Doris Willens

Who was Lee Hays?

Every biography of course has to answer that question about its subject. But it is perhaps harder in the case of Hays, preacher's kid, orphan, Almanac Singer, Weaver, Old Man of the Mountain. The problem is that his part in The Weavers, the most popular folk music group to come along prior to at least 1957, overshadowed his life -- even after they broke up. For thirty years, he was Lee Hays of The Weavers, which makes him easy to recognize but hard to know.

This book tries. It gives the basics, covering his life from his early years in Arkansas to his final vegetation in the New York countryside, where he took in young people (I know one of those young men, quoted in the book, whose first album was blurbed by Hays), slowly lost body parts to diabetes, and eventually returned to his own compost heap.

But Hays was a very strange man. Why did he never finish anything? Why wouldn't he work? Why did he grumble about everything but never try to fix the problem? Why did he never marry, or seeming seek any sort of familial relationship with anyone of either gender? Hays was bitingly witty, quite inventive, an undeniable original -- but he was his own worst enemy. Why?

And who was he outside the context of The Weavers, and of Pete Seeger, who are almost as omnipresent in the last half of the book as is Hays himself?

I don't know the answer, and I can't guess. I suppose I can't expect Doris Willens, who knew him well but clearly wasn't a psychologist, to solve it either. But the question hangs over this entire book. Willens sort of handwaves at the diabetes that eventually killed him -- but even if he had that in his twenties (which is far from certain), his problems weren't physical; they were with his ability to get himself in harness. It's a good, interesting, readable, if slightly unfocused volume. But it doesn't feel like a biography -- that is, something that writes down a person's life. It's more like a photo essay (even though there are only a few photos), showing what Hays did, but without much explanation why.… (altro)