XPost: alt.obituaries   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Ronnie Gilbert, Bold-Voiced Singer With the Weavers, Is Dead at 88   
      
   By BRUCE WEBERJUNE 6, 2015   
      
   Ronnie Gilbert, whose crystalline, bold contralto provided distaff   
   ballast for the Weavers, the seminal quartet that helped propel folk   
   music to wide popularity and establish its power as an agent of social   
   change, died on Saturday in Mill Valley, Calif. She was 88.   
      
   The death was confirmed by her partner, Donna Korones.   
      
   Ms. Gilbert had a résumé as a stage actor and later in life a career   
   as a psychologist, but her enduring impact was as a singer.   
      
   The Weavers, whose other founding members were Pete Seeger, Lee Hays   
   and Fred Hellerman, started playing together in the late 1940s.   
   Like-minded musicians with progressive political views, they performed   
   work songs, union songs and gospel songs, and became known for   
   American folk standards like “On Top of Old Smoky,” “Goodnight, Irene”   
   (first recorded by the blues singer Lead Belly), Woody Guthrie’s “So   
   Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” and “The Hammer Song” (a.k.a. “If I   
   Had a Hammer”) by Mr. Seeger and Mr. Hays, as well as songs from other   
   cultures, including “Wimoweh” from Africa and “Tzena Tzena Tzena,” a   
   Hebrew song popular in Israel (though it was written before Israel was   
   established in 1948).   
      
   Their voices, especially Ms. Gilbert’s, were powerful, their harmonies   
   were distinctive and their attitude was an enthusiastic embrace of the   
   listener. Together those elements created a singalong populism that   
   laid the groundwork for a folk-music boom in the 1950s and 1960s and   
   its concomitant earnest strain of 1960s counterculture.   
      
   The Kingston Trio, the Limeliters and Peter, Paul & Mary, among   
   others, were direct musical descendants; slightly more distant   
   relations included Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs.   
      
   “We sang songs of hope in that strange time after World War II, when   
   already the world was preparing for Cold War,” Ms. Gilbert recalled in   
   “The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time,” a 1982 documentary about the group.   
   “We still had the feeling that if we could sing loud enough and strong   
   enough and hopefully enough, it would make a difference.”   
      
   The Weavers’ own narrative was a dramatic one, a product of the   
   political moment. Hardly confrontational or subversive in their   
   presentations — in their public appearances they were well groomed,   
   the men often wearing jackets and ties and Ms. Gilbert a dress — they   
   were nonetheless targeted by the anti-Communist right wing.   
      
   In 1949 they were still an informal ensemble, playing at union   
   meetings and on picket lines but rarely if ever for money. They were   
   on the verge of dispersing when Max Gordon, owner of the Village   
   Vanguard in Manhattan, booked them to play for two weeks during the   
   Christmas holidays. Instantly a hit, they were so popular that they   
   stayed at the Vanguard for six months and were signed by Decca   
   Records. For the next two years, touring and recording and appearing   
   on radio and television, they were among the biggest musical stars in   
   the country.   
      
   But in June 1950, the influential pamphlet “Red Channels,” purportedly   
   an exposé of the Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry,   
   was published, and it named Pete Seeger, who had in fact been a member   
   of the Communist Party earlier in his life.   
      
   The following year the Weavers were investigated by the Senate   
   Internal Security Subcommittee, whose purview was to root out   
   subversive citizen threats. In 1952, while they were on tour in Ohio,   
   a paid informant for the F.B.I., Harvey Matusow, testified before the   
   Ohio Un-American Activities Commission that three members of the   
   group, including Ms. Gilbert, were Communist Party members. (Mr.   
   Matusow would later write a book in which he recanted dozens of his   
   accusations.)   
      
   The Weavers were blacklisted; invitations to perform and record dried   
   up, their recordings were removed from stores, and the group   
   disbanded. With her husband, Martin Weg, a dentist, Ms. Gilbert moved   
   to California, where they started a family.   
      
   Then, in 1955, the Weavers’ manager, Harold Leventhal, arranged a   
   concert at Carnegie Hall. The show sold out, perceived by many ticket   
   buyers not just as a musical event but as an act of defiance against   
   the overzealousness of anti-Communists.   
      
   It renewed interest in the Weavers, and though Seeger (who died in   
   2014) left the group a couple of years later, the group, with a series   
   of replacements beginning with Erik Darling, continued to perform and   
   record until 1964, when they gave a farewell concert in Chicago. Their   
   influence — and Ms. Gilbert’s — was by then well established.   
      
   “I was at the 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall,” Mary Travers of Peter,   
   Paul & Mary wrote in a companion booklet to a boxed set of recordings   
   by the Weavers. “And surely for me part of the reason that I could   
   sing folk songs was because of Ronnie Gilbert.   
      
   “When I first began to sing, most of the better-known people who were   
   singing folk songs had those sort of Kentucky mountain sopranos. I of   
   course was anything but a soprano! So when I heard the Weavers I found   
   another voice, one that was definitely the voice of a strong woman,   
   someone able to stand on her own two feet and face adversity.   
      
   “And she had a courageous voice: There was a tremendous sense of joy   
   and energy and courage in her voice. She was able to be very gentle,   
   too; she did wonderful ballads and lullabies and things; but there was   
   that trumpet sound she had that I found very encouraging, because it   
   said, oh, you too! You’re not a misfit, there’s somebody else out   
   there with a big voice!”   
      
   Ms. Gilbert was born Ruth Alice Gilbert in Brooklyn on Sept. 7, 1926,   
   and grew up in and around New York City. Her parents were immigrants;   
   they separated when she was 11, but by then had given her piano and   
   dance lessons. Her father, Charles, from the Ukraine, worked as a   
   milliner. Her mother, Sarah, from Poland, was the more influential   
   parent — a garment worker, a union activist and a member of the   
   Communist Party who also had an interest in the arts. She brought her   
   daughter, about 10 at the time, to a union rally at which Paul Robeson   
   sang, an event Ronnie Gilbert would later recall as “transformative.”   
      
   “That was the beginning of my life as a singer and a — I wouldn’t call   
   myself an activist, but a singer, a singer with social conscience,   
   let’s say,” she said in a 2004 interview for Voices of Feminism, an   
   oral history project at Smith College.   
      
      
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