"Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!": The Writings of Lee Hays

pete seeger

Lee Hays (1914–1981) is remembered today as the bass singer of the Weavers, the popular folksinging quartet that included Pete Seeger and was blacklisted during the early years of the Cold War. Hays is especially well known for his collaborations with Seeger on a number of political songs, including "The Hammer Song," and for his central role in producing Wasn’t That a Time!, the 1981 film documentary about the Weavers. But he was also a talented, multifaceted writer of prose. In "Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!," Robert S. Koppelman brings together a selection of Hays’s published and unpublished literary output and places the author and his work in historical context. In these writings, Hays emerges as a learned, incisive, and witty advocate of a new aesthetic that he helped introduce to American culture--an aesthetic grounded in the music of both the Methodist Church of his family and the black churches of his Arkansas neighbors. Hays honed his participatory, inspirational musical style and his skills as a song leader while working in the Southern labor movement, where he became acquainted with the left-wing notion of "Art as a Weapon." Yet as the autobiographical pieces in this collection make clear, it was not until he moved to New York City, teamed up with such iconic folk figures as Woody Guthrie and Seeger, and began performing before a mass public that he fully matured as a musical artist with a political message. In addition to documenting the trajectory of Hays’s career, the volume also includes samples of his well-crafted work as a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Together these writings reveal Hays to be an artist of diverse personal talents and deep social commitment.

Genres memoirmusic

240 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1,2003

This edition

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover
Published: January 7, 2004 by University of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558494237
ASIN: 1558494235
Language: English

About the author

pete seeger

Peter Seeger, better known as Pete Seeger, was a folk singer, political activist, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. As a member of the Weavers, he had a string of hits, including a 1949 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. However, his career as a mainstream performer was seriously curtailed by the Second Red Scare: he came under severe attack as a former member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Later, he re-emerged on the public scene as a pioneer of protest music in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

He was perhaps best known as the author or co-author of the songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s. Seeger was also widely credited with popularizing the traditional song "We Shall Overcome", which was recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists, and became the publicly perceived anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement soon after musicologist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.