In recent years, musical tributes, from Elvis imitators to innumerable Grateful Dead cover bands, have become a common part of our cultural landscape. But the idea of mounting a musical tribute to a folk quartet called the Weavers seems, on the surface, like a dubious proposition.
It has been 51 years since the Weavers first began performing their unique blend of folk music in New York City nightclubs. There wasn’t a matinee idol in the bunch, and Pete Seeger, who left the group in 1955, is the only member who could be considered a household word. Nonetheless, Weavermania, a revue put together by four of Chicago’s best acoustic musicians, Michael Smith, Barbara Barrow, Mark Dvorak and Tom Dundee, is a successful show that captures both the feel and the sound of the Weavers’ performances.
Barrow and Smith conceived the idea of a Weavers tribute back in the mid-1980s. The project was put on hold when Smith became the composer and in-house musician for Steppenwolf Theatre’s successful adaptation of the “Grapes of Wrath,” and it was well over a decade, and two aborted attempts later, when the duo finally hooked up with Dvorak and Dundee to form the current group.
In between their busy individual schedules, the quartet has played a handful of local shows, most recently last Saturday night at the College of DuPage’s McAninch Arts Center. To a packed, and very responsive house, the quartet played two hour-long sets comprising material written or first popularized by the Weavers.
In an interview, Smith explained why the Weavers, who broke up in the mid-’60s, are relevant to today’s audiences. “They had really good taste in selecting their songs, and they were the first ones to bring a lot of these songs to people’s consciousness. `Wimoweh,’ `Rock Island Line,’ `Michael Row the Boat Ashore,’ `Lonesome Traveler,’ `On Top of Old Smoky’ — these are songs that nobody ever heard before the Weavers made them popular.”
The Weavers came together in 1949, when banjo virtuoso and politically outspoken singer Pete Singer and the deep-voiced Lee Hays, who had played together in the Almanac Singers, were joined by singer Ronnie Gilbert and guitarist Fred Hellerman, whose jazz background further distinguished the group’s instrumental complexity.
Although their initial audition for Decca records was a flop, they were heard by bandleader Gordon Jenkins, who recorded two tracks with his band backing the Weavers. That initial recording was a rare two-sided hit, with the Israeli dance tune “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” reaching No. 2 and the flip side, the band’s trademark rendition of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene,” topping the charts for 12 weeks.
But the Weavers made no bones about their political affiliations, a fact that worked against them in the McCarthy-driven hysteria of the postwar years. Seeger was a member of the Communist Party from 1942 to 1950 and traveled with progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace during his 1948 campaign. When the Weavers had their first hits, they were identified as communist sympathizers by an article in the conservative publication “Aware.” This notoriety led to cancellation of a planned television series, loss of most of their nightclub engagements and their virtual disappearance from the radio.
Ironically, as Smith noted, the Weavers’ trials ultimately brought the group even greater popularity.
“The Weavers had an audience that would follow them anywhere,” Smith said. “The blacklist put them in the situation where they had to figure out a way to make a living, and the nightclubs wouldn’t hire them, so they started doing concerts, and suddenly they were one of the first folk groups playing at Carnegie Hall or Town Hall.”
“They also wrote songs like `Wasn’t That a Time,’ `Lonesome Traveler’ and `If I Had a Hammer.’ They delivered the songs with arrangements that socked it to you,” Smith continued. “Their sound, their arrangements and their choice of songs never get old. It’s like `Greensleves’ or something. There are some songs that maintain their value and their power over time.”
Dvorak noted that the band also anticipated the world music phenomenon by four decades. “One of the things that made the Weavers so popular was that they did something that hardly anyone else has done, in that they took traditional music from different cultures, different countries, and brought it to popular consciousness.”
Smith noted that this was not a particularly safe career move in postwar America. “When I first went to see the Weavers there was this tension that had to do with anything outside of America. In the ’50s there was this feeling that the rest of the world was really dangerous, and the Weavers would come along and say, `Here’s a little tune from Israel or Africa.'”
Beset by a combination of financial and personal struggles, the Weavers disbanded in 1952, but reunited in 1955 and, although Seeger left in 1958, the group continued until 1963. They played their last reunion show in 1980, the year before Hays died. The remaining Weavers are still around, although Seeger, Gilbert and Hellerman are essentially retired.
But their legacy lives on, as Dundee has seen firsthand. “The first concert we played, I noticed a couple of 11- to 14-year-old kids. My impression was that their parents or grandparents had dragged them along, and that they wouldn’t dig it at all. After a few songs I noticed them swaying back and forth and singing the words. The next concert we did, it was the same thing. After about three concerts, it dawned on me. The last CD these kids bought may have been Nine Inch Nails, but last summer at camp they sang `This Land is Your Land’ and `Michael Row the Boat Ashore,’ and it is pertinent music in their lives today.”
For Weavermania, the four musicians assume the musical identities of specific band members. Barrow sings Gilbert’s parts, while Dundee plays guitar and sings Hellerman’s lines. Smith, who originally planned to take the Hellerman role, now sings Hays’ booming bass parts, while Dvorak, a masterful clawhammer banjo player and commanding vocalist, recaptures the music of three successive Weavers: Seeger, banjo player Eric Darling, who brought his bluegrass influences to the group between 1958 and 1963, and Frank Hamilton, who joined the group after founding the Old Town School of Folk Music.
At the Saturday show, the group played most of the Weavers’ hits, and indeed much of the audience joined in, reprising a phenomenon Smith first experienced when he saw the Weavers in the early ’60s. “I was probably 19, and they came out, and from the first note, the audience started singing, and I was really annoyed! I wanted to hear the Weavers. But it came clear that the audience was excited about filling the room with sound. There was something about just being in the room with those people that we wanted to try to re-create, because you don’t have that experience anymore.”
The four musicians in Weavermania do a creditable job of capturing the driveof the original group.
The members of Weavermania are now talking to Peter Glaser, who wrote the play “Woody Guthrie, an American Song” and worked with Smith on his one-man show, “Michael, Margaret, Pat and Kate,” about expanding the revue into a theatrical program. And at the group’s next shows, a pair of dates at the Old Town School on May 12, they will be joined by a real Weaver, Hamilton, still an active performer now living in Atlanta.
