By 1940, Commonwealth College had begun to fall apart, attacked by reactionary forces from without and riven by factional disputes within. A few months before it finally closed its doors, Lee Hays left, headed to New York to “carry Commonwealth’s labor songs to the unions up there” (Willens 1988: 59). At the time he left Com-monwealth, Hays had been compiling a workers’ songbook, with musical notations by Waldemar Hille (R. Cohen 2002: 28). Hille, who had been the dean of music at Elmhurst College in Illinois, met Hays during a visit to Commonwealth at the end of 1937. According to Hille, although Williams took the lead in converting religious hymns into labor and political songs, it fell to Hays to “polish” the final versions. It was Lee, Hille averred, who “was able to take the lead and make things hum” (quoted in Willens 1988: 53–54). In New York, Hays met two kindred political and musical spirits in Millard Lampell and a young banjo player and singer named Pete Seeger.
Together, the three founded the Almanac Singers, a musical collec-tive with a rotating membership that dedicated itself to a mixture of traditional folk tunes and political songs meant to be sung to a labor union audience. Over the next several years, its other mem-bers included, at one time or another, Woody Guthrie, pioneering folklorist Alan Lomax and his sister Bess, Tom Glazer, Burl Ives, Earl Robinson, Sis Cunningham, and Gordon Friesen. Although all its principal members were white, a number of well-known African American singers and musicians also participated, including Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, and Josh White (Reagon 1975: 59). In addition to the Almanacs themselves, the communal house they lived in in Greenwich Village attracted other “Left and musical luminaries,” including Jim Garland, Aunt Molly Jackson, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the detective writer Dashiell Hammett (R. Cohen 2002: 29).
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Although never a commercial success, the Almanacs did achieve a certain amount of notoriety as they performed at labor union and political gatherings, garnering favorable reviews from the Commu-nist Party’s Daily Worker and described by Time Magazine as “four young men who roam around the country in a $150 Buick and fight the class war with ballads and guitars” (quoted in R. Cohen 2002: 29).
In addition to their numerous live performances in the early 1940s, the Almanacs recorded several albums on the obscure Keynote label, including 1941’s Talking Union, dedicated exclusively to labor songs, which features a CIO union–styled version of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” In the mid-1950s, the Folkways label reissued the album, making it available to a younger generation of folk music artists and activists (Dunaway 2011: 2). In addition, Hays and Seeger would go on to found the Weavers, who became a commercial success at the end of the 1940s with hit recordings of their covers of songs such as Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” and Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” before falling victim to the blacklist during the Red Scare of the 1950s. The Weavers, too, included “We Shall Not Be Moved” in their repertoire (Dunaway 2011: 140) and inspired a new generation of musicians and singers, such as Peter, Paul, and Mary, who would lead the socially conscious folk song revival in the United States in the 1960s. It is also necessary to recognize just how impor-tant the Almanac Singers—and later the Weavers—were to left-wing political activists in the 1940s and 1950s. Irwin Silber, a member of the Communist Party and editor of Sing Out! and other left-wing publications, had this to say about the importance of the Almanac’s music to the movement:
We were all influenced by the Almanacs. I had been to the mass rallies before the war where the Almanacs sang. The Al-manacs had a very liberating effect on the Left. . . . The domi-nant music of the Left, until the time of the Almanacs, was twofold: it was the European revolutionary tradition, and it was American popular music. . . .
[The Almanacs’ music] was very liberating because—at least for people of my generation who were rejecting the val-ues inherent in commercial music and didn’t have that sense of identification with the European tradition, and didn’t want
to—we wanted something that was American. . . . It wasn’t just the Almanacs, it was Woody and Lead Belly and Pete and so on, pulling it together that made a connection between the musical and the political values that made a lot of sense to us.
(quoted in Dunaway and Beer 2010: 59–60)
Thus, the Almanacs’ musical repertoire, including songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved,” was viewed by left activists as music that not only spoke to specific causes that concerned them, such as labor and civil rights, but also belonged specifically to them.
In an article comparing the artistic and musical “gestalt” of the Marxist “old left” in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s with that of the ideologically more eclectic “new left” of the 1960s, Deni-soff (1969) argues that activists like Silber of the “old left” developed what he called a “Folk Consciousness.” This consciousness, he insists, referred to an admiration of folk music by urban intellectuals and activists that led to its use in “the framework of social, economic, or political action” in which “social and organizational themes” were added to “traditional tunes,” performers emulated “rural attire,” and folk singers were regarded as “people’s artists” (Denisoff 1969: 428).
The Almanac Singers, Denisoff maintains, exemplified the “folk consciousness” of the old left, sometimes quite self-consciously and explicitly, as when they told a reporter from People’s World that they were “trying to give back to the people the songs of the workers” that had been “stolen from them by the bourgeoisie” (Denisoff 1969: 429).
Beyond the union movement, “We Shall Not Be Moved” became a standard in the repertoire of the Marxist left all over the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. By the mid-1930s, radical artists in New York City were singing it at their organizational meetings (Monroe 1974:
8), as were black and white Communist Party members in Alabama (Kelley 1990: 99, 136). In the late 1930s, Earl Robinson, the composer of “Joe Hill” and “Ballad for Americans,” put together a songbook titled America Sings for the Communist Party’s bookshops, which, along with “The Internationale,” “Solidarity Forever,” and other topi-cal protest songs, includes a version of “We Shall Not Be Moved” with the line “Lenin is our leader” (Robinson 1937). And in 1948, Walde-mar Hille finally published the collection of union and other songs that Lee Hays had in mind to publish a decade earlier. Titled The
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People’s Song Book, it of course includes a version of “We Shall Not Be Moved.” In the book’s introduction, the folklorist Alan Lomax insists that the songs it includes reflect “an emerging tradition that represented a new kind of human being, a new folk community com-posed of progressives and anti-fascists, and union members.” The book is, he claims, “a folio of freedom folklore, a weapon against war and reaction, and a singing testament to the future” (quoted in Hille 1948: 3).12 This emerging tradition would be subject to fierce repres-sion from the forces of reaction in the United States beginning soon after the publication of Hille’s long-awaited songbook.