Almanac House

In the 1940s, New York City became a center for American folk music, and one of the movement’s epicenters was this house in Greenwich Village, literally home in 1941 to the Almanac Singers. The Almanac Singers were a loose collective that at times included many of the folk revival’s key participants: Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Pete Seeger, Bess Lomax (sister of Alan Lomax), Lee Hays, Gordon Friesen, Agnes Cunningham, and others. Guthrie, Lampell, and Seeger lived in the house, with others passing through as well, and held performances–called hootenannies–there to help pay the rent.

New York in the 1940s was home to a number of well known southern folk musicians including Leadbelly, Aunt Molly Jackson, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGee. Many young activists including Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger drew on folk styles for songs about unions and left wing politics. New York was where musicians could make their living, playing benefits for left-wing groups that recognized the songs for their “authenticity” and protest tradition.

The location in New York City most associated with the folk revival was Almanac House, so called because it formed the home base for the Almanac Singers, who wrote “The Sinking of the Reuben James.” Many of the arguments and agreements that shaped folk music as it has come to be understood happened in this house. Nearly every member of the Almanac Singers–and they were many–would become a key participant in the creation of the early folk revival, which blossomed once again in the 1960s.

Pete Seeger, the Harvard-educated son of Charles Seeger, sometimes considered the father of ethnomusicology, was determined to extend the traditional use of music as a tool for political organizing. The Almanac Singers took their name from the Farmer’s Almanac, which Seeger considered was one of the only two books that the common man owned. The Bible would help them with the next world; the almanac assisted them in getting through this one.

With the exception of Woody Guthrie and, later, Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, none of the Almanacs had rural roots. The Almanacs deferred to Guthrie and imitated his style. They made their living playing benefits for unions and left-wing organizations, often dressed in rural or western clothing.

Almanac House was more an idea than a physical location. Consistently behind in rent payments, the actual Almanac House moved four times between 1940 and 1942, though always in or around Greenwich Village. The most iconic version stood at 130 West 10th Street and remained in the possession of the Almanacs for most of 1941.

The house was three stories (Seeger and Miller Lampell lived on the top floor, Guthrie on the second) with a communal first floor that served as a “perpetual open house.” The house served as a meeting place for likeminded individuals with allegiances to the left, labor politics, or the Communist Party.

On weekends, the Almanacs would cart their mattresses down into the basement to provide seating for free-form musical collaborations/parties known as hootenannies, a term from the Pacific Northwest that the amused Seeger and Guthrie decided to popularize. The hootenannies charged 35 cents a head, and were used as fundraisers for rent payments. Musicians like Brownie McGhee, Leadbelly, Josh White, and Sonny Terry were known to stop by, and the basement would often fill to standing room only.

Although the Almanac Singers’ place in history would be eclipsed by the individual contributions of nearly every one of its members, the Almanacs and the house served a critical purpose in the folk revival movement. It was a place where those interested in the use of song for political ends could come together, formulate their ideas, and talk about music. The communal, bohemian lifestyle of the Almanacs was a rarity at the time, though it would become more of a norm for Greenwich Village by the 1960s.The Almanac Singers and Almanac Houses were broken up by WWII, with Guthrie and Seeger both entering the armed forces.

The house is a visual landmark of the West Village, recognizable for the large handwritten script that spells “Murray Space Shoes” on either side of the doorway. Shortly after the Almanacs left the house, the Space Shoe company moved in. The business has long since closed, but at this writing in 2004, the house is still owned by the same family. A psychic now operates from the basement where the hootenannies were held. The two top floors are now occupied by a ukulele duo called “Sonic Uke.” During the summer, Sonic Uke becomes a neighborhood fixture, holding informal concerts on the stoop, which they call uke-i-nannies. Strangely, the present residents had no prior knowledge of the building’s history.