Saturday Music Club: A/B The Weavers: "Venga Jaleo"/Lila Downs: "El Quinto Regimiento"

The Weavers: "Venga Jaleo"

 

Lila Downs: "El Quinto Regimiento" 

FFB: Lee Hays: short stories for ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and BESTSELLER MYSTERY MAGAZINE; Doris Willens: LONESOME TRAVELER: THE LIFE OF LEE HAYS

from the FictionMags Index:

HAYS, LEE (1914-1981) (chron.)

•  * Banquet and a Half, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1954
•  * Monday’s Washday, (ss) Bestseller Mystery Magazine May 1959
•  * On the Banks of the Ohio, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1949
•  * Pour on Water, (ss) Bestseller Mystery Magazine Sep 1959
•  * Three Against Deeth, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1948; A modern (colloquial dialect) English version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

The text of "Pour on Water" as published in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, 9/59.

I started reading, in what's turned out to be a very busy week, Doris Willens's biography of Lee Hays, with no precognition that it would be the week we'd lose Pete Seeger, Hays's longest-term collaborator in such projects as the Almanac Singers, People's Songs and, of course, the Weavers...they also wrote together, most famously "The Hammer Song" or "If I Had a Hammer"...a modest success in the Weavers' recording but one of their most commonly covered songs, and among the biggest hits Peter, Paul and Mary, and Trini Lopez, would have.  The nephew of Vance Randolph (the folklore collector who published notable collections of Ozark Mountains-dwellers and others' stories and songs beginning with The Ozarks, 1931), Hays faced early tragedy (in Hays' teen years, his father died in an auto accident, leading his mother to retreat from reality and be institutionalized; Hays began the first of many periods of couch-surfing, mostly with siblings, one of whom got him a library job which led indirectly to his radicalization and lifelong interest in social justice issues and activism).  Hays would spend most of the rest of his life trying to overcome his own emotional baggage as well as the very real sorts of threat that his fellow Southerners, among other sorts of yahoo very much including the Red-baiters of the turn of the 1950s, could pose; meanwhile, he would throw off sparks in all sorts of ways, in writing dialect-heavy short stories for Fredric Dannay and Robert P. Mills at EQMM and Bestseller Mystery when the mood struck him, in his various organizational activities around folk music and otherwise (in the mid-'50s doldrums after the blacklisting had temporarily sidelined the Weavers, Hays recruited his biographer, Doris Willens, then Doris Kaplan, a new mother and temporarily on maternity leave from a journalism career, and actor/writer/musician Alan Arkin and members of Arkin's family to become the Baby Sitters, who would record at least four albums-worth of folk music, including their own compositions, for children), and yet, as Willens notes, he never did get around to writing the autobiography he easily could have, and as Seeger would repeatedly note, his old bandmate would consistently badger Hays into one project or another after the latter's retirement from performance, including writing the script for the documentary The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!  

What a person can accomplish while waiting, sometimes rather irritably, for other things to happen, is one of the lessons of this book and Hays's life...the points should be taken. And Hays's stories about the villainous (or at least severely mischievous and arguably justified) Opal (the boy) and Sam (the girl) should be read...the example linked to above is short and eminently worth reading, particularly for those looking for something somewhere between Walt Kelly and James Lee Burke in appeal...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Not one of George Salter's better efforts among EQMM covers. Pity Hays's debut as a
fiction-writer had to take place in an issue packed with such obscure fellow-contributors...

Hays, Kaplan/Willens, and the Arkins/Dana with some fellow-travelers.

The Weavers: "Lonesome Traveler"

Composed by Lee Hays, who sings lead. The Decca Records recording with the Gordon Jenkins chorus and orchestra.

"Mbube" > "Wimoweh" > "The Lion Sleeps Tonight": Saturday Music Club on 1 January

Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds (1939): "Mbube"


The Weavers (1954 Carnegie Hall recording): "Wimoweh" 

The 1952 (hit) studio recording, The Weavers with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra and Chorus.
The 1952 Yma Sumac (with the Martin Denny Orchestra) recording.
The 1952 Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra recording.
The Kingston Trio variation on the Weavers' version, in concert (late 1950s/early '60s)
The Karl Denver Trio (1962 version on 1964 television)

Miriam Makeba: "Mbube" (1960)

Angelique Kidjo in concert, 2010
The Mahotella Queens, ?1970s

The Tokens: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (1961)

The Nylons' elaborated version.
The Next Edition Quartet, featuring Bill Crider

Ladysmith Black Mambazo & the Mint Juleps: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"

The Soweto Gospel Choir, undated

The history of "Mbube"...an appropriately if somewhat excessively jaundiced view...

December's Underappeciated Music: the links

Kirtsy MaColl and the Pogues

The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you reader/listeners of....

Patti Abbott: Tuesday Night Music; Friday Night Music; Saturday Night Music; The Pogues and Kirsty McColl: "Fairytale of New York"

Brian Arnold: A Different Kind of Christmas Music Mix 2013! 
 
The Weavers: "Children, Go Where I Send Thee"

Bill Crider: Song of the Day

Amber Frost: Nina Simone: "Be My Husband"

Paul Gallagher: Mingus

Ed Gorman: The Drifters: "White Christmas" 

Lee Hartsfeld: Public Domain Christmas

Jerry House: David Mallett

Randy Johnson: Motorhead

Ron Kretsch: Johnny Cash and the Cowsills: "Children Go Where I Send Thee"

Todd Mason:  Bluegrass (and such) infested with Beatles; Yearning/Journeys with Dengue Fever, et al.; Jim Hall; the Zombies' afterlife

Enoch Light: "Tabu" 

Richard Metzger: The Velvet Underground; "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore" ; The Monkees: “Ríu, Chíu” and (with Neil Young) "You and I";  Crass: Merry Crassmass

George Kelley: Allison Krauss & Natalie McMaster: "Get Me Through December"

Kate Laity: Button Box 

Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday;  The Dropkick Murphys: "The Season's Upon Us"

Muddy Waters (featuring Little Walter and Otis Spann): "Don't Go No Further"

James Reasoner: Christmas Music I Like

Charlie Ricci: Leon Redbone: Christmas Island 

Ron Scheer: Oscar Peterson: An Oscar Peterson Christmas 

Prashant Trikannad:  Bryan Adams videos

 

February's Forgotten Music: THE WEAVERS: REUNION AT CARNEGIE HALL 1963

In 1963, to mark their 15th anniversary as a performing unit, nearly all the Weavers (and all seven who'd recorded together...one Jackie Gibson had apparently tapped out almost immediately after formation in 1948) came onstage at Carnegie Hall for a second series of concerts, the first after a 1955 reunion concert to spit in the face of a McCarthyite blacklist of the diversely leftist band...after being the biggest hitmakers in the history of pop-folk music from 1948 to 1952, the unabashed Communist affiliation of Pete Seeger and Fred Hellerman was a very useful means of chasing them out of their Decca Records contract, off the charts and off the scene. But reform they did, and began recording for Vanguard Records, to their mutual benefit, both live and studio albums, and then Pete Seeger decided he wanted to leave the band, strike out on his own again...leading to his first replacement, the relatively slick but also rather dull Erik Darling, who would soon leave to be a solo act, then form The Rooftop Singers (their one hit being the bowdlerized "Walk Right In"), then the rather more congenial Frank Hamilton, and then for the final year of band's run, young Bernie Krause came in. The 1963 concert is thus almost the end of the band as a regular working unit as well as We're All Together Again for the First Time, and a fine set of songs it is, except for Darling's fairly dull solo "Train Time" (the man had chops on his instrument, but not a whole lot of charisma nor apparently much sense of the importance of the band he joined...to be fair, to be the New Seeger in the band was probably a bit more daunting than being, say, the New Pete Best). Despite such impressive predecessors as the Almanac Singers (which had included Seeger and Hays at times, along with Woody Guthrie and others), the Weavers basically created the commercial space for folk music in the marketplace, and the folk "revival" and efflorescence of the 1950s and later owes at least some debt at every level to what the Weavers did...

The Weavers in the first flush of their commercial success: the "Around the World" suite:


Also, no film or video footage exists of the 1963 concerts (as far as I know), but one of their best gospel numbers throughout their career is this:


Meanwhile, Pete Seeger, seeing that his old songwriting partner (and occasional Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine contributor) Lee Hays was going into a final spiral, gathered the original four together again for another reunion concert, an album and film, Wasn't That a Time, which will also be popping up again on PBS stations in early March in the US as a pledge-drive incentive:



Meanwhile, you can do worse than to gather these albums, and the documentary footage...few people, certainly few bands, have had such an epochal influence on those who followed.

For more of this month's "forgotten" music choices, please see Scott Parker's blog.