The Almanac Singers were only together for about a year in the early ’40s, but their repertoire, and individual members, would go on to much later greatness in the decades that followed. Comprised of folk legends Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Pete Hawes, and Millard Lampell, the group performed mostly at left-wing political conventions and labour rallies with a set list that mixed the traditional with the political. Through the Almanac Singers young urban audiences were for the first time exposed to the music with which the singers in the group were familiar and which they could bring to the group - blues, hillbilly, mountain music, Southern Methodist hymns. Woody Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912 to middle-class politically liberal parents. He spent much of his childhood in rural Texas, where he learned to play guitar, banjo and fiddle. He married in 1933, and drew his first serious lyrical inspiration from the horrific 1935 dust storms that drove his family from Oklahoma to California and forced them to become migrant labourers. Moved by the plight of his own family and thousands of others like them, Guthrie began writing songs about migrant workers, class conflict, women’s issues, union martyrs and the great American West. In the late 1930s he moved to New York, where he began to collaborate with other folk artists including Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers. He wrote a string of songs about the war in Europe, first opposing war on principle, then, supporting the fight against Nazi fascism. After serving in the armed forces, he returned once more to New York. His health gradually deteriorated, and he was diagnosed with Huntingdon’s Disease. He died after long periods in hospital in 1967. Pete Seeger was born in 1919. The youngest of three boys, he grew up in a house full of music. He fell in love with folk music around the age of sixteen.