The Communist Folk Singers Who Shaped Bob Dylan
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 Dylan 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 to 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 had 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 in 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 Guthrie 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, he “graduated to the Communist Party.” Guthrie had been thrust into party-related struggles through 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.” As artists, they sought to embody communist writer Mike Gold’s vision 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’ imprisonment 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 as “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, 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, “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. “In the Daily Worker, we were famous,” Seeger said in an interview, “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 they 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 an “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.
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. 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 for him, 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 Guthrie, Mike Gold 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.
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