I concur with much of what Q said above about people simply getting on about their business, but I do have to disagree a bit with the idea that the Weavers had very little effect. I think we're missing an important intermediate step here.

In 1949 (if my memory serves me) songs like Goodnight Irene, Tzena Tzena Tzena, and On Top of Old Smoky began issuing from radios and juke boxes, along with a song I had heard some years before, sung by a guy who was regarded at the time as Seattle's answer to Burl Ives, Ivar Haglund: The Frozen Logger, written by Pacific Northwest author and collector of Paul Bunyan tales, James Stevens.

1949 was the year I graduated from high school and entered the University of Washington. It was not more than a year or two after this that I began running into people who were taking up guitars and banjos and learning folk songs. Claire Hess, a young woman with whom I was keeping steady company, put a guitar in my hands for the first time and taught me G, C, and D7. She was learning songs from a copy of A Treasury of Folk Songs compiled by Sylvia and John Kolb, Bantam Books, New York, 1948 (35¢), and a stack of Weavers records. Shortly thereafter, I heard Walt Robertson sing in concert for the first time, and I was hooked! It was shortly after this that I met several other people who were making varying degrees of progress learning to play and sing. Among them was Sandy Paton, who was residing in Seattle at the time. I venture to say that all of us had been influenced to one degree or another by the sudden burst of folk music onto the pop music scene made by the Weavers—even if they did vanish from sight (temporarily) shortly thereafter.

This influence was a moving force. When the Weavers were hunkering down from the Blacklist, the Gateway Singers leaped into the breach. The Gateway Singers were frankly and openly patterned after the Weavers (three guys and a strong-voiced female singer, with prominent guitar and 5-string banjo instrumentation), and even though they branched out later, at first their repertoire consisted of Weavers' songs. Then, in 1959, along came the Kingston Trio with their recording of Tom Dooley and the Great Folk Scare was off and running. Roam through (this web site a bit and check some of the links, especially here and here. Various groups (such as the Kingston Trio) and individuals acknowledge the influence the Weavers had on them.

With that wave to surf on, along came Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and others, then came Bob Dylan and a spate of singer-songwriters, like Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs—and from here on you can fill in the rest by yourself.

One could make a pretty convincing case that when the juggernaut first got rolling, although it was being nudged by people such as Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Susan Reed and Richard Dyer-Bennet, it was the Weavers who gave it the strongest push.

Don Firth