At a recent meeting of the League of American Writers, Theodore Dreiser heard Pete Bowers and Lee Hays, the Almanac Singers, sing ballads from their endless repertoire. When they had finished singing, Dreiser commented, “If there were six more teams like you, we could save America.”

Lee Hays, youthful ex-preacher and teacher (Commonwealth College), was born to an Arkansas family of whom he is not proud. “They were reactionaries," he said. He ran away from home at the age of 15; and he has since that time been associated with the workers of the South, labor unions, as well as peo­ple’s literary and musical organizations.

Pete Bowers, who prepared for college at a Connecticut Preparatory School, and attended Harvard, developed an interest in the people’s music and has for the last two years been traveling through all sections of the country learning the songs that America sings.

Bowers and Hays are the performers. But actually they are two of a trio. The third member of the group is Millard Lampell, born in West Virginia, now doing magazine work in New York. The group has recently completed a book of songs which it has prepared for the American Peace Mobilization. They are songs of labor, songs of social protest, songs of satire. They use the tradi­tional ballad and hymn forms, and to the established music they add topical lyrics, such as:

Remember when the AAA
Killed a million hogs a day;
Instead of hogs it’s men today
PLOW THE FOURTH ONE UNDER!

The Almanac Singers make it a point not to be an exclusive writing group; anyone who has an idea for them will be heard and the idea will be used if it is good.

For the most part they use ballads. But they are also engaged in writing original words and music. In addition they parody such old songs as “Billy Boy:”

Don’t you want to see the world, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Don’t you want to see the world, Charming Billy?
It wouldn’t be much thrill to die for DuPont in Brazil
He’s a young boy and cannot leave his mother.

In a foreword to their book for the APM they say, "Write new songs of your own and parodies and poetry, and sing them so loudly that all the warmongers and native fascists and enemies of peace will hear you and tremble in their counting houses."

“We are in the peace army. Remember that a singing army is a winning army.”

Hays, Bowers and Lampell have a lot to say about the way ballads should be sung. Ballads, they contend, are the people’s expression. Pete Bowers told the Writers League meeting the other night that the ballad is that form which the people use to express themselves, just as writers express themselves in writing. The folk song is the medium which was created to compensate for books which are prohibitive for economic reasons.

Lee Hays proved this by a case he cited. He told how he ran across a group of Negroes in Natchez who formed a “literary guild” at which they read their own writings – poetry and prose. Hays came along and sang them some folk songs. Because of their lack of literary training and because books have been, and are completely inaccessible to the Mississippi Negro, they felt a more thorough outlet in the folk song and ballad than they did in their attempts at writing. In response to their enthusiasm, Hays started a sing­ing school; his students’ enthusiasm, however, was far from equaled among the forces of reaction and the school was disbanded, Hays being personally escorted out of town.

At the present time the group has many plans. They are moving to a large apartment so that they can have ballad evenings, there is a project afoot for the opening of classes in the techniques of ballad writing, and there is the possibility that they may make an album of records. This Friday evening they will be heard in a program of ballads sponsored by the Seven Arts Guild at the Malin Studio Theatre, 135 W. 44th St.

They are not a part of the current ballad fad; they feel a definite responsibility for the cultural and political standards of their work; and toward the end of creating valid material they have made thorough analytical studies of the source of a people’s culture as it is found in all contemporary forms of proletarian expression. As they say, there is a tremendous significance in the fact that their audiences repeatedly call for “Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?” and “Joe Hill.” Audiences want this form of music, but there too few examples among which they can choose. The Almanac Singers hope to provide a larger repertoire for all ballad singers. Their task is to write ballads that grow out of the immediacy of our problems today, rather than to repeat performances of those songs which have, to be sure, solid historical connotations, but nevertheless are “standards” and have lost much of their meanings today.

The Almanac Singers and Woody Guthrie have gathered the material for a book which Lee Hays describes as “the best documented ballad history of hard-hitting songs by hard-hit people.” Woody, in a letter to Pete Bowers, sums up the need for such ballads and boys who sing them — and he sums it up as only Woody can: “The biggest parts of our song collection are aimed at restoring the right amount of people to the right amount of land and the right amount of houses over the right amount of kids and the right amount of groceries in the right amount of working folks.”

And if ballads will do that, just go ahead, boys.

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