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"Some Kind Of Socialist:" Lee Hays, The Social Gospel, And The Path To The Cultural Front, Elizabeth Withey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1939, with sixty-five dollars and twenty pages of Commonwealth Labor songs, Lee Hays, youngest son of a Methodist minister, hitchhiked thirteen hundred miles from Mena, Arkansas, to New York City where he found stardom in the Folk Revival movement, first, as a founder of the Almanac Singers then the Weavers. Hays’ biographer Doris Willens and others, viewing Hays’ unabashed socialism, ribald humor, penchant for beer, brandy, and cigarettes as induced by the childhood trauma of his father’s death, argue Hays rejected his father’s beliefs: replacing religion with radical politics. This thesis, in contrast, argues Hays’ upbringing immersed in contradictions …