Upon his discharge from the Army in 1946, Seeger finally got a chance to realize his plans, and convened a group of interested people for a meeting in the basement of his in-laws' apartment in Greenwich Village.
People's Songs' founding committee included several former members of the Almanac Singers and other notable members of the folk community in New York and included Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Horace Grenell, Anges "Sis" Cunningham, Burl Ives, Millard Lampell, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax Hawes, Josh White.
[2] They elected Pete Seeger president and Lee Hays executive secretary and collected money to rent a small office located at 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, which also housed shared a radical drama group Stage for Action.
[3] The organization was loosely modeled as an American version Great Britain's Workers Music Association, founded 10 years earlier than People's Songs.
The first People's Songs convention was held in 1947 in Chicago,[5] and there was a branch in California headed by Mario Casetta, an army friend of Seeger's from Saipan, who became a key figure in the West Coast folk and world music scene.
In its first year People's Songs met with success, but this was a trying time for the labor movements in the United States, which had a significant Communist presence since its inception.
In addition, there was a conservative majority in Congress, which opposed the labor movement altogether and was adamantly committed to maintaining racial segregation in the South.
Eager to reverse the social legislation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, it passed the Taft-Hartley act (over Harry S. Truman's veto).
Some scholars believe that President Truman himself instituted loyalty oaths and mass firings, in order to preempt conservative criticism, control public opinion, and forestall any opposition to his Marshall Plan and to a military build-up from the left wing of his party.
In 2010 Reed-Elsevier sold all its microfilm titles, including People's Songs, Broadside magazine, and New City Songstore, a British folkmusic newsletter published by Peggy Seeger, to ProQuest/CSA.
Scores, songbooks, and lyrics by Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, Joe Hill, Huddie ("Lead Belly") Ledbetter, Alan Lomax, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Malvina Reynolds, Peggy and Pete Seeger, Josh White, and lesser-known and some anonymous authors dealing with civil rights, the Cuban Revolution, election songs of the 1940s, labor, pacifism, and war.