Songs Are Dangerous

Songs are dangerous. So said HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) in the 1950s, and its anti-communist investigators did their best to prevent us from being un-American in public. Nevertheless, the Weavers endured, and on November 28, 1980, at New York's Carnegie Hall, four aging Weavers waited to walk onstage for our first reunion concert in nineteen years, and presumably our last. Actually, only three of us would walk. Lee Hays, "the 'senior member' of the Weavers," as he liked to call himself, would roll on in a wheelchair. A double amputee with a bad heart, he was losing his long battle with diabetes. As we waited for the signal to go on, I wondered how the audience would handle the shock of seeing big Lee so cut down. And how would he, grinding his teeth, face and hair already wet with sweat, handle his key role as emcee?

Movie cameras rolled and the noise of wild welcome cheering and applause flared as we entered, but it gradually subsided as we crossed Carnegie's huge stage, wheeling Lee, a blanket covering his stumps, to his microphone behind a small table. The air was electric with anticipation. Then, in the silence, a familiar baritone voice, gravelly with disuse and age, announced: "Good evening, I'm Lee Hays ... more or less." A nanosecond of quiet, and then an explosion of cheers and laughs rocked the staid old auditorium. The tension evaporated. Onstage, backstage, and in the audience, we all settled down to enjoy the concert. The years had altered us: Pete with turkey neck and his hair almost gone, Fred with a full goatee and post-middle-age paunch, and me with my plus size 3X figure. But we were survivors, and we were there anyway. If I hadn't known that Lee would be annoyed and embarrassed, I would have said in public what I know we were all thinking: that Lee's appearance that night was the most valiant and generous act of his career. To which he might have replied, as he had to a showbiz promoter twenty-five years earlier: "Act? That was no act; that was the real thing!"

Family

I was born Ruth Alice Gilbert in September 1926 to Charles and Sarah Gilbert of Brooklyn, New York. I was a chubby, bookish child at a time when every mother imagined her darling to be the next Shirley Temple, and tap dancing lessons were practically obligatory. I loved the dancing, but it was the singing that I excelled at, and it soon became my path.

I trace my part as a "political" singer to a tradition my mother learned as a child laborer in pre–World War I Poland. Before she immigrated to America as a teenager to work in the dress factories of New York, the tradition of meetings and discussion groups, demonstrations, plays, poetry, and singing had already crossed the ocean and met its American counterpart in the songs, parodies, and street theater of the Wobblies and the American trade union movement. It was into that fine international stew that I was born.

PAUL ROBESON, 1936

One morning, my mother, Sarah, an activist International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union dressmaker, shook me awake.

"Get dressed, get dressed, we're going downtown to a rally."

"Oh no! Why do I have to go? It's Saturday. I want to go to the movies."

"No, Ruthie, you're coming with me today; it's something special."

The outdoor event was on Thirty-Eighth Street near Seventh Avenue, in the Manhattan garment district. I stood in the street, miserable, brooding over my mother's unfairness, jostling with grim-faced strangers for my space, and gritting my teeth at the incomprehensible speeches delivered from the back of a truck to applause and boos from the audience. I was just about to start complaining again when my mother grabbed my arm and pointed up toward the platform: "Look, Ruthie, look! There's Paul! Now! Now you're going to hear some real singing." It was as if someone had sprayed the crowd with a can of happiness. The somber faces disappeared. People shouted, cheered, laughed. A woman near us took off her gloves to sharpen her applause. I looked up to see a black man standing at the microphone smiling, taller and broader than everyone else on the platform. Finally, he leaned down to speak. Everyone hushed. "Comrades," he began with a voice so deep I felt a rumble in my chest. He said something about "my people and your people," and I looked at my mother for an explanation. She was fumbling for a handkerchief, her eyes full of tears.

Paul Robeson — actor, singing star, lawyer, football hero — in the garment district amid the short, pale, adoring, mostly Jewish garment workers! He cupped his hand behind his right ear and sang a song familiar from grade school music:

When Israel was in Egypt land, let my people go ... Oppressed so hard they could not stand, let my people go ...

The words wrenched at me as if I'd never heard them before, carried by the thrilling sound of his voice settling around us like a velvet carpet. Now I was full of questions: What's a pharaoh? Who were the firstborn? Why did Moses threaten to kill them? My mother and I talked all the way home on the rattling BMT subway. It was the first of our lifelong gabfests about politics, power, and songs.

MY PARENTS

"Silly, how can you grow up to be a cowboy? You're a girl," chided Mama. Satisfied at last with the latest hem on my old green party dress, she pulled out the remaining pins, bit off the thread, and steadied the rickety kitchen chair for me to jump down. "Women don't do such things," she threw in for good measure, and pulled the dress off over my head, muffling my retort. "They do too, Mommy, I saw in the movies!"

I remind Daddy to give me a dime to "go see the cowboys tomorrow."

"No! No movies," he said. "Do not ask me again!" He threw down his napkin and walked out of the kitchen.

"Why is Daddy mad at me? I was only reminding him tomorrow is Saturday."

"Don't pester," Mama said. "There's no money for foolish things. Daddy had no work again this week."

"A cyclical downturn of the market," Daddy's newspaper had said. "The worst depression in a decade." This particular cycle had wheeled us into a sandpit from which there seemed to be no getting out.

"If this country had socialism like in Russia ..." Mama had said several times.

"Do they have movies in Russia, Mommy — cowboys?"

"Silly, it's not about cowboys."

Because of the Depression, we were a family always on the move, looking for cheaper rent. I rarely spent a whole semester in the same school. In a move to Queens, we stayed still long enough for adventures with my neighbors the Flynn twins, Mary and John. One Saturday, Mrs. Flynn invited me to have lunch with them. She served us sandwiches with a thick layer of peanut butter and a thin line of red jam. I took a bite and started to chew, but then I...