Grammy awards today

I don't usually get that excited about the Grammys. (Or is that Grammies?) But I'm always happy to see good musicians win. It does occasionally happen.

The award presentations are already in progress. This was a nice one to see:

Perhaps the most inspiring sight of the evening was two of the three surviving members of the Weavers, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, taking the stage together to accept their award. The seminal group was tremendously popular in the early '50s until the members were tainted as Communist sympathizers and the group found itself blacklisted. They fought back against political intolerance back then, and still had plenty of fighting spirit this night. "We wouldn't have had a 'lifetime' to be honored without the support of people who refused to be intimidated by the political witch hunt of those times," said Gilbert. Hellerman added, "If this award to us has any message, it's that if you stay the course you can outlast your enemies with your honor and dignity intact." - Legends Honored At Special Merit Awards GRAMMY.com 02/08/06.

We might call them the "Dixie Chicks" of the 1950s. This group the Weavers, of which Pete Seeger is the most famous member, was the group that first popularized Woody Guthrie's music and are thus responsible to a great extent for his enormous influence on popular music. Seeger and Guthrie had been close in 1940s, and remained so until Guthrie's death.

And, yes, Seeger at least was an actual member of the Communist Party for part of his life. But the accusations against the Weavers - whatever they were, I don't know, holding holds and singing the Internationale or something? - that lead to their being boycotted by many venues were made by a professional fink named Harvey Matusow, who eventually went to the slammer for perjuring himself in making false accusations about people accused of being "Reds". Believe it or not, "reds" meant Communists in those days, not Republicans. Matusow admitted that he had lied about the Weavers, too. Scumbag.

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