Wimoweh weavers free#
To hear a free Sound Bite from this boxed set, call 202/334-9000 and press 8136.The song that topped the Billboard pop chart on December 18, 1961, was an instant classic that went on to become one of the most successful pop songs of all time, yet its true originator saw only a tiny fraction of the song’s enormous profits. THE WEAVERS - "Wasn't That a Time" (Vanguard). The boxed set covers all these phases, but it wisely emphasizes the live performances, where the group's humor and charisma were most apparent. The Weavers called it quits in '63 but got together for two last Carnegie Hall concerts in '80. When Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Seeger were reunited for a concert at Carnegie Hall in '55, it proved so successful that the group was revived. With nowhere to work, the group broke up in '53. Falsely accused of being Communist Party members, the Weavers went from chart-toppers to unemployables in less time than Vanilla Ice. Perhaps the richest irony is that this diluted brand of folk-pop made the Weavers the only musicians blacklisted during the right wing's McCarthy Era. If the Weavers' versions of songs by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, Blind Blake and Merle Travis are more accessible than the originals, those bouncily cheerful renditions are also more quickly exhausted.
On the other hand, there was an undeniably glee-club quality to the Weavers' singing that tended to bleach the dramatic shadows out of their material. If only for their historical impact, the songs on this boxed set are important. Weavers' songs such as "Wimoweh," "If I Had a Hammer," "Guantanamera," and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" have been recorded by everyone from R.E.M. On the one hand, their polished vocal harmonies created a vast new audience for folk music and created the opening for the early '60s folk movement of such Weavers' heirs as the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs. The group's popularizing tendencies were both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. The Weavers' new four-CD boxed set, "Wasn't That a Time" (Vanguard), begins with eight of those early 78s for Decca Records and then offers 79 more songs from their later recordings for Vanguard. In fact, their version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" was the No. The quartet took songs by a black Louisiana convict, a Palestinian Zionist, a Dust Bowl socialist and an anonymous Zulu troubador and turned them into pop hits between 1950 and '52. Back in 1950, going pop didn't mean plugging in electric guitars but adding big-band charts by Frank Sinatra's future arranger Gordon Jenkins. Dylan, after all, was doing the same thing Seeger had done 15 years earlier with the Weavers: lending contemporary pop arrangements to folk music. IT'S RICHLY ironic that Pete Seeger threatened to axe the wires when Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
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