Featuring one half of The Almanac Singers, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, The Weavers built on this legacy and quickly found themselves the subjects of surveillance by the FBI as the McCarthy witch hunts took hold across the US. However, the songs’ early 50s folk-pop ambience is hard to square with The Weavers’ history as political activists whom the FBI viewed with great suspicion. But they certainly were under surveillance, so much so that they called it a day in 1952, by which time Decca could no longer get Weavers records into the stores or on the radio, despite the group having had 13 weeks at No 1 with their cover of Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene.
This 22-track compilation of material recorded for Decca during 1950-52 includes covers of songs by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and others, including the forementioned Goodnight Irene, So Long (It’s Been Good To Know Yuh), Wimoweh, and the collection’s title track which, when taken together, confirms The Weavers’ place in history as important precursors to the folk revival and the Greenwich Village scene in particular.
