40 Facts About Lee Hays

Lee Elhardt Hays was an American folk singer and songwriter, best known for singing bass with the Weavers.

Lee Hays familiarized audiences with songs of the 1930s labor movement, such as "We Shall Not Be Moved".

Lee Hays was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the youngest of the four children of William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, who before her marriage had been a court stenographer.

William Hays's vocation of ministering to rural areas took him from parish to parish, so, as a child, Lee lived in several towns in Arkansas and Georgia.

Lee Hays learned to sing sacred harp music in his father's church.

Mrs Lee Hays taught her four children to type before they began learning penmanship in school, and all were excellent students.

In 1927, when Lee Hays was thirteen, his childhood came to an abrupt end as tragedy struck the family.

The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Lee Hays traveled alone to enroll at Hendrix-Henderson College in Arkansas, the Methodist school that his father and siblings had attended, but the expense of their mother's institutionalization and the effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 meant that college tuition money was not available for Lee.

In 1932, Lee Hays moved out of his brother's house into a room at the Cleveland YMCA, where he stayed for two years.

Lee Hays enrolled at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed.

Lee Hays moved in with Williams and his family: "I got to be his [Williams'] chief helper for quite a while", he later wrote.

Lee Hays's life was saved only because his activities attracted newspaper publicity and the attention of northerners.

Lee Hays dropped out of school in order to follow them, living on odd jobs for a time.

Lee Hays then went to visit Zilphia, who had married Myles Horton, a founder and the director of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education and labor organizing school in Monteagle, Tennessee.

Lee Hays decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.

Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Lee Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church.

Lee Hays compiled a 20-page songbook of union organizing songs based on hymns and spirituals.

Lee Hays was in charge of the sanitary facilities, and he kept it beautiful; he even put curtains up in the windows of the two-holer we had.

The German-born Lowenfels, a highly cultured man and a modernist poet who was fascinated by Walt Whitman and edited a book of his poetry, became another surrogate father to Lee Hays, influencing him deeply.

Under Lowenfels' influence, Lee Hays began to write modernist poems, one of which was published in Poetry Magazine in 1940.

Lee Hays had pieces based on Arkansas folklore published in The Nation.

Lee Hays was rejected from the Armed Forces because of a mild case of tuberculosis and he indeed felt sick all the time, missed performances, and developed a reputation for hypochondria.

Lee Hays wrote to friends, old and new, who he thought might be interested.

Lee Hays was the one with the sense of history, who tied it all together.

Lee Hays was the one who brought the sharecroppers in, and the union songs based on hymns.

Lee Hays thought in terms of events, history; he saw large, and that rubbed off on the rest of us.

Lee Hays was the philosopher of the folk music movement.

At a board meeting in late 1946, Pete Seeger proposed Lee Hays be replaced as executive secretary with energetic young friend of his, Felix Landau, whom Pete had met during his army days in Saipan.

Crushed, Lee Hays returned to Philadelphia to stay with Walter Lowenfels and family.

Lee Hays escaped in a car with Guthrie and Seeger after a mob claiming to be anti-communist patriots attacked the cars of audience and performers after the show.

Lee Hays wrote a song, "Hold the Line", about the experience, that the Weavers recorded on Charter records with Robeson and writer Howard Fast.

Lee Hays was denounced as a member of the Communist Party during testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities by Harvey Matusow, a former Communist Party member.

Subsequently, Hays liked to maintain that another entertainer, called Lee Hayes, spelled with an "e", was banned from entertaining because of the similarity of his name.

Lee Hays spent the blacklist years rooming with the family of fellow blacklist victim Earl Robinson, in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

Lee Hays wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the US and Britain.

In 1958, Lee Hays began recording a series of children's albums with the Baby Sitters, a group that included a young Alan Arkin, Earl Robinson's nephew.

Lee Hays wrote to a friend that in his new surroundings he had no idea how to earn new money but that, "Having a listed number with no fear of Trotskyite crank calls is a huge relief".

Lee Hays, who had always been overweight, had been diagnosed in 1960 with diabetes, a condition the doctors thought he had probably suffered from for many years previously.

Lee Hays died on August 26,1981, from diabetic cardiovascular disease at home in Croton, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were mixed with his compost pile.