Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Peter Seeger (born May 3, 1919), better known as Pete Seeger, is a folk singer, political activist, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. As a member of the Weavers, he had a string of hits, including a 1949 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. However, his career as a mainstream performer was seriously curtailed by the Second Red Scare: he came under severe attack as a former member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Later, he re-emerged on the public scene as a pioneer of protest music in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

He is perhaps best known today as the author or co-author of the songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s. Seeger is also widely credited with popularizing the traditional song "We Shall Overcome", which was recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists, and became the publicly perceived anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement soon after musicologist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.

Family and personal life

Seeger was born in New York City. His father Charles Seeger was a musicologist and an early investigator of non-Western music. His stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was one of the most significant female composers of the 20th Century. His siblings Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger also had notable musical careers. Half-brother Mike Seeger went on to form the New Lost City Ramblers, who influenced Bob Dylan. His uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted poet, was killed during the First World War. In 1936 he heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and his life was changed forever. Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. He then attended Harvard University until he left in 1938 during his sophomore year. In both cases, he was a scholarship student. In 1943 he married Toshi-Aline Ohta, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. Pete and Toshi have three children, Danny, Mika and Tinya, and grandchildren Tao, Cassie, Kitama, Moraya, Penny, and Isabelle. Tao is a folk musician in his own right, singing and playing guitar, banjo and harmonica with The Mammals.

Seeger lives in the hamlet of Dutchess Junction in the Town of Fishkill, NY and remains very politically active, as well as maintaining an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley Region of New York, especially in the nearby City of Beacon, NY. He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949, and lived there first in a trailer, then in a log cabin they built themselves, and eventually in a larger house. Seeger joined the Community Church (a church practicing Unitarian Universalism) and often performs at functions for the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Musical career

Early work

"Arlo, folk songs are serious."

Pete Seeger to Arlo Guthrie

Seeger dropped out of Harvard College in 1939. and he took a job in Washington, D.C. at the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress. In that capacity, he met and was influenced by many other musicians such as Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. He met Guthrie at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant workers concert on March 3, 1940 and the two thereafter began a musical collaboration.

Pete Seeger, 1944. Note Eleanor Roosevelt sitting in the audience.

Spanish Civil War songs

Seeger has long been interested in the music that came out of the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, he was invited by Moses Asch (later of Folkways Records) to record a collection of Spanish Civil War songs. These included "Valley of Jarama" and "Peat Bog Soldiers".

In 2006, he sang eight songs for the nine-cut CD "Canciones de Las Brigadas Internacionales". These are:

• "Valley of Jarama" (El Valle del Jarama)
• "Cookhouse" (El Hornillo)
• "Young Man from Alcala" (El Joven de Alcalá)
• "Quartermaster's Song" (La Canción del Intendente)
• "Viva la Quince Brigada"
• "El Quinto Regimiento"
• "Si Me Quieres Escribir" (Spanish Marching Song)
• "Si Me Quieres Escribir"
• "Venga Jaleo"

Banjo

In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He went on to invent the Long Neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, and slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo.

Group recording

As a self-described "split tenor" (between an alto and a tenor), he was a founding member of several folk groups; the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie and the Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. The Weavers had major hits in the early 1950s, before being blacklisted in the McCarthy Era.

In 1955 he recorded an album entitled Union Songs for Folkways Records (FH 5285A).

Soloing

Seeger started a solo career in 1958, and is known for songs such as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (co-written with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer" (co-written with Lee Hays), "Turn, Turn, Turn," adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and "We Shall Overcome" (which he and Guy Carawan based on a spiritual). Seeger became influential in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village. He helped found Broadside Magazine and Sing Out!. He was strongly associated with Moses Asch and Folkways Records. To describe the new crop of folk singers, many of whom were politically minded in their songs, he coined the phrase "Woody's children", alluding to his former bandmate Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. He has often sung and is associated with the song "Joe Hill".

Pete Seeger made his only tour of Australia in 1963. At the time of this tour, his single Little Boxes was number one in the nation's Top 40's. In 1993, the Australian singer/plawright Maurie Mulherin, assembled an anthology of Seeger's work in a stage production Wasn't That a Time?. It enjoyed a long and sold-out season at the New Theatre in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown.

In the mid-60s he hosted a regional folk music television show called Rainbow Quest, which featured folk musicians playing traditional folk music. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Roscoe Holcomb, The Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Richard Fariña, The Beers Family, and Mimi Fariña, and many others. Thirty-eight hourlong programs were recorded at new UHF station WNJU's Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi with Sholom Rubinstein.

An early advocate of Bob Dylan, Seeger was supposedly incensed over the distorted electric sound Dylan brought into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, especially with the inability to clearly hear the lyrics. There are many conflicting versions of exactly what ensued, some claiming that he actually tried to disconnect the equipment. He is often cited as one of the main opponents to Dylan at Newport 1965, but asked in 2001 about how he recalled his "objections" to the "electric" style, he said:

I couldn't understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, "Maggie's Farm," and the sound was distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, "Fix the sound so you can hear the words." He hollered back, "This is the way they want it." I said "Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now." But I was at fault. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, "you didn't boo Howlin' Wolf yesterday. He was electric!" Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.

Seeger at 86 on the cover of Sing Out! (Summer 2005), a magazine that he helped found in 1950 and to which he still occasionally contributes.

Later work

In 1998 a double-CD tribute album was released - "Where Have All the Flowers Gone: the Songs of Pete Seeger". It contained contributions from Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Tom Paxton, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg, Eliza Carthy, Bruce Springsteen, Roger McGuinn, Judy Collins, Indigo Girls, Dick Gaughan, Martin Simpson, Odetta and others.

Pete Seeger still performs occasionally in public, and for a number of years has appeared at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough Tennessee to tell stories, these days mostly children's stories such as Abiyoyo. He performed at MerleFest April 27-30, 2006 in Wilkesboro, NC.

On March 16, 2007, the 88-year old Pete Seeger performed with his siblings Mike and Peggy and other Seeger family members at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he had been employed as a folk song archivist 67 years earlier.

In April 2006, Bruce Springsteen released a collection of songs associated with Seeger or in Seeger's folk tradition, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Springsteen performed a series of concerts based on those sessions, to sellout crowds. Springsteen had previously recorded one Seeger favorite, "We Shall Overcome," on the 1998 "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" tribute album.

Activism

Early Political Activism (pre-1950)

As a young man Seeger was a communist activist; however, he left the communist party in 1950 and strongly rejected the policies of Stalin and the Fascist form of Communism practiced in the Soviet Union. After 1950, Seeger became an anti-Stalinist socialist and continued strong support of the labor movement in the U.S.

Seeger said of his reouncement of communism: "I realized I could sing the same songs I sang whether I belonged to the Communist Party or not, and I never liked the idea anyway of belonging to a secret organization." An article written in 2006 by an official of the American libertarian Cato Institute reported that in the early years of World War II, political opponents called him "Stalin's Songbird".

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Seeger, then a member of the Communist Party became strong proponents of military action against Germany. There is no evidence that Seeger was involved in any anti-American activites. In fact Seeger served in the US Army in the Pacific. He was trained as an airplane mechanic, but reassigned to entertain the American troops with music. Later, when people asked him what he did in the war, he always answered "I strummed my banjo". After returning from service, Seeger established People's Songs, an organization designed to 'Create, promote and distrubute songs of labor and the American People"

Activism in the 1950s and Early 60s

Pete Seeger was falsly convicted for contempt of congress in 1961. He spent a year in jail before the conviction was eventuially overturned. The charge stemmed from an inident that occured six years earlier in 1955 when Seeger refused to divluge personal information to the since-disbanded House committe on un-American activities. .

On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) where he refused to name personal and political associations stating it would violate his First Amendment rights... "I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this." Seeger's refusal to testify led to a March 26, 1957 indictment for contempt of Congress; for some years, he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York. He was convicted in a jury trial in March 1961, and sentenced to a year in jail, but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

Vietnam War-Era Activism

Seeger satirically attacked then-President Lyndon Johnson with his 1966 recording, on the album Dangerous Songs!?, of Len Chandler's children's song, "Beans in My Ears". Beyond Chandler's lyrics, Seeger said that "Mrs. Jay's little son Alby" had "beans in his ears", which, as the lyrics imply, ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them. To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War the phrase implied that "Alby Jay" was a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ", and sarcastically suggested "that must explain why he doesn't respond to the protests against his war policies".

Seeger attracted wider attention starting in 1967 with his song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy", about a captain — referred to in the lyrics as "the big fool" — who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II. In the face of arguments with the management of CBS about whether the song's political weight was in keeping with the usually light-hearted entertainment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the final lines were "Every time I read the paper/those old feelings come on/We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on." And it was not seriously contested that much of the audience would grasp Seeger's allegorical casting of Johnson as the "big fool" and the Vietnam War the foreseeable danger. Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show, after wide publicity, it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers' Brothers show in the following January.

Environment

Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he founded in 1966. This organization has worked since then to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and worked to clean it. As part of that effort, the sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969 with its inaugural sail down the Hudson River to South Street Seaport Museum in New York City. The sloop regularly sails the river with volunteer and professional crew members, primarily conducting environmental education programs for school groups. The Great Hudson River Revival (aka Clearwater Festival) is an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Hudson at Croton Point Park. This festival grew out of early fundraising concerts arranged by Seeger and friends to raise money to pay for Clearwater's construction.

File:Pete Seeger Clearwater.jpg

Seeger's album Clearwater Classics. The title alludes to his work with the Clearwater group, working to clean the Hudson River.

Awards

Seeger has been the recipient of many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including :

• The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1993)
• The National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994)
• Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Honor (1994)
• The Harvard Arts Medal (1996)
• Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1996)
• Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 1996 for his record "Pete" (1997)
• The Felix Varela Medal, Cuba's highest honor for "his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism" (1999)
• The Schneider Family Book Award for his children's picture book "The Deaf Musicians." (2007)
• The Eugene V. Debs Award (1979)

There is also currently a petition being circulated to persuade the Norwegian Nobel Committee to nominate Seeger for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Quotes

From Seeger

• "I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other."
• "My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologize [in his recent book] for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader."
• "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."
• "Plagiarism is the basis of all culture." Seeger quoting his father.
• "Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple."
• "Some may find them [songs] merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I."
• "Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first."

From others

Jim Musselman (founder of Appleseed Recordings), longtime friend and record producer for Pete Seeger:

"He was one of the few people who invoked the First Amendment in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Everyone else had said the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination, and then they were dismissed. What Pete did, and what some other very powerful people who had the guts and the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the committee and say, "I'm gonna invoke the First Amendment, the right of freedom of association...." "

"...I was actually in law school when I read the case of Seeger v. United States, and it really changed my life, because I saw the courage of what he had done and what some other people had done by invoking the First Amendment, saying, "We're all Americans. We can associate with whoever we want to, and it doesn't matter who we associate with." That's what the founding fathers set up democracy to be. So I just really feel it's an important part of history that people need to remember."

References

• Seeger, Pete. How to Play the Five-String Banjo, 3rd edition. New York: Music Sales Corporation, 1969. ISBN 0-8256-0024-3.
• Dunaway, David K., How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger, McGraw Hill (1981), DaCapo (1990), Villard (2008) ISBN 0-07-018150-0, ISBN 0-07-018151-9, ISBN 0-306-80399-2, ISBN 0-345-50608-1.
• Wilkinson, Alec, "The Protest Singer: Pete Seeger and American folk music", The New Yorker, April 17 2006, p. 44–53.
• Zollo, Paul (7 January 2005). "Pete Seeger Reflects On His Legendary Songs". GRAMMY Magazine.

External links

• PBS's American Masters site for "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song"
• Pete Seeger Appreciation Page
• "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song" documentary filmmaker Jim Brown interview on The Alcove with Mark Molaro, 2007
• "To Hear Your Banjo Play" a movie at archive.org narrated by Pete Seeger
• "We Shall Overcome: An Hour With Legendary Folk Singer & Activist Pete Seeger" (Democracy Now!)
• Folk Banjo inspired by Pete Seeger
• On Point Radio : "The World According to Pete Seeger"
• "Pete Seeger Is 86", Studs Terkel, The Nation, May 16, 2005
• Folk Legend Pete Seeger Looks Back - National Public Radio interview
• Peter Seeger interviewed by Australian composer Andrew Ford (MP3 of interview first broadcast in 1999)
• Essay on Seeger's Americanism by Seeger's friend, the author Edward J. Renehan Jr.
• Pete Seeger, Folk Singer and Song Writer by Thomas Blair. Part of a series of Notable Americans
• 1 Hour Internet Radio Interview with Pete Seeger August, 2007. Pete talks about his experiences dealing with the music industry over his long career, trying to get by as a young artist, music in the public domain and the world in general.
• "Pete Seeger, una leyenda" by Gani Jakupi (comic book in Spanish)

See also

• Tom Winslow