Prol Chic!
“Though Seeger didn’t formally join the Communist Party until 1942, the Almanacs’ lyrics marched in lockstep with the party’s views well before then. In keeping with the line adopted after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact (which caused many U.S. party members to quit in disgust), for example, the Almanacs warbled against American entry into World War II, foreshadowing the preference for peace at any price that later characterized the McGovernite Left. “Franklin D., listen to me,/You ain’t a-gonna send me ’cross the sea.” The group continued in this vein into the late 1940s. Campaigning for Progressive Party anti–cold war candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, they regularly performed a send-up of Harry Truman, to the tune of “Oh, Susannah”:
We’ve got to jail the communists
To keep this country free.
And everyone’s a communist
Who doesn’t vote for me.
(The lyrics referred to the newly enacted Smith Act, requiring Communist Party members to register with the government.) A more militant Seeger-Guthrie song, “66 Highway Blues,” threatened: “Sometimes I think I’ll blow down a cop/Lord, you treat me so mean. . . . I’m gonna start me a hungry man’s union,/Ain’t a-gonna charge no dues,/Gonna march down that road to the Wall Street Walls,/A-singin’ those 66 Highway Blues.”
The Almanacs/Weavers also dressed the part of authentic jes’ plain folks, sporting farmer’s overalls on stage. Anticipating the fashion affectations of later pop stars, in which studiedly grungy clothing often serves as both costume and political statement, they suffered from what biographer Dunaway calls “a bad case of proletarian chic.”
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html