution. Well, like many a folksong, then it spread through the country. It had verses added to it and different variations on the melody. About forty years ago, when Japan took over Korea and tried to make a colony out of it, they abolished the singing—made it a prison offense—to sing the national anthem of Korea or any patriotic songs, and “Ariran” became kind of an unofficial anthem. It was sung by the guerrillas who fought in the hills against the fascists, and today is sung in both North and South Korea—a symbol of unity in an otherwise divided country.

This introduction illustrates the kind of erudite presentation that informs Seeger’s performances, and it also serves as a demonstration of the nature of Seeger’s subtle subversion. His description of the song’s origins highlights the power of music as a weapon for social justice. The condemned man’s song is “picked up by the other prisoners” and then proliferates “throughout the country.” Songs operate like a virus.

They pass from person to person carrying their message. They cannot be imprisoned or

22 killed and they endure—rising again when necessary. According to Seeger, “Ariran” was resurrected 350 years after its composition when Koreans needed it to combat the despotism of fascist Japan. That the Japanese tried to outlaw the singing of patriotic songs during their occupation of Korea is an acknowledgement of music’s subversive force. Perhaps even more important, “Ariran” was still sung in both North and South

Korea. While music can be a formidable weapon, it is strongest as a tool to build unity.

Songs cross the borders that divide us and show us what we hold in common.

What is most subversive about Seeger’s introduction to the song lies in its subtext.

“Ariran” is an antique song from Korea, and it describes an episode from Korean history, but Seeger is talking about the United States in the 1950s. Seeger knew that he could be facing prison—or worse—for his own political views. He is the condemned man of the introduction. Like the “despotic emperor” or the “fascists,” the reactionary right of 1950s

America was working hard to silence Seeger and his comrades. His introduction to

“Ariran,” however, demonstrates his belief in the power of song. Should he be struck down, the songs will endure and triumph in the end. This particular presentation of the song is also politically dangerous for its source material. The story that Seeger uses to frame “Ariran” is apocryphal. “Ariran” or “Arirang” is a melodic and thematic skeleton upon which myriad iterations of the song have been built over centuries in Korea. The story of the song’s origin that Seeger presents is drawn almost verbatim from the book

Song of Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel (1941) by Kim San and Nym Wales.

Kim San was the nom de guerre of Jang Jirak, a Korean communist who fought the

Japanese occupation and later served in Mao’s Red Army. It his version of “Ariran” that

Seeger presents—a version that has already been repurposed and recast as a song of

23 leftist resistance. Should there be any doubt about where Seeger’s sympathies lay, one need only look to his source to be certain that his worldview was defiantly unshaken by the threat of the Red Scare.

In Seeger’s singing, “Ariran” expresses grief but never despair. The melody is plaintive, and he skillfully uses his banjo to create a simple accompaniment that echoes the sound of similar instruments from Asia such as the Chinese pipa or the Japanese samisen. The verses he sings are lyrical and evoke the quality of haiku:

Ariran, Ariran, Arariyo, Crossing the hills of Ariran-O.

In my homeland of 3,000 leagues, Peace and abundance will flower at last.

Ariran, Ariran, Arariyo, Crossing the hills of Ariran-O.

Oh, my countrymen, why are your voices hushed? Only the waterfalls and fountains sing free.

Ariran, Ariran, Arariyo, Crossing the hills of Ariran-O.

Numberless are the stars blinking in the night— Endless the sorrow we know in our life.

Ariran, Ariran, Arariyo, Crossing the hills of Ariran-O.

The song’s “homeland” may be long-ago Korea, but it is for the United States that Seeger is wishing peace and abundance. He is singing for the end of the Cold War and of the nation’s internal political conflict. If one assumes that Seeger used the lyrics printed in

Song of Ariran as the basis for his performance, the alteration that he made for his second verse is significant. In the book, the translation of Kim San’s version reads “Oh, twenty

24 million countrymen / where are you now? / Alive are only three thousand li / of mountains and rivers.” In Kim San’s “Ariran” his missing countrymen have been exiled or killed. Seeger is summoning his present but defeated or dormant compatriots to end their silence. It is a call to action. Seeger knew McCarthyism was unjust, and he believed that challenging it openly was the key to destroying its power. When he finally appeared before HUAC, he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs on the grounds of the First Amendment. It was a defense that only a handful of witnesses chose. Most used the Fifth Amendment if they did not wish to cooperate. Citing the First Amendment challenged the Committee’s right to ask any American the kind of questions they posed.

Seeger was aware that he might have to sacrifice himself to present this challenge. When

Congress found him guilty of contempt, he faced ten years in prison. The concluding verse to his “Ariran” speaks to the sadness he feels, but he is not defeated. Rather, his final verse taps into the timelessness of struggle. It is eternal and enduring like the numberless stars; it is “endless.” Despots and fascists rise and fall but thoughts and words carry the hope of freedom across generations—buoyed on a river of song.

Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower We come on the ship that sailed the moon We come in the age’s most uncertain hour And sing an American tune Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right It’s all right, it’s all right You can’t be forever blessed Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day And I’m trying to get some rest That’s all I’m trying to get some rest —Paul Simon, “American Tune”

Near the end of his life, critic John Berger wrote an essay in which he tried to identify what gave songs their extraordinary power. He argued that one specific peculiarity of songs was their ability to transcend their moment. Berger wrote:

A song, as distinct from the bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience. While it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs have another dimension, which is uniquely theirs. A song fills the present, while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans forward farther and farther. Without the persistence of this hope, songs would not exist. Songs lean forward. The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a song offer a shelter from the flow of linear time—a shelter in which the future, present, and past can console, provoke, ironize and inspire one another.

Berger contrasts this with the speech of contemporary politicians which he finds utterly detached from any sense of history and, therefore, hopeless. I am thinking about this now as I sit writing in a coffee shop in Scranton in 2018. I believe that it was the comfort of this “shelter” that I felt the night that I first heard Folksongs and Ballads in 1990. The album was recorded and produced in the 1950s and its songs were hundreds of years old, but the power of that music grabbed hold of me that night and has never let go. It was my

“listening ear” that was waiting to hear those songs transmitted from some distant past.

They have inspired and consoled me for thirty years, and I expect that they will until I die. Neither Pete Seeger, the owners of Stinson Records, or the many anonymous authors

26 of the songs themselves knew that it would be me, specifically, who would receive their messages, but they transmitted them anyway. I have passed those messages on myself for decades now. Likewise, I have no idea where or how they have reverberated, but it is my hope that they have continued to offer hope and do some good. I do know that my daughter has begun to sing the same Irish songs that I learned as a child. At night, I hear her singing bits of verses to herself as she falls asleep in her crib. This is where I find my hope now. I know as long as the songs persist, the struggle for peace, justice, and unity will go on until there is no world left to struggle for.

AFTERWARD

The preceding essay was written as the capstone to my work toward the master’s degree in English at Lehigh University. I began to study there two years ago in August

2016. I remember vividly my first day as a graduate student and teaching fellow. It was a beautiful late summer morning and the sun shone brilliantly over the campus’s lofty oaks and gothic spires. With an armful of books and an appropriately professorial necktie, I rehearsed my lesson plan in my head as I strolled from my car to Drown Hall. As I came up the hill to the broad and level brick walkway leading to Linderman Library, I was jarred from my reflection by the scene before me. All along the walkway a crew of the university’s food service workers was quietly and efficiently setting up grills, chafing dishes, coolers, and white-clothed tables in preparation for a student event later in the day. They were all too busy to notice me as I walked by, but I observed each of them closely. I spent more than ten years working in the grueling and thankless food service industry. I knew intimately every operation that was being performed. I could see what was being done well and what could be done better. I could tell who was afraid of the boss, who hated her job, who wanted a cigarette break, who the person was that you wanted on your team when things got ugly, and who was too hungover to be of any use. I suddenly felt ridiculous in my necktie. I felt like a traitor. This was where I belonged— not in the ranks of the academics but amongst my black and tan uniformed comrades, all but invisible to the students lolling about the commons. Every instinct told me to drop my books and pitch in unloading the trailer.

My thesis is, in a sense, torn between worlds because I have always felt torn between worlds myself. I have performed a jittery balancing act between scholarship,

28 blue-collar labor, and the arts, and I have rarely found a niche in which I felt truly comfortable. My art has been too erudite to be entertaining, my scholarship too entertaining to be serious, and my interest in education and the arts too deep to permit me to wear the boss’s yoke complacently. While this history may have hindered my ability to realize my potential in any particular pursuit, it has also broadened my personal perspective in ways that a more single-minded focus never could. One aim of my thesis has been to try to find some synthesis for my disparate parts. It is not a traditional scholarly thesis because I do not see myself as a traditional scholar. I have attempted here to place the different aspects of myself beside one another and juxtapose them to demonstrate how the combination informs my worldview and my interests. Most importantly, this essay is a move toward using my skills and graduate training in the pursuit of social justice. In these pages, I have sought to show clearly some of the ways that words and art can carry political aspirations forward.

My time as a graduate student of English at Lehigh has been made more productive and pleasurable thanks to the department’s focus on the link between literature and social justice. I have always believed that literature and art do not exist in a vacuum.

They reflect and affect the operations of our social lives and they shape our course as we build our collective future. Encountering a wide range of fiction, poetry, and drama has been a vital part of my M.A. training. But, the exploration of critical theory has been my most important work at Lehigh. In particular, the works of cultural studies theorists like

Raymond Williams and Marxist critics like Frederic Jameson have provided me with a critical toolkit and vocabulary to apply to literature and society equally. Cultural studies illustrates how structures of power and political systems can be scrutinized via processes

29 similar to those that English scholars use to examine literature. We live in a society awash in information, yet our ability to consider carefully its meaning is sorely underdeveloped. The work of literary scholars—so often dismissed as frivolous or impractical—is precisely the kind of close analysis that is required. Deep and nuanced study of language and multiplicity of meaning is essential to a thorough understanding of both literature and the operations of social power. Moreover, examining literature highlights the nature of our society’s base and superstructure in ways that nothing else can. Literature facilitates the adoption of different and conflicting viewpoints and offers dynamic and personal perspective on history. The form, content, and scope of literature can operate as tools to trace—as Frederic Jameson calls it—a “cognitive map” of social structures of power. The focus of art and literature can be broad or narrow, general or detailed. This unique flexibility enables us to view society in new and highly illuminating ways. It allows us to make connections and see relationships that are otherwise obscure.

Raymond Williams’ work was also appealing to me because of his attention to the affective dimension of literature. In my opinion, many critics do harm to literature and art when they reduce it solely to abstract ideas. Any piece of expressive culture carries an emotional charge that must be considered. Indeed, no human work can ever be wholly divorced from affect. Even in highly political studies such as Marxism and Literature,

Williams acknowledged the necessity of accounting for feeling in the work of the critic.

Political movements are never simply intellectual or theoretical; they are motivated and sustained by emotion. Art and literature are the most effective means of sustaining or transmitting those emotions. The arts can carry past political movements forward, redoubt those of the present, or inspire new ones. Works of art are works of imagination,

30 and imagination is vital to social progress. The move toward a “politics of transfiguration”—to borrow Paul Gilroy’s term—through which society is not merely improved but recreated, is a creative act, and it is only through the imaginative nature of art that such a future can be envisioned.

My affinity for Williams was also due to his roots among the working class of south Wales. His youth spent among Welsh miners, railroad workers, and farmers sharpened his awareness of the structures and barriers of social class and taught him to appreciate the “ordinary” culture of working people. My time spent studying folk music has repeatedly forced me to consider distinctions between high and low culture. The assumed superiority of print culture over oral, of fine art over folk arts is part of the process of policing the boundaries between rich and poor, master and servant. Like

Williams, I have learned through my love of folk culture that hierarchies ranking forms of human expression are false and oppressive. This has also informed my work as a scholar, and it is another reason that I have chosen a non-traditional approach to my final thesis. I believe that academic modes of writing too often enact similar distinctions and exclusions. At its worst, academic exclusivity raises the ivory tower higher and barricades the campus gate more firmly. The expense of gaining access to academic journals can be prohibitive, and the specialized vocabulary of academic writing often makes scholarly research inaccessible to the uninitiated. Yet, those uninitiated are often the people who need intellectuals’ work in their lives most desperately. This essay is partly my attempt to adopt the role of go-between and find a middle ground. It is geared toward publication for a more general audience rather than a narrowly academic

31 readership. I hope that I can serve as conduit and pass something important from one world to another.

Like all scholars, I am deeply indebted to those who have come before. I have spent almost three decades studying materials related to folk music and its power as a tool for political progress, but I would like to mention a few works that have been particularly useful in preparing this essay. Pete Seeger’s rich life has been written about many times, but David King Dunaway’s How Can I Keep from Singing? remains the most authoritative and thorough biography to date. Ann Pescatello’s Charles Seeger: A

Life in American Music and Judith Tick’s Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music were invaluable for envisioning the world that shaped young Pete.

Jim Brown’s 2007 documentary film Pete Seeger: the Power of Song, produced in collaboration with the Seeger family is also an excellent window into Seeger’s life and work. While many books have been written about the history of the Communist Party

USA, a few specific works regarding its links to folk music proved indispensable.

Richard A. Reuss and Joanne C. Reuss’ American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics,

1927-1957 is an exhaustive and admirable examination of the relationship between folk music and the CPUSA. Robbie Lieberman’s “My Song is My Weapon”: People’s Songs,

American Communism, and the Politics of Culture follow in a similar vein but is more narrowly focused on the 1940s and the work of the People’s Songs organization. Singing

Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals by David King Dunaway and

Molly Beer evokes the suspicion and fear of the Red Scare experienced by the professional folk singing community of the 1950s as only well-conducted oral history can. Finally, John Berger’s insightful and moving essay “Some Notes on Song: The

Rhythms of Listening” was invaluable in helping me to clarify and articulate exactly why this music has held such power over me for all these years.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Almanac Singers, The. Talking Union: The Almanac Singers, vol. 1, Original 1941-1942 Recordings. Naxos, 2001. An Anthology of Folk Music. Sine Qua Non, 1973. Atkins, E. Taylor. “The Dual Career of ‘Arirang’: The Korean Resistance Anthem that Became a Japanese Pop Hit.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 645-687. Baez, Joan. Joan Baez. Vanguard, 1960. Belafonte, Harry. Calypso. RCA Victor, 1956. Berger, John. “Some Notes on Song: The Rhythms of Listening.” Harper’s Magazine, February 2015, pp. 64-69. Black Flag. The First Four Years. SST, 1983. Bragg, Billy. Help Save the Youth of America EP: Live and Dubious. Go! Discs, 1988. Brown, Jim. The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time. United Artists, 1982. ---. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song. Shangri-La, 2007. Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left. Verso, 2013. Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In Person at Carnegie Hall. Columbia, 1963. Clash, The. London Calling. Epic, 1980. Dead Kennedys. Bedtime for Democracy. Alternative Tentacles, 1986. Dubliners, The. The Dubliners. Transatlantic, 1964. Dunaway, David King. How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger. Villard, 2008. ---. A Pete Seeger Discography: Seventy Years of Recordings. Scarecrow, 2011. Dunaway, David King and Molly Beer. Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals. OUP, 2010. Dylan, Bob. Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1962. Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Routledge, 2002. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. New Directions, 1958. Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. U of NC P, 2000. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights, 1956. Gold, Michael. Change the World!. International, 1936. Guthrie, Woody. Library of Congress Recordings. Rounder, 1988. Howard, Walter T., editor. Anthracite Reds: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression, vol. 2. iUniverse, 2004. Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping” (1988). The Jameson Reader, Edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, Blackwell, 2000, 277-287. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Viking, 1957. Kim San and Nym Wales. Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel. John Day, 1941. Kingston Trio, The. . . . from the “Hungry I.” Capitol, 1959. Klein, Joe. Woody Guthrie: A Life. Delta, 1999. Korson, George. Minstrels of the Mine Patch: Songs and Stories of the Anthracite Industry. Folklore Associates, 1964.

Lieberman, Robbie. “My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950. U of Illinois P, 1989. Lomax, Alan. Folk Songs of North America. Doubleday, 1960. Moglen, Seth. “Sharing Knowledge, Practicing Democracy: A Vision for the Twenty- First Century University.” Kalfou, vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2014, pp. 174-190. Ochs, Phil. I Ain’t Marching Anymore. Elektra, 1965. Olmsted, Tony. Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound. Routledge, 2003. Pescatello, Ann M. Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music. U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. Peter, Paul and Mary. Peter, Paul and Mary. Warner Bros. 1962. Pogues, The. If I Should Fall from Grace with God. Island, 1988. Radosh, Ronald. “The Communist Party’s Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan.” American Communist History, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3- 19. Reuss, Richard A. and Joanne C. Reuss. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957. Scarecrow, 2000. Seeger, Peggy. First Time Ever: A Memoir. Faber & Faber, 2017. Seeger, Pete. Pete Seeger in His Own Words. Edited by Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal, Paradigm, 2012. ---. Pete Seeger Concert and Folk Songs & Ballads (1953). Collectables Records, 2006. ---. Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies. Sing Out, 1993. ---. The Incomplete Folksinger. U of Nebraska P, 1992. ---. We Shall Overcome. Columbia, 1963. Sex Pistols, The. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Virgin, 1977. Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. Viking, 2010. Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music. Oxford UP, 1997. Van Ronk, Dave. Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues and a Spiritual. Folkways, 1959. Washington Squares, The. The Washington Squares. Gold Castle, 1987. Weavers, The. At Carnegie Hall. Vanguard, 1957. Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary” (1958). Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, Edited by Robin Gable, Verso, 1989, pp. 3-18. ---. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977. ---. The Country and the City. Chatto & Windus, 1973.

VITA

Brian Reese studied history and theatre at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts and earned a BA in English at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is currently completing his MA in English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.