![]() ![]() Jenkins started out arranging for Benny Goodman before scoring a huge hit in his own right with, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” an appalling piece of crap. One such figure was Gordon Jenkins, a sallow jazz cat with a gigolo’s mustache and a matinee idol’s greased-back hairstyle. Six months passed, and the Weavers were still at the Vanguard, drawing sellout crowds, including the odd refugee from the swell supper clubs of Times Square. What they failed to grasp was that Seeger and his comrades had managed to filter the stench of poverty and pig shit out of the proletarian music and make it wholesome and fun for Eisenhower-era squares. The Weavers’ appeal was inexplicable to folk purists, who noted that most of their songs had been around forever, in obscure versions by blacks and rednecks who never had hits anywhere. The gig was extended for a month, and then another. The pay was $200 a week plus free hamburgers, and the booking was for two weeks only, but something unexpected happened: Crowds started coming. He even allowed his wife to outfit the band in matching corduroy jackets, a hitherto-unimaginable concession to showbiz, when they landed a gig at the Village Vanguard. He toned down his politics, excised references to dark sexual lusts from Leadbelly standards, and threw some hokey cowboy songs into the mix. This was no great achievement, given that the Weavers’ repertoire was full of dreck like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Greensleeves.” Pete will admit no such thing, but one senses he was growing tired of cold-water flats and wanted a proper career, as befitting a thirtysomething father of two. Later he taught “Wimoweh” to the rest of his band, the Weavers, and it became, he says, “just about my favorite song to sing for the next forty years.” The Zulus were chanting, “Uyimbube, uyimbube,” but to Pete it sounded like, awimboowee or maybe awimoweh, so that’s how he wrote it down. ![]() “Golly,” he said, “I can sing that.” So he got out pen and paper and started transcribing the song, but he couldn’t catch the words through all the hissing on the disk. Later he taught “Wimoweh” to the rest of … the Weavers, and it became, he says, “just about my favorite song to sing for the next forty years.” To Pete it sounded like, awimboowee or maybe awimoweh, so that’s how he wrote it down. He was fascinated – there was something catchy about the underlying chant, and that wild, skirling falsetto was amazing. Pete put it on his old Victrola and sat back. They were about to be thrown away when Lomax intervened, thinking, “God, Pete’s the man for these.”Īnd here they were: ten shellac 78s, one of which said “Mbube” on its label. Alan was presently working for Decca, where he’d just rescued a package of 78s sent from Africa by a record company in the vain hope that someone might want to release them in America. Alan and his dad, John, were already famous for their song-collecting forays into the parallel universe of rural black America, where they’d discovered giants like Muddy Waters and Leadbelly. It wasn’t particularly glorious, the money was rotten, and on top of that, he was sick in bed with a bad cold.Ĭame a knock on the door, and, lo, there stood his friend Alan Lomax, later to be hailed as the father of world music. Discharged in ’45, he returned to New York and got a gig of sorts in the public school system, teaching toddlers to warble the half-forgotten folk songs of their American heritage. After that it was into uniform and off to the front, where Pete played the banjo for bored GIs. ![]() Scenting a capitalist plot to destroy the brave Soviet socialist experiment, Pete and Woody turned gung-ho overnight and started writing anti-Nazi war songs, an episode that made them briefly famous. He was also a pacifist, at least until Hitler invaded Russia.
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