Jesse Jarnow - Wasnt That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America

February 1952

in Akron, the five men who arrived at the nightclub and sat at the table in the first row, center stage, and silently glowered at the headline act. They were just ordinary customers, one of the men told a reporter, with no intentions of starting anything. In the Beacon Journals photograph, they stare at the stage, beers and ashtrays in front of them, occupied by their appointed roles.

Arraying themselves around the single microphonethree men in tuxedos and a sole woman in a gownthe Weavers certainly didnt look dangerous. Nor did the group acknowledge the stone-faced American Legion delegation from the stage, though the folk quartet was surely aware of its presence. In Cleveland, where the chart-topping musicians had performed earlier that week, they were under constant surveillance by Legion members, police subversive squad members and F.B.I., the ranking American Legion representative said.

For weeks, the Legion commander and his friends had lobbied the club owner to cancel the bands Akron appearance. The Weavers manager had flown from New York to discuss the situation, but the Legion members hadnt shown up for a scheduled meeting. The Yankee Inn was nearly sold out.

, a long corridor of trees, late-afternoon sunlight casting through the branches, people screaming, rocks shattering windows, uniformed police officers standing by passively.

In Akron, the American Legion members almost certainly did not join the singing when the band encouraged the audience to do so. Unable to find anything subversive about their performance, Louis Mancini, the 14th District Legion commander for Summit and Portage Counties, allowed that the Weavers were in fact good entertainment.

While the military veterans from the Legion didnt start anything that night in Akron, what had been started had been started long ago, not by them, and not by the Weavers. What had reestablished itself in the years after World War II was a long and intricate fissure down the center of American culture, becoming visible in the fog when certain issues illuminated it, a fissure that might be seen throughout the countrys history.

The Yankee Inn was merely the latest battlefield in an unceasing clash between deeply set forces locked in philosophical and political and even spiritual combat, manifesting to face off on the physical plane only on occasion. Each side held its own values, its own sense of history, and its own hopes for the American future. With great determination and intention, the Weavers had fought and sung their way to the front lines. In Akron in 1952, the battle raged at its peak, the results seeming to hang in the balance, with the Weavers at the lead of a powerful cultural battalion.

. Theyd been in the upper reaches of the hit parade constantly since mid-1950 and their recent Christmas album, an early concept collection, had earned unexpectedly high sales too.

style on the A-side, The Billboard noted, an arrangement of an old cowboy song. But the editors raised their eyebrows at the song that backed it, a strange foreign-sounding folk-tune, with a one-word lyric.

Like Weavers songs before it, Wimoweh especially would begin its path to global ubiquity with their version, a shifting chant capped by a soaring and mysterious falsetto melody, not an English word within it. And like the other songs the Weavers brought into the pop and folk canons, few of the arrangements that followed would sound much like the Weavers themselves. As selectors of songs, the Weavers were nearly unparalleled, drawing music from across continents and centuries, then transformingregularizingthem into standards, from Goodnight Irene to the Bahamian sailor song The Wreck of the John B.

While the multicultural novelty of their choices surely fed their chart success, so did their performances. Backed by pop orchestras, and sometimes fighting their way through strings and horns and choirs foisted upon them by their record company, the Weavers inventive vocal harmonies cut throughas often did the peculiar ringing sound of a banjo, itself almost as novel in pop music as the songs they performed.

in New York, where the woman in the gown stepped to the front and sang an untranslated Spanish Civil War song in a jolting electric contralto that barely needed a microphone to fill a concert hall. In Akron, the Weavers most likely didnt do Venga Jaleo, but one might imagine the American Legion clearly receiving the signal even if it couldnt quite decode the message.

us, weve said, Look, do you like our music? he told the reporter. Were musicians, not politicians. The only platform we can stand on is our songs. Let the people judge.

The American Legion delegation got their news from Counterattack, a newsletter that printed the names of alleged Communists in the entertainment field. Often, news traveled slowly in the 1950s, but across right-wing anti-Communist networks it could move with lightning speed.