12/18/2023 0 Comments Weavers wimoweh![]() ![]() On the other hand, there was an undeniably glee-club quality to the Weavers' singing that tended to bleach the dramatic shadows out of their material. If only for their historical impact, the songs on this boxed set are important. ![]() Weavers' songs such as "Wimoweh," "If I Had a Hammer," "Guantanamera," and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" have been recorded by everyone from R.E.M. On the one hand, their polished vocal harmonies created a vast new audience for folk music and created the opening for the early '60s folk movement of such Weavers' heirs as the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs. The group's popularizing tendencies were both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. The Weavers' new four-CD boxed set, "Wasn't That a Time" (Vanguard), begins with eight of those early 78s for Decca Records and then offers 79 more songs from their later recordings for Vanguard. In fact, their version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" was the No. The quartet took songs by a black Louisiana convict, a Palestinian Zionist, a Dust Bowl socialist and an anonymous Zulu troubador and turned them into pop hits between 1950 and '52. Back in 1950, going pop didn't mean plugging in electric guitars but adding big-band charts by Frank Sinatra's future arranger Gordon Jenkins. Dylan, after all, was doing the same thing Seeger had done 15 years earlier with the Weavers: lending contemporary pop arrangements to folk music. IT'S RICHLY ironic that Pete Seeger threatened to axe the wires when Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
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