An Introduction to America’s Music

432 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II

commentary. Similarly, Harry Belafonte scored several calypso hits in the 1950s but

kept his music separate from his outspoken advocacy of the civil rights movement.

Despite the blacklisting that broke up the Weavers, however, Pete Seeger con-

tinued to be a leader among political activists who used music to further progres-

sive causes. Seeger and others wrote topical songs—songs, often using preexisting

melodies, with new words pertaining to the current scene, whether commenting

on specifi c events or making generalized pleas for peace and justice—for publica-

tion in leftist magazines such as Sing Out! and Broadside. In 1950 Sing Out! published

“If I Had Hammer,” a song written the previous year by Seeger and Lee Hays. The

Weavers had recorded the song for Decca, but the record company had backed

away from the song’s overt politicking and chose not to release it. Not until 1956

did Seeger record a solo version (LG 17.5) for Folkways, a small independent label

run by Moses Asch, a devotee of both traditional music and leftist political causes.

By that time the song had been adopted by peace activists and was on its way to

becoming an anthem of the civil rights movement.

The fi rst three stanzas of “Hammer” differ from one another only in the

appearance of two or three new words in each stanza. The fourth stanza merges

the imagery of the fi rst three stanzas and gives the key to what otherwise would

be enigmatic lyrics. Each stanza is eighteen bars long: the expected sixteen-bar

length is extended with a long melisma in the last line that begins with an exu-

berant upward leap of an octave. The melody is entirely pentatonic with the

exception of a single bluesy lowered seventh in bar 6 (“All o_-ver this land”), mak-

ing the tune easy to pick up and sing along with.

FOLK REVIVAL AND FOLK AUTHENTICITY

“If I Had a Hammer” reached a mass audience only in 1962, via a hit record by

the popular folk trio of Peter, Paul, and Mary. By that time, following the election

of John F. Kennedy to the presidency, the political climate seemed to be mov-

ing toward the optimism of JFK’s “New Frontier.” Amid the social changes of the

early 1960s, the fl ourishing of urban folk music led to the rise of three different

approaches: that of popularizers (commercialized acts like the Kingston Trio), polit-

icizers (social activists like Pete Seeger), and preservationists (musicians dedicated

to upholding traditional repertories and performance styles). The fi rst group

freely altered traditional material to make it more commercially palatable, and

the second composed entirely new songs or fi t new topical lyrics to old songs. The

preservationists, however, sought to perpetuate all they could of the folk tradi-

tions they embraced: original lyrics, singing styles, instruments, and earlier ways

of playing them. This branch of the urban folk revival drew on the scholarly work

of folk song collectors, and one of its most effective proponents was Mike Seeger,

the half brother of Pete and son of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Fascinated with Earl Scruggs’s bluegrass banjo style, in the 1950s Mike Seeger

and Ralph Rinzler compiled LP anthologies of banjo music with scholarly com-

mentary for Folkways. Then in 1958 Seeger formed a trio, the New Lost City

Ramblers, dedicated to performing old tunes in the traditional styles he had

been collecting. Each member of the NLCR played multiple string instruments,

enabling the group to recreate the sounds of various old-time string bands. They

had studied those traditional bands fi rst by listening to old hillbilly and race

records, then by traveling south to work directly with old-time musicians who

topical songs

LG 17.5

Mike Seeger

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