Hays came naturally by his interest in folk music since his uncle was the eminent Missouri and Arkansas folklorist Vance Randolph,[1] author of, among other works, the bestselling Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales and Who Blewed Up the Church House?.

The Reverend Hays was killed in an automobile accident on a remote road and soon afterward Lee's mother had to be hospitalized for a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Lee's sister, who had begun teaching at Hendrix-Henderson College, also broke down temporarily and had to quit her job to move in with their oldest brother in Boston, Massachusetts.

The period immediately following his father's death was so painful that Lee Hays could not bring himself to talk much about it, even to Doris Willens, the writer he selected to be his biographer.

[citation needed] There the rebellious Hays embarked on an extensive program of self-education, becoming radicalized in the process: Every book that was considered unfit for children to read was marked with a black rubber stamp.

He enrolled at the University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas, a Presbyterian school that allows students to work in lieu of tuition, intending to study for the ministry and devote his life to the poor and dispossessed.

[citation needed] One of these was Willard Uphaus, a professor of divinity at Yale University, who had recently been appointed executive secretary of the National Religion and Labor Foundation, and who became Williams' admirer and supporter.

"[8] In her drama classes at Highlander Zilphia borrowed the techniques of the New Theater League in New York, which encouraged participants to create plays out of their own experience, which would then be staged at labor conferences.

Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church.

In 1937, when Claude Williams was appointed director of Commonwealth College in Mena Arkansas, a labor organizing school, he hired Hays to direct a theater program.

Playwright and fellow student Eli Jaffe[13] said that Hays "was deeply religious and extremely creative and imaginative and firmly believed in the Brotherhood of Man."

Doris Willens, his biographer, speculates that Hays's physical and mental states were possibly a response to the ongoing tribulations of his mentor and of Commonwealth College.

[15] Long subject to the virulent hostility of its neighbors and in dire financial straits, the embattled school was riven by internecine struggles between its more radical members and the more moderate socialists on its board.

[citation needed] In 1940 the board expelled the avowedly Marxist Claude Williams for allegedly allowing Communist infiltration and for being excessively preoccupied with the issue of racial discrimination, and soon after, the institution was disbanded.

As the clouds gathered around Commonwealth College, Hays headed north to New York, taking with him his collection of labor songs, which he planned to turn into a book.

The German-born Lowenfels, a highly cultured man and a modernist poet who was fascinated by Walt Whitman and edited a book of his poetry, became another surrogate father to Hays, influencing him deeply.

It was a somewhat fluid group that included Josh White and Sam Gary and later Sis Cunningham (a fellow Commonwealth College alumna), Woody Guthrie (with whom Hays collaborated on his 1940 debut album, Dust Bowl Ballads), and Bess Lomax Hawes, among others.

The songs attacked the peacetime draft and the big U.S. corporations which were then receiving lucrative defense contracts from the federal government while practicing racial segregation in hiring.

Concurrently, in the Atlantic Monthly Carl Joachim Friedrich, a German-born but anti-Nazi professor of political science at Harvard, deemed the Almanacs treasonous and their album "a matter for the Attorney General" because it seemed to him to be subversive of military recruitment and morale.

Somewhat mollified, nevertheless, labor leaders canceled the march and ordered union members to get behind the war and to refrain from strikes; copies of the isolationist Songs for John Doe were destroyed (a month after being issued).

But as a disciple of Claude [Williams], Lee in 1940 held firm with those who continued to believe that America and Britain were maneuvering not to defeat Nazi Germany, or rather, not just yet, but first to turn Hitler to their desired end of destroying the Soviet Union...In short, 1940 was a bad time to say a good word for "peace."

Worse, the only other voices opposing the war emanated from the extreme right, particularly America Firsters, a group suspected of harboring the hope that Hitler would eventually triumph .

Whatever uneasiness the Hitler-Stalin pact churned up, Lee hoped to submerge by throwing his vast energies into the service of the dynamic Congress of Industrial Organizations [(CIO)]—the challenger to the fat and lazy and bureaucratic old American Federation of Labor.

[21]The Almanacs, who now included Sis Cunningham, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Bess Lomax Hawes, discarded their anti-war material with no regrets and continued to perform at union halls and at hootenanies.

Hays was rejected from the Armed Forces because of a mild case of tuberculosis and he indeed felt sick all the time, missed performances, and developed a reputation for hypochondria.

Jenkins backed them up with his own lush string orchestra and huge chorus, but tactfully and with care, so as not to obscure the words and musical personalities of the groups' personnel.

[31]In 1950, Pete Seeger was listed as a probable subversive in the anti-communist pamphlet Red Channels and was placed on the entertainment industry blacklist along with other members of the Weavers.

He wrote reviews and short stories, one of which, "Banquet and a Half", published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and drawing on his experiences in the South in the 1930s, was the recipient of a prize and was reprinted in the U.S. and Britain.

In 1958, Hays began recording a series of children's albums with the Baby Sitters, a group that included a young Alan Arkin, Earl Robinson's nephew.

After the great financial success of Peter, Paul and Mary's cover of "If I Had a Hammer" in the mid-1960s, Hays, whose mental and physical health had been shaky for years, lived mostly on income from royalties.