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Red, White & Blacklisted

A Posthumorous Memoir of Lee Hays

This story is Hays’ personal perspective on some of the most precarious years in America’s history. The legendary curmudgeon and skilled folksinger grew up among the desperately poor of rural Arkansas, produced a documentary about sharecroppers at the age of 23 (in the middle of the depression), co-founded the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, and then The Weavers with Pete Seeger.  He left a rich legacy of empty booze bottles as well as iconic songs, rousing political essays, poems, porn, Ellery Queen Mysteries, and even romance novels.  It turns out the politics of fear and intimidation, so effectively a part of our political landscape today, had another heyday in the last century.  We ignore the past at the risk of our future.