WASN'T THAT A TIME!
Willens, Doris
Wasn't That a Time! LONESOME TRAVELER: The Life of Lee Hays by Doris Willens W.W. Norton. 281 pp. $17.95. Folk music fans who remember the Weavers from their glory days remember Lee Hays: He was...
...I started as a paragraph and worked my way up to page...
...I got most of my education reading books in the stacks of the public library where I was a page," he told Doris Willens when she was interviewing him for this biography...
...Folk music fans who remember the Weavers from their glory days remember Lee Hays: He was the large man with the great, rumbling voice and the whimsical Southern sense of humor...
...He started, in fact, as a Methodist minister's son in Arkansas and worked his way up to radical union organizer, song-smith, celebrity, and blacklisted performer in the witch-hunt years...
...with Walter Lowenfels), and "Lonesome Traveler...
...His shortcomings are honestly reported by Doris Willens, a neighbor, friend, and sometime collaborator who has, nonetheless, written a warm and affectionate book about a fascinating human being and his troubled times...
...In what may have been his finest hour, he told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, "I am proud that I have sung for every American, Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I'm proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity...
...Among those songs were "If I Had a Hammer" (written with Pete Seeger), "Wasn't That a Time...
...Hays was plagued by ill health, and his personal quirkiness and abrasiveness were sometimes hard to take—even by those who loved him...
Vol. 53 • March 1989 • No. 3
