“Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!”: The Writings of Lee Hays

Lee Hays (1914–1981) is remembered today as the bass singer of the Weavers, the popular folksinging quartet that included Pete Seeger and was blacklisted during the early years of the Cold War. Hays is especially well known for his collaborations with Seeger on a number of political songs, including “The Hammer Song,” and for his central role in producing Wasn’t That a Time!, the 1981 film documentary about the Weavers. But he was also a talented, multifaceted writer of prose. In “Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!,” Robert S. Koppelman brings together a selection of Hays’s published and unpublished literary output and places the author and his work in historical context. In these writings, Hays emerges as a learned, incisive, and witty advocate of a new aesthetic that he helped introduce to American culture–an aesthetic grounded in the music of both the Methodist Church of his family and the black churches of his Arkansas neighbors. Hays honed his participatory, inspirational musical style and his skills as a song leader while working in the Southern labor movement, where he became acquainted with the left-wing notion of “Art as a Weapon.” Yet as the autobiographical pieces in this collection make clear, it was not until he moved to New York City, teamed up with such iconic folk figures as Woody Guthrie and Seeger, and began performing before a mass public that he fully matured as a musical artist with a political message. In addition to documenting the trajectory of Hays’s career, the volume also includes samples of his well-crafted work as a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. Together these writings reveal Hays to be an artist of diverse personal talents and deep social commitment.