It's richly ironic that Pete Seeger threatened to ax the wires when Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan, after all, was doing the same thing Seeger had done 15 years earlier with the Weavers: lending contemporary pop arrangements to folk music. Back in 1950, going pop didn't mean plugging in electric guitars but adding big-band charts by Frank Sinatra's future arranger Gordon Jenkins. And it worked. The quartet took songs by a black Louisiana convict, a Dust Bowl socialist, and an anonymous Zulu troubador and turned them into pop hits between 1950 and 1952. The Weavers' four-CD box set, Wasn't That a Time, begins with eight of those early 78s for Decca Records and then offers 79 more songs from their later recordings for Vanguard. Weavers' songs like "Wimoweh," "If I Had a Hammer," "Guantanamera," and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" have been recorded by everyone from R.E.M. to Aretha Franklin. If only for their historical impact, the songs on this box set are important. --Geoffrey Himes