My stepfather sang a song that he learned while hopping freight cars during the Depression called "Tennesee Blues". He also brought home recordings of Burl Ives, Josh White and Leadbelly. My aunt, who turned into a Reaganite, at earlier times was an avid socialist.
She introduced me to Pete Seeger who sang "Hold The Line" at the Peekskill riots.

I went to a hootenanny (a term coined earlier by Bob Miller, a composer and songwriter in the Twenties and popularized by Pete Seeger), the attendees being Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes and others including a soon-to-be singing partner, Guy Carawan. I got hooked.

My first guitar teacher, Sam Surace, told me that I should investigate this style of playing with the fingers in the folk manner.

I heard the Weavers blaring from the record stores on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles and was taken with their sound....so much that I joined them in 1963.