Jimmie Driftwood - Oldies Selection: Best Of (2021)

Jimmie Driftwood was almost an anachronism in the years he was at his commercial peak, from 1957 through 1961. A schoolteacher by training, he originally started writing songs as a way of helping his students learn about history, and subsequently composed (or collected and re-composed) over 5,000 songs, many of them dealing with some element of America's past and its history, telling old folk tales, or preserving some aspect of the daily lives of the people who sang them. Only one modern figure in folk music remotely approaches his contribution to American song and the popular understanding of its roots, and that is Lee Hays of the Weavers Driftwood was never the activist that Hays was, however, being more concerned with teaching than political causes and, thus, never engendered either the blacklisting or the subsequent canonization by the Left that Hays received. And Hays, for all of his leftist sympathies, was never invited to sing before Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the occasion of the first visit of any Soviet leader to the United Nations, as Driftwood was.