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THE COMMUNIST FOLK SINGERS WHO SHAPED BOB DYLAN  
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Taylor Dorrell
March 5, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, he was a disciple of Woody Guthrie.
But Guthrie and his contemporaries were more than folk singers —
they were blacklisted radicals, shaping American music while staring
down the Red Scare. _

An album cover shows Woody Guthrie (far left) and Pete Seeger (second
from right) performing with the Almanac Singers.,

 

In 1960, a young Robert Zimmerman — who had begun to call himself
“Bob Dylan” — journeyed from the icy flatlands of Minnesota to
New Jersey on a pilgrimage. His destination: the bedside of his ailing
idol, the legendary folk hero, Woody Guthrie. He was obsessed with
Woody, or rather, with the mythic figure Guthrie created in his
memoir, _Bound for Glory_. The book painted Guthrie as a
train-hopping folk troubadour singing for hobo camps, union halls, and
saloons, armed with nothing but a guitar and harmonica. Biographer
Clinton Heylin described
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at this time as being fully immersed in his “Guthrie phase.”

_A Complete Unknown, _inspired by _Dylan Goes Electric _by Elijah
Wald_,_ has brought Dylan back into the limelight. However, its
depiction of his story glosses over a key historical fact: both Pete
Seeger and Woody Guthrie — central figures in Dylan’s career and
the film’s narrative — were communists. Given the limits of what a
film can capture, it’s worth revisiting the time before _A Complete
Unknown_ to see what shaped Dylan’s early influences.

When Seeger and Guthrie Sang for Their Lives

“I’m not sure if these guys are going to try and break up this
meeting or not,” Robert Wood confessed
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Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, his eyes fixed on the row of men lined
up at the back of the union hall. It was 1940, and the Mid-Continent
Refinery strike
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dragged on for over a year, its violence flaring in bombings,
shootings, and even acid attacks. The hall that day held sixty weary
workers and their families, huddled under the harsh gaze of the men in
the back — whose allegiance, whether to the police, the National
Guard, or the oil company, remained an open question.

Seeger and Guthrie had only recently met, but when Guthrie invited the
young musician on a road trip to Texas, Seeger jumped at the chance.
They both shared the belief that socialism and folk music were
intertwined, that their revolutionary aims were best expressed through
the authenticity of folk music. Seeger later claimed
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a 1956 sealed letter to his grandchildren that “being a communist
has helped me, I believe, to be a better singer and folklorist, and a
more selfless citizen.”

What transpired on that road trip is the stuff of legend. They played
music in bars to raise money for gas, they picked up curious
hitchhikers (including a man with no legs named Brooklyn Speedy), and,
on more than one occasion, narrowly avoided jail.

When they reached Oklahoma, Woody contacted the local Communist Party,
which sent party organizers Robert and Ina Wood to escort them. The
Woods set up a kind of miniature tour, bringing them to sing for
impoverished residents of Hooverville, the unemployed Workers
Alliance, and the striking oil workers. It was the beginning of a
lifelong friendship and collaboration — but at the time, it was
unclear whether this stop would end in their arrest or something far
worse.

That night in the union hall, as tensions in the hall threatened to
erupt, Robert Wood had a novel idea to defuse the situation. “See if
you can get the whole crowd singing,” he instructed
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and Seeger.

Neither was entirely confident they could play the role of
peacekeepers. Seeger, just twenty-two, was still more of a fan than a
collaborator with the then-little-known yet widely respected Woody
Guthrie. They were also, in many ways, opposites. Guthrie was short,
blunt, orphaned young, and spent his early years hopping trains and
singing in saloons. Seeger, by contrast, was tall, soft-spoken, a
Harvard dropout, and wholly unfamiliar with train-hopping. Yet despite
their differences, the two shared a deep commitment to music and
politics, viewing folk music as the voice of America’s
contradictions — its beauty and tragedy, its diversity and
struggles. United in their opposition to capitalism’s harsh
realities, they both saw in the Communist Party a vision of a more
just and equal society.

Seeger had been a member of the Young Communist League at Harvard
before, in his words
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he “graduated to the Communist Party.” Guthrie had been thrust
into party-related struggles
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his California radio show — Guthrie’s first booking agent, Ed
Robbin, was both the host of the show before his and an editor
at _People’s World,_ the Communist Party’s West Coast newspaper.
Guthrie would come to write a daily column for the paper, called
“Woody Sez
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As artists, they sought to embody communist writer Mike Gold’s
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of a “Shakespeare in overalls” — a cultural voice for the
era’s social struggles.

That night in the union hall, those struggles were on full display.
Anyone present would have seen the stark shift in the atmosphere when
Guthrie and Seeger pulled out their instruments. As the unwelcome
guests in the back surveyed the room, all of the workers and their
families started to sing. Even if for only a moment, the tensions were
lifted.

“Perhaps it was the presence of so many women and children that
deterred them,” Seeger later reflected. “Or perhaps it was the
singing.”

The Almanac House

Perhaps it was the singing that led, later that year, to Ina and
Robert Wood being arrested in their shop, the Progressive Bookstore.
They were sentenced to ten years’
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for violating the Criminal Syndicalism Act. It was illegal, according
to the act, to sell books that advocated for criminal syndicalism or
sabotage. Among the supposedly subversive titles in question were
works like the US Constitution, the Bible, and Carl Van Doren’s
biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Oklahoma’s Red Scare in 1940 ushered in an early statewide
blacklist, forcing another radical Oklahoma musician, Agnes “Sis”
Cunningham, to flee to New York. A member of the left-wing theater
group, the Red Dust Players, Cunningham had drawn the attention of the
FBI, which described her
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“very active with the Communist element.”

Pete Seeger was busy with paperwork when Sis Cunningham and her
husband Gordon Friesen arrived at the Almanac House — the Greenwich
Village apartment where the term “hootenanny” was first used to
describe an impromptu folk performance. (Sunday night hootenannies
also helped cover their rent.) Seeger jumped up to give a bright
welcome and introduced them to Lee Hays, who was absorbed with turning
a pair of spoons into a musical instrument, and a shaggy-haired
guitar-playing Oklahoman: Woody Guthrie. Cunningham and Friesen soon
moved in and Sis, an accordion player, became a central member of the
group.

Not long after their fateful Oklahoma tour, Guthrie and Seeger had
joined forces in New York City, where the Almanac House became part of
an urban commune of left-wing folk singers. It was a hodgepodge of
musicians, radicals, and drifters united by two things: music and a
vision for a better world.

Here Guthrie’s ragged storytelling met Seeger’s polished
musicianship. They wrote and performed songs that captured the
struggles of ordinary people, from coal miners to sharecroppers,
releasing albums steeped in the language of class struggle.

The Almanac Singers were unapologetically political. Their songs often
followed “the Party line,” shifting from anti-fascist anthems to
isolationist “peace songs” during the brief period of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — then back to fighting the fascists after
the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Critics have painted this
political pivot as naive or opportunistic, but for Guthrie, Seeger,
and their comrades, these shifts reflected the urgency of their time.

As Seeger later explained in a 2006 interview
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the UK and the United States had tolerated Adolf Hitler, hoping he’d
attack the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin disrupted their plans by
signing a nonaggression pact, temporarily upending that expectation.
Communists had long fought fascism in Spain, Germany, and Italy,
urging the League of Nations to act, but viewed the war as imperialist
until the Nazis invaded the USSR. This completely transformed the
conflict into an attack on socialism, prompting Woody to tell Pete
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“I guess we’re not singing peace songs anymore.”

The Almanac Singers were famous — at least in the pages of
the _Daily Worker_. Columnist Mike Gold, an early supporter, saw in
them something more inspiring than the Composers’ Collective
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“In the _Daily Worker_, we were famous,” Seeger said in
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“unknown elsewhere.” But they laid the groundwork for what was to
come.

The First Musicians to Get Canceled Were Communists

In 1950, the Weavers’ song “Goodnight, Irene” was number one on
the jukebox. By 1951, their hits — “Tzena,” “Kisses Sweeter
Than Wine,” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” — were
everywhere. These songs, arranged with gentle strings, flutes, and
slow tempos, offered a polished, radio-friendly version of folk. No
folk group in New York’s music scene had reached such heights.

But their fame was short-lived. One of their members, Pete Seeger, was
the only musician named in _Red Channels_, the infamous 1950 booklet
alleging communist ties among cultural figures. With the FBI backing
the blacklist, the Weavers became the first musical act to be truly
“canceled” in the modern-day sense. Their television spots were
scrapped, their concerts — including one at the Ohio State Fair —
terminated. (Ohio governor Frank Lausche personally received
confidential FBI documents straight from J. Edgar Hoover before
canceling their performance, though the decision came so fast that
their names still appeared in the programs.) _Variety_ noted
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were “the first group canceled out of a New York cafe because of
alleged left-wing affiliations.”

Seeger’s defiance only deepened his troubles. When he testified
before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955,
Seeger refused to plead the Fifth or to name names. Instead, he
challenged the committee’s very authority to interrogate Americans
about their beliefs, implicitly citing the First Amendment. As a
result, he was labeled
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“unfriendly witness.” By then, the blacklisting had curtailed the
careers of the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, and Seeger himself. In
1956, he was cited for contempt of Congress along with Arthur Miller
and Albert Einstein’s good friend, Dr Otto Nathan
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Woody Guthrie never achieved the Weavers’ level of fame — and was
never named in _Red Channels_. While the spirit of the nation was
stifled by anti-communist trials, Woody’s health began to
deteriorate. He followed in his parents’ footsteps — developing
Huntington’s disease like his mother and, in a tragic echo of his
father, accidentally catching on fire. The burns on his right arm and
hand left them unusable. Soon he was in and out of hospitals — until
one day, he was in for good.

Despite the repression, Seeger remained defiant and looked back on
this time fondly. “I thrived on it,” he later reflected
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His music had been seen by the most powerful government in the world
as a weapon worthy of disarming.

A Struggle and a Song

Although Seeger found an audience later in life, he never fully
escaped the crosshairs of anti-communism. He was blacklisted from the
TV show _Hootenanny_ and was vilified for visiting North Vietnam
during the Vietnam War — though figures like Johnny Cash stuck up
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calling him “one of the best Americans and patriots I’ve ever
known.“ He also stood alongside the younger wave of folk singers who
made their way South to support the civil rights actions taking place
throughout the 1960s.

Their story is more than a footnote in Bob Dylan’s life. The author
of _Dylan Goes Electric_, Elijah Wald, wrote in a since-deleted
Facebook post that _A Complete Unknown_ “shortchanges both the
humor and the political commitment of that world.” Dylan’s legacy
is complex, and flattening the biggest influences of his early career
does it no favors.

Folk music, for Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, was never just music
— it was memory, resistance, and a reminder that even in the
harshest of times, the simplest songs can still carry the weight of a
better world. Writing about
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posed a question: “Where are we all heading who have bet our lives
on democracies? Who can say?” He found the answer in Guthrie’s
“harsh and painful” songs — songs that “reek of poverty and
genuine dirt and suffering.” “Democracy is like that,” he wrote,
“and it is a struggle and a song.”

Perhaps it’s time for a new “Guthrie phase” — to pick up our
machines against fascism, like the communist folk singers once did,
and dare to imagine a new world.

_Taylor Dorrell is a writer and photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
He’s a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, a
reporter for the Columbus Free Press, and a freelance photographer._

_Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today.
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* Bob Dylan
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* Woody Guthrie
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* Pete Seeger
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* The Almanac Singers
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* Communists
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