I came back to the States again and got drafted into the Army on the same day, May eighth, that Hitler surrendered. I don't know if it was me or that big Red Army or those few million Yanks there acrost his fence that caused him to give in. I was sent down to Texas and went through a cloud-burst, windstorm that broke the speedometers at a hundred miles an Hour. I sung at the barracks, Px's. My next camp was down along the mudflow of the Mississippi. Then out to a desert camp in Las Vegas, (Lost Wages), Nevada, the rambling gambling town where the big shots go to toss off your dough on the prettiest lit up neon wheels and green tables that you nearly ever seen. They counted my kids and found out that I had a big army of my own, sent me back to this New York place.

Went down to a meeting of a new union of progressive songwriters that call themselves "Peoples Songs," found Peter Seeger and his banjo, the president and Lee Hays (Arkansaw Hard Luck Lee), the vice president. I found Betty Sanders, Leadbelly, Bernie Asbel, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax, Tom Glazer, Charlotte Anthony, Lou Kleinman, Mildred Linsley, and Shaemas O'Sheel, Bob Russell, there, almost every songwriter pitching in their efforts to make out of all of their little works one big union called "Peoples Songs."

The reason for Peoples Songs is to shoot your union the kind of a song or songs when you want it and fast. To help you to make a songbook, a program, a throwaway songsheet, a whole evening. Or maybe your problem is just about how to make a song and get it copyrighted, printed, circulated around, how to set a fee, and what to do with your works after you create them. I am one of the fifteen now on the Executive Committee of Peoples Songs, 130 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York. I think all of us that are members of Peoples Songs can pat ourselves on the backs that we have at our hands here a broadminded recording and distributing company with the imagination and the hindsight and foresight in social pastures, Moe Asch's Union Records and his Disc Company of America. I don't think that any better luck could have come to these artists nor to this firm. I have never in my life seen a better blend and unity. I would like for you to check this list of record albums, this list of single records, and to take notice of who is here, who is spoken for here, and more, the way they are spoken for. Each one of these speak in music for a people. It is through such music firms as this that your people will know my people, know each others plans and hopes and our past struggles and fights. Unless we do hear the work songs, war songs, and love songs, dance songs, of all the people everywhere we are most apt to lose the peace and this world along with it. I know more about those Arab Villages, those Sicilian bombed towns, those British Cities knocked to their knees, those North African dust and rock piles, I know more about these people because of the songs I heard them sing than of any words I heard them speak in their own native tongues.

This is my letter. This is my letter that I could keep on writing on all night and ten nights. I find that there is almost no place for me to stop once I commence writing such a letter as this, and I can't believe hardly that I am writing such a letter as this to a recording company to be printed by them to tell you what is eating at just one of their many expert performers. It is a story that is not complete, and could not be in such a few pages. It is a story enough, though, maybe, to give you a little taste, a sample feeling, of the roads from back down which we come. I think every artist recorded by Asch has got quite a road to tell you about.

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