The Almanac Singers were an American New York City-based folk music group, active between 1940 and 1943, founded by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and were joined by Woody Guthrie. The group specialised in topical songs, mostly songs advocating an anti-war, anti-racism and pro-union philosophy. They were part of the Popular Front, an alliance of liberals and leftists, including the Communist Party USA (whose slogan, under their leader Earl Browder, was “Communism is twentieth century Americanism”), who had vowed to put aside their differences in order to fight fascism and promote racial and religious inclusiveness and workers’ rights. The Almanac Singers felt strongly that songs could help achieve these goals.
Cultural historian Michael Denning writes, “The base of the Popular Front was labour movement, the organisation of millions of industrial workers into the new unions of the CIO. For this was the age of the CIO, the years that one historian has called ‘the largest sustained surge of worker organisation in American history'”. “By the early 1940s,” he continues, “the CIO was dominated by new unions in the metalworking industries–the United Autoworkers, the United Steel Workers, and the United Electrical Workers–and ‘industrial unionism’ was not simply a kind of unionism but a kind of social reconstruction”. It is in the context of this social movement that the story of the Almanac Singers, which formed in early 1941, ought to be seen.
Ed Cray says that Hays and Seeger’s first paying gig was in January 1941 at a fund-raising benefit for Spanish Civil War Loyalists at the Jade Mountain restaurant in New York City. According to a 1965 interview with Lee Hays by Richard Reuss, Seeger, Hays, and Lampell sang at an American Youth Congress held at Turner’s Arena in Washington, D.C., in February 1941, at which sponsors had requested songs constructed around the slogan “Don’t Lend or Lease our Bases” and “Jim Crow must Go”. Shortly after this, they decided to call themselves the Almanacs. They chose the name because Lee Hays had said that back home in Arkansas farmers had only two books in their houses: the Bible, to guide and prepare them for life in the next world, and the Almanac, to tell them about conditions in this one.”
Performers who sang with the group at various times included Sis Cunningham, (John) Peter Hawes and his brother Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, Bess Lomax Hawes (wife of Butch and sister of Alan Lomax), Cisco Houston, Arthur Stern, Josh White, Jackie (Gibson) Alper, Burl Ives, (Hiram) Jaime Lowden and Sam Gary. They invented a driving, energetic performing style, based on what they felt was the best of American country string band music, black and white. They wore street clothes, which was unheard of in an era when entertainers routinely wore formal, night-club attire, and they invited the audience to join in the singing. The Almanacs had many gigs playing at parties, rallies, benefits, unions meetings, and informal “hootenannies”, a term Seeger and Guthrie learned on an Almanac tour of Portland and Washington. On May day of 1941, they entertained a rally of 20,000 striking transit workers in Madison Square Garden, where they introduced the song “Talking Union” and participated in a dramatic sketch with the young actress Carol Channing.
The Almanacs’ first record release, an album of three 78s called Songs for John Doe, written to protest the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Recorded in February or March 1941 and issued in May, it comprised four songs written by Millard Lampell and two by Seeger and Hays. The Almanac’s second album, Talking Union, also produced by Bernay, was a collection of six labour songs: “Union Maid”, “I Don’t Want Your Millions Mister”, “Get Thee Behind Me Satan”, “Union Train”, “Which Side Are You On?”, and the eponymous “Talking Union”. This album, issued in July 1941, was not anti-Roosevelt but was criticised in a review by Time magazine, nevertheless. It was reissued by Folkways in 1955 with additional songs and is still available today. The Almanacs also issued two albums of traditional folk songs with no political content in 1941: an album of sea shanties, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads (sea shanties, as was well known, being Franklin Roosevelt’s favourite kind of song) and Sod-Buster Ballads, which were songs of the pioneers. When the USA entered the European war after Germany’s post-Pearl Harbor declaration of war in December 1941, the Almanacs recorded a new topical album for Keynote in support of the war effort, Dear Mr. President, under the supervision of Earl Robinson, that included Woody Guthrie’s “Reuben James” (1942).
