ABSTRACT
Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and their friends greeted the coming postwar world with a general feeling of relief and optimism, yet tinged with anxiety. With fascism defeated, there now appeared the chance to return to their progressive political agenda: supporting labor unions, fi ghting racism and promoting civil rights, advocating world peace, and the myriad other small issues, such as raising wages (which had been essentially frozen during the war), controlling housing prices, and the like. Th ey also believed that music could play a role in these eff orts. On December 31, 1945, Seeger invited a group of friends to his in-laws’ house in Greenwich Village to launch a new organization, to be called People’s Songs. Th e gathering included Lee Hays, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly, and numerous others. “Th e reason for People’s Songs is to shoot your union the kind of a song or songs when you want it and fast,” Woody explained. “To help you to make a songbook, a program, a throwaway songsheet, a whole evening. … Unless we do hear the work songs, war songs, and love songs, dance songs of all the people everywhere we are most apt to lose the peace and this world along with it.” Woody became one of the original thirty-three members of the advisory committee, but soon was elevated to the smaller national board of directors.1
