Don, I want to be clear - I do think the Weavers had a HUGE effect on shaping what we consider to be "folk" music.   

My point is that the Weavers were NOT the first artists to bring folk music to a general public AND their success was ONLY possible because of the work of others. The songs you mentioned - Wimoweh, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, On Top of Old Smoky, and So Long, It's Been Good to Know You - all songs that were either written or collected by some of the names that have been mentioned in this thread.

I disagree with you when you say "it wasn't until 1949 (I remember this pretty well), when the Weavers started pouring out of radios and juke boxes, that folk music hit the mass media with any impact at all". In hindsight it may SEEM as if the Weavers started it all, but folk music had been heard on the Top 40 or Hit Parade much earlier. In the 1940's Burl Ives had hits with songs like "Lavendar Blue". Ella Fitzgerald had a huge hit during WWII with "A Tisket, A Tasket". That is an old children's folk song - "Kitty Kitty Kasket". Those early 1950 Weaver recordings sold in the same numbers as the others, and THOSE recordings of the Weavers did not turn on a generation to folk music. That would come a few years later.

If you ever find an old copy of Billboard magazine from that era, you won't find a Country Music chart- they called it Folk Music. This is well before the Weaver's became a group. One could argue that the Carter Family were the first group to bring folk music to a commercial audience.   Folk music could also be found on Broadway in the 1940's through plays like "Sing Out Sweet Land" where folk music was the basis of the show. Paul Robeson recorded spirituals going back to the 1920's. Let's not forget radio (a subject dear to my heart!!). Alan Lomax had a program on CBS, Josef Marais on NBC and Oscar Brand began hosting a radio program in 1945 where a group of musicians without a name sang songs. That group became the Weavers.

Again, the songs that you mention, and the recordings that the Weavers made for Decca, were very popular.   If you listen to those recordings (with Gordon Jenkins orchestra), they do not sound much different than the recordings of Patti Page, Mel Torme or other "hits" of the time. The Weavers sound of the early 1950s was a real commercial sound. These are the songs that America was introduced to.

Those of us who love folk music, we tend to remember the "acoustic" sounds of the later year of the Weavers, recordings they made starting with the historic 1955 Carnegie Hall concert. Remember, the Weavers had "broken up" so that concert was really their first "reunion"!. This is the sound that turned on a generation of "folk" fans, but those records never sold in the same numbers as their earlier Decca recordings. The "folk revival" that most of us seem to remember begins with the Kingston Trio, but as I hope I have been able to remind everyone, the folk revival began decades earlier.