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Carregando... Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays (1988)de Doris Willens
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. 1   waltzmn | Mar 6, 2021 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
During the Great Depression, Lee Hays, the son of a Southern Methodist minister, used his music to life the hearts of sharecroppers and miners and union organizers. He helped bring black music to America's consciousness. He could make people laugh in times when there seemed little to laugh about. An Arkansas traveler and radical minstrel, he commented wryly on events and impaled reactionary southern congressmen on their own words. A kind of Mark Twain of the left, people said. But Lee Hays, for all his great size and talents and humor, was also a difficult man, plagued by self-doubts and a driving need to discombobulate any person or group that struck him as self-satisfied. nbsp; Lonesome Traveler is the story of a prodigious talent with a zeal for changing the world. With Pete Seeger he formed the popular folksinging group the Weavers, which sang songs of social justice just as a tidal wave of red-hunting hit America. The rest of his legendary story will anger, touch, and delight. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)784.4The arts Music Instruments and instrumental ensembles and their music [formerly: Voice and vocal music] Folk songsClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.5)
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Every biography of course has to answer that question about its subject. But it is perhaps harder in the case of Hays, preacher's kid, orphan, Almanac Singer, Weaver, Old Man of the Mountain. The problem is that his part in The Weavers, the most popular folk music group to come along prior to at least 1957, overshadowed his life -- even after they broke up. For thirty years, he was Lee Hays of The Weavers, which makes him easy to recognize but hard to know.
This book tries. It gives the basics, covering his life from his early years in Arkansas to his final vegetation in the New York countryside, where he took in young people (I know one of those young men, quoted in the book, whose first album was blurbed by Hays), slowly lost body parts to diabetes, and eventually returned to his own compost heap.
But Hays was a very strange man. Why did he never finish anything? Why wouldn't he work? Why did he grumble about everything but never try to fix the problem? Why did he never marry, or seeming seek any sort of familial relationship with anyone of either gender? Hays was bitingly witty, quite inventive, an undeniable original -- but he was his own worst enemy. Why?
And who was he outside the context of The Weavers, and of Pete Seeger, who are almost as omnipresent in the last half of the book as is Hays himself?
I don't know the answer, and I can't guess. I suppose I can't expect Doris Willens, who knew him well but clearly wasn't a psychologist, to solve it either. But the question hangs over this entire book. Willens sort of handwaves at the diabetes that eventually killed him -- but even if he had that in his twenties (which is far from certain), his problems weren't physical; they were with his ability to get himself in harness. It's a good, interesting, readable, if slightly unfocused volume. But it doesn't feel like a biography -- that is, something that writes down a person's life. It's more like a photo essay (even though there are only a few photos), showing what Hays did, but without much explanation why. (