Hey lolly lolly lo

Besides Atwater-Donnelly, there's other groups that I like--like the Weavers. Ever heard of them? They used to be. I don't know if there's any website for them, so I can't give you a link. But I will tell you about them.

The Weavers were a folk group with four members; Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilberts, and Fred Hellerman (?). We have a couple of recordings by them--one thing that supposedly combines two albums--which I don't know--and another one, The Weavers: Together Again. Anyway, they get a lot of airplay at our house.

There's this one song I really like, on our "unnanmed" album--it's called "Around the World". I can't quite explain it. There's a lot of dialog, but they end up playing a polka and a hora. Then they get in this song, "Hey Lolly Lolly" which starts out kind of serious and not too funny...

"A married man will keep your secret."
"A single boy will talk about you."

But then it gets into somebody singing (Daddy says it's Lee Hays)

"Alas my love you do me wrong"
"To treat me so discourteously!"

That's from "Greensleeves". I don't know why it's so funny--except that somebody sang earlier in "The Rock Island Line" the same thing--Ronnie Gilberts the "Alas my love" part, and one of the guys the "to treat me so..." part. Is there something funny about that song? If anyone knows, I'd like to be enlightened...

Anyway, I like that song 'cause it's got the hora in the middle and I am really into Jewish music. But the rest of it is cool--it's just my favorite and more fun than "When the Saints Go Marching In".

The only Weaver I know more about is Pete Seeger--and even then, we just got more recordings by him--some with Arlo Guthrie, and his Childrens' Concert at Town Hall (Susie and I love that one!). But I don't know much else about him--Daddy says he thinks he's still alive, which surprises me because he's in his eighties or nineties, isn't he? Well, so is Jean Ritchie--hmm, come to think of it, Jean Ritchie has a homepage, does Pete Seeger have one? I'll have to check that out. Anyway, the most else I know about him is that he wrote one of my favorite songs: "If I Had a Hammer". I love that one! It's cool. I've thought so since Mum taught it to me in second or third grade. She explained it pretty well--I still know what it means. Anyway, Daddy was teaching Susie carpentry and joked that that was going to be the song they had to warm up with. You don't need to sing to do carpentry, I told him. And he just laughed.

The only other thing I know about Pete Seeger is that he supposedly autographed Aubrey Atwater's banjo--but I haven't seen that. She just said that he and Doc Watson had autographed it and showed it off, but I was too far away to see anything except that it needed a new head or something because the skin was peeling. Since she kept the peeling skin on, I'll take her word for it...

That's about all I can think of for now. Probably it'll have posted successfully, and then I will come up with something else. 'Bye now.
Saro