Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays

By Doris Willens

Book Overview

During the Great Depression, Lee Hays, the son of a Southern Methodist minister, used his music to life the hearts of sharecroppers and miners and union organizers. He helped bring black music to America's consciousness. He could make people laugh in times when there seemed little to laugh about. An Arkansas traveler and radical minstrel, he commented wryly on events and impaled reactionary southern congressmen on their own words. A kind of Mark Twain of the left, people said. But Lee Hays, for all his great size and talents and humor, was also a difficult man, plagued by self-doubts and a driving need to discombobulate any person or group that struck him as self-satisfied. Lonesome Traveler is the story of a prodigious talent with a zeal for changing the world. With Pete Seeger he formed the popular folksinging group the Weavers, which sang songs of social justice just as a tidal wave of red-hunting hit America. The rest of his legendary story will anger, touch, and delight.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803297475
• ISBN13: 9780803297470
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

From Out of the Black(list)

This is a fine biography of a significant socio-politic-musical figure who was subsumed in the anti-Communist hysteria of the American 1940's and 50's. With Pete Seeger, Hays was a co-founder of two musical groups that were effectively blacklisted: the Almanac Singers (eventually joined by Woody Guthrie), and of the seminal folk-pop group The Weavers, whose hit recording of "Goodnight Irene" forever changed the relationship between folk music and popular culture. Hays himself is revealed as a complex and colorful man, of considerable musical and literary talent, personal flaws, and a blazing social conscience that propelled all his work and regularly made him a target of established political hierarchies. With ample excerpts of Hays' writing, photos from the period, and first-hand narrative (Hays roomed with the author's family, and performed with him as part of the "Babysitter's Quartet", which included then-folksinger-now-actor Alan Arkin) this book gives an entertaining and easy-to-appreciate portrait of a remarkable man. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into a period of important, still-difficult American history.