I’m a little late on this… OK, over a week late, but I just saw this, and in all the Senatorial fuss it seems not to have been mentioned here. Bess Lomax Hawes died on Friday, November 27.
Hawes was a folk-lorist, teacher, and singer who, in the ’40s, was a member of the Almanac Singers alongside Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, among others, writing and performing topical protest songs while working for the Office of War Information in New York City.
But her biggest claim to fame came in 1949 when she was living in Boston and was hired, with another singer, Jacqueline Stein, by the Progressive Party’s mayoral candidate Walter O’Brien to write campaign songs. Together, the two of them came up with “M.T.A.“:
Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn’d
He may ride forever
‘neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned.
My condolences, Charley.
for so many reasons, telling a story, making a point, using sense of place, and making a pitch.
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p>One of the original verses is not well known because the Kingston Trio, who popularized the song, turned one of the verses into a banjo solo. The original version is here.
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p>I am skeptical about one thing, namely the idea that two lefty folksingers would have been paid money to pen a ditty for Walter O’Brian’s mayoral run in 1948.
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p>Beer, maybe.
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p>I’ve met Jacky Stein.
is how absurd and surreal it is; a little piece of urban Kafka. Political agitprop with humor and a vivid imagination.