Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
I'm away until September, harvesting blueberries in Maine, but I've queued up a series of Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up diaries to entertain you until I return.
Last year the theme of the puzzles I queued up to post during my absence was Summer Songfest (spotlighting a different song each week) This year I was planning to make the theme Democratic candidates worth supporting this November, but at the last minute I decided to do another Summer Songfest. So if you love puzzles you can come by Saturday evenings for a little light puzzle fun, or if you love music you can come by Saturday evenings for some tuneful entertainment. Each week I"ll post a YouTube clip of the song featured in the previous week's verticals.
Last week's puzzle spotlighted Gary Peters, a noteworthy Democratic senate candidate. Hmmm -- hard to get a musical YouTube clip out of that...
Ah, but one of the clues spotlighted The Weavers! So here's a classic Weavers clip to enjoy as you work on tonight's puzzle.
The Weavers were a very interesting musical group. You can read more about them, as well as find the clues for tonight's puzzle, just below the orange squiggle...
Since I'm very short on time I'm going to borrow heavily from Wikipedia for the story of The Weavers:
The Weavers were formed in November 1948 by Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger. In 1940 and 1941, Hays and Seeger had co-founded a previous group, the Almanac Singers, which had promoted peace and isolationism during the Second World War, working with the American Peace Committee. It featured many songs opposing entry into the war by the U.S. In June 1941, the same month Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the APC changed its name to the American People's Committee and altered its focus to supporting U.S. entry into the war. The Almanacs supported the change and produced many pro-war songs urging the U.S. to fight on the side of the Allies. The group disbanded after the U.S. entered the war.
The new group took its name from a play by Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Weber (The Weavers 1892), a powerful play depicting the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844, containing the lines, "I'll stand it no more, come what may"...
Because of the deepening Red Scare of the early 1950s, their manager, Pete Cameron, advised them not to sing their most explicitly political songs and to avoid performing at "progressive" venues and events...
During the Red Scare, however, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were identified as Communist Party members by FBI informant Harvey Matusow (who later recanted) and ended up being called up to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1955. Hays took the Fifth Amendment. Seeger, however, refused to answer, claiming First Amendment grounds, the first to do so after the conviction of the Hollywood Ten in 1950. Seeger was found guilty of contempt and placed under restrictions by the court pending appeal, but in 1961 his conviction was overturned on technical grounds.
Because Seeger was among those listed in the entertainment industry blacklist publication, Red Channels, all of the Weavers were placed under FBI surveillance and not allowed to perform on television or radio during the McCarthy era... Their recordings were denied airplay, which curtailed their income from royalties. Right-wing and anti-Communist groups protested at their performances and harassed promoters. As a result, the group's economic viability diminished rapidly and in 1952 it disbanded...
In December 1955, the group reunited to play a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. The concert was a huge success. A recording of the concert was issued by the independent Vanguard Records, and this led to their signing by that record label. By the late 1950s, folk music was surging in popularity and McCarthyism was fading.
A happy ending, right? Unfortunately no. There's a strange twist coming up:
After the April 1957 LP release of the Carnegie Hall concert, the Weavers launched a month-long concert tour. That August the group reassembled for a series of recording sessions for Vanguard. As Seeger's college concert bookings grew, the singer felt restricted by his obligations to the group. Vanguard booked the Weavers for a January 15, 1958, session to record a rock-and-roll single. The results were embarrassing and fueled Seeger's frustration. The following month Gilbert, Hays and Hellerman overruled Seeger about a recording a cigarette ad for a tobacco company. Seeger, opposed to the dangers of tobacco and discouraged by the group's apparent sell-out to commercial interests, decided to resign. Honoring his commitment to record the jingle, he left the group on March 3, 1958.
The Weavers weren't quite as good without Seeger, but did continue (with replacements for Seeger) for 6 more years before disbanding in 1964.
For more information about the Weavers, you might enjoy watching Wasn't That A Time, a 78-minute documentary about them available in its entirety on YouTube. But first, perhaps you'd like to solve tonight's puzzle.
Here are the clues for tonight's puzzle. If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 7 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. stick
2. stretch
3. mysterious
4. greater number
5. "Who Killed Davey _____?"
6. never again!
7. the Red
8. the Red Stater
9. work out a deal
10. rainbows
11. display cases
12. Petula and Clifford
13. thick slice
14. aromatic herb
15. excuses
16. animal which loves to eat apples
17. ceremonial dinner
18. more stupid
19. blade
20. scar which everyone has
21. lighten
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are instructions for solving JulieCrostics.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter.
For instance, if the clues for a row were
1. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.
In the example given, the verticals read DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out Daily Kos!