The Almanac Singers
A shifting collective of topical singers based out of a Greenwich Village loft they called Almanac House, the group coalesced around Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell in early 1941, soon joined by Woody Guthrie. Performing in street clothes for union halls and picket lines rather than concert stages, they set labor and anti-fascist politics directly to traditional folk melodies on albums like 'Talking Union' and 'Songs for John Doe,' inventing an unpolished, audience-participation performing style with little precedent in American popular music. FBI and Army scrutiny scattered the group by 1943, but Seeger and Hays carried its songbook — and its conviction that a folk song could organize a room — directly into the Weavers six years later.
we haven’t charted The Almanac Singers yet
this stretch of the river isn’t mapped. we trace the watershed one artist at a time — and we’re always heading further upstream.