Lee Hays - Later Life

Later Life

If Arnold was successful, we would have had a set of horse-faced rulers, but that might be preferable to what we have now.

Lee Hays, after the election of Ronald Reagan, at the Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park, Croton, N.Y., June 1981.

In 1958, Hays began recording a series of children's albums with The Baby Sitters, a group that included a young Alan Arkin, the son of a family friend of the Robinsons. 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.

In 1967, he moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York where he devoted himself to tending his organic vegetable garden, cooking, writing, and socializing. He wrote to a friend that in his new surroundings he had no idea how to earn new money but that, "Having a listed number with no fear of Trotskyite crank calls is a huge relief". At the insistence of his old friend Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie, however, he did appear, playing himself as a preacher at a 1960 evangelical meeting, in the film Alice's Restaurant (1969), based on Arlo's hit song of that name.

Hays, who had always been overweight, had been diagnosed in 1960 with diabetes, brought on by alcoholism, depression, and the use of a strong drug, a condition the doctors thought he had probably suffered from, along with TB, for many years previously. (Source: Liner notes from Pete Seeger on the Weavers boxed tape collection: "Wasn't That a Time") This led to a heart condition and he was fitted with a pacemaker. Both his legs eventually had to be amputated. Younger friends, among them Lawrence Lazare and Jimmy Callo, helped to take care of him.

His bad health notwithstanding, Hays performed in several Weavers reunion concerts, the last of which was in November 1980 at New York City's Carnegie Hall. His last public performance with the group took place in June 1981 at the Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park. Two months later he was dead. The documentary film The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!, for which Hays had written the script, was released in 1982.

Near the end of his life Hays, wrote a farewell poem, "In Dead Earnest", inspired perhaps by Wobbly organizer Joe Hill's lyrical "Last Testament"but with an earthy Ozark frankness:

In Dead Earnest

If I should die before I wake,
All my bone and sinew take:
Put them in the compost pile
To decompose a little while.
Sun, rain, and worms will have their way,
Reducing me to common clay.
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishes in the seas.
When corn and radishes you munch,
You may be having me for lunch.
Then excrete me with a grin,
Chortling, "There goes Lee again!"
Twill be my happiest destiny
To die and live eternally.

He died on August 26, 1981 from diabetic cardiovascular disease at home in Croton, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were mixed with his compost pile.