Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer, political activist, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 50s as a member of the Weavers, most notably the 1950 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. However, as a victim of the blacklist, his career as a mainstream performer was seriously curtailed. In the 1960s, however, he re-emerged on the public scene as a pioneer of protest music in support of international disarmament and civil rights and, more recently, as a tireless activist for environmental causes.

As a composer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), 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 was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.

Family and personal life

Pete Seeger, nearly 89, photographed in March of 2008 with his friend, the writer/musician Ed Renehan.

Seeger was born in New York City, USA. His father, Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., was a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, investigating both American folk and non-Western music. His mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a classical violinist and teacher. His parents divorced when Seeger was five. His stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was one of the most significant female composers of the 20th century. His eldest brother, Charles Seeger III, was an astronomer, and his next older brother, John Seeger, taught for years at the Dalton School in Manhattan. His uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted poet, was killed during the First World War. His half sister, Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, was married for many years to British folk singer, Ewan MacColl. Half-brother Mike Seeger went on to form the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, was married to Pete's other half-sister, singer Penny Seeger.

In 1943 Pete 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, Daniel, 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. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the PBS documentary Pete Seeger: Power of Song

Seeger lives in the hamlet of Dutchess Junction in the Town of Fishkill, NY and remains very active politically, 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

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. Though Pete Seeger's parents were both professional musicians, they didn't press him to play an instrument. On his own, Pete gravitated to the ukelele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it, while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Then in 1936, while he traveling with his father (who was at that time a director of Roosevelt's Farm Resettlement program), Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and his life was changed forever. For the next four years, he devoted much of his time to trying to master the instrument.

Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but, as he became increasingly involved with radical politics and folk music, his grades suffered. He dropped out of college in 1938. He dreamed of a career in journalism took courses in art. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing (still with four-string banjo) at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. Then, following a summer stint of touring with The Vagabond Puppeteers, a radical traveling puppet theater inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico , he took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to sift through commercial "race" and "hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented traditional folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union, of which his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938-53). Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's three-times weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940-41) alongside of Josh White, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast, which made news when it performed in March, 1941, at a command performance at the White House organized by Eleanor Roosevelt, called, "An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers" , before an audience that included the Secretaries of War, Treasury, and the Navy, among other bigwigs. During the war, Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin.

Pete Seeger, 1944. Eleanor Roosevelt is center.

Spanish Civil War songs

Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, viewed by many as a rehearsal for World War II. In 1943, as a member of a floating group called The Union Boys (who included Tom Glazer, and many former Almanac Singers), he recorded an album of 78s called Songs of the Lincoln Brigade on Moe Asch's Stinson Label. This included such songs as "There's a Valley in Spain called Jarama", and "Quinte brigada". This collection was later issued by Asch on a Folkways LP called Songs of the Lincoln and International Brigages, with songs from another Stinson album, Six Songs for Democracy, sung by Ernst Busch and chorus, which included "Peat Bog Soldiers" (composed in by prisoners of German concentrations camps in 1930s Germany), "Los cuatro generales",and songs by Hans Eisler and Bertold Brecht.

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 recordings

As a self-described "split tenor" (between an alto and a tenor), he was a founding member of several folk groups. These included the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, and the Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman.

The Weavers had a string of major hits in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before being blacklisted in the McCarthy Era. Their number # 1 hit of 1950 was "Good Night Irene". Others included "So Long It's Been Good to Know You", "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", "Tzena Tzena", and "Wimoweh", to name a few. They also performed briefly in a reunion tour in 1955, which produced a hit version of Merle Travis's "Sixteen Tons". In The Power of Music, Seeger claims he resigned from the Weavers because the three other band members had agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial.

Soloing

During the sixties Seeger became known for anti-war songs as such as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (co-written with Joe Hickerson), "Turn, Turn, Turn," adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and "We Shall Overcome" (an arrangement of a spiritual by Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School, Frank Hamilton, Seeger, and Guy Carawan that became the anthem of the civil rights movement). Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village, as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine and for his columns in Sing Out!. To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers, he coined the phrase "Woody's children", alluding to his associate and traveling companion, Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. This urban folk revival movement, a continuation of the activist tradition of the thirties and forties, used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics as tools of social change. Ultimately, it traces its descent to the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies' Little Red Song Book compiled by Swedish-born union organizer Joe Hill (1879-1915). The Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie's, who was known to carry it around.

During the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger toured college campuses extensively. At this time, he increasingly accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin associated with Lead Belly. Seeger's distinctive custom-made guitars had a triangular soundhole. He combined the long scale length (approximately 28") and capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop-D (DADGBE) tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks. Seeger's adoption of the twelve-string guitar doubtless inspired other folk performers to follow his example, ensuring its survival and contributing to its popularity and in the 1960s and 70s.

Pete Seeger made two tours of Australia, the first in 1963. At the time of this tour, his single Little Boxes (written by Malvina Reynolds) 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 One Word We. It enjoyed a long and sold-out season at the New Theatre in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown.

The long television blacklist of Seeger ended in the mid-60s when he hosted a folk music television show called Rainbow Quest (broadcast regionally, not nationally), 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, Rev. Gary Davis, Donovan, Shawn Phillips and many others. Thirty-nine 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.

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.

An early booster of Bob Dylan, Seeger, who was one of the Board of Directors of the Newport Folk Festival, became upset over the extremely loud and distorted electric sound that Dylan, instigated by his manager Albert Grossman, who was another Folk Festival Board member, brought into the 1965 Newport Festival during his performance of "Maggie's Farm". Tensions between Grossman and the other board members were running very high (at one point reportedly there was a scuffle and blows were briefly exchanged between Grossman and Board member Alan Lomax). There are several versions of exactly what actually happened during Dylan's performance. and some claimed that Pete Seeger actually tried to disconnect the equipment. Seeger has been portrayed by Dylan's publicists as a folk "purist" who was one of the main opponents to Dylan's "going electric", but when 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.

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.

As of 2008, 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–April 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 folk songs associated with Seeger's repertoire, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (some reviewers noted that, oddly, the album contained no songs actually composed by Seeger). Springsteen performed a series of concerts based on those sessions, to sellout crowds. Springsteen had previously recorded the Seeger favorite, "We Shall Overcome," on the 1998 "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" tribute album.

During the summer of 2008, Seeger is playing a limited number of dates throughout Canada and the U.S. with his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Guy Davis. In September, Appleseed Recordings will release "At 89," Seeger's first studio album in 12 years.

Activism

Pre-1950

In 1936, at the age of 17 Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League, then at the height of its popularity and influence, and, in 1941, he became a member of the adult version of the Communist Party (see #Quotes From Seeger), drifting away from it after the war. In the Spring of 1941, the twenty-one year old Seeger performed as a member of the Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Butch and Bess Lomax Hawes, and Lee Hays. They cut three albums of 78s on the Keynote label, Songs for John Doe (released in May, 1941), the Talking Union, and an album of sea chanteys. The songs in Songs for John Doe (in which Josh White and Sam Gary joined the Almanacs, and which contained such lines as, "It wouldn't be much thrill to die for Du Pont in Brazil") were very anti-corporation and anti-Roosevelt. Their anti-war tone reflected the Moscow Party line after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which maintained the war was "phony" and a mere pretext for big American corporations (many of whom had supported and helped to re-arm Hitler's Germany as a bulwark against Communism) to get Hitler to to attack Soviet Russia, a line of argument that Seeger has said he believed to be true at the time. A June 16, 1941, review in Time magazine, which had become very interventionist, denounced the Almanacs' John Doe, accusing it of scrupulously echoing "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J. P. Morgan war". Roosevelt, when the album was shown to him, consoled himself with the observation, which proved to be correct, that very few people would ever hear it. At that point, the U.S. had not yet entered the war but was energetically re-arming, and blacks were barred from employment in defense plants, a situation that angered African Americans and white progressives. Black union leaders A. Philip Randoph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste began planning huge march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and to urge desegregation of the American Armed forces. The march, which many regard as the first manifestation of the Civil Rights Movement, was canceled after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (The Fair Employment Act) of June 25, 1941. This Presidential act diffused black anger considerably, although the US army still refused to desegregate, declining to participate in what it called "social engineering". Roosevelt's order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union. The Communist Party immediately directed its members to get behind the war effort, and it also forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war. Copies of Songs for John Doe were removed from sale, and the remaining inventory was reportedly destroyed. Only a few copies exist to this day. The Almanac Singers' Talking Union album, on the other hand, was reissued as an LP by Folkways (FH 5285A)in 1955 and is still available. The following year the Almanacs issued an album in support of Roosevelt and the war effort, Dear Mr. President. Their detractors, however, have not allowed anyone to forget the repudiated Songs for John Doe.

Seeger served in the US Army in the Pacific. He was trained as an airplane mechanic, but was 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 and others established People's Songs, conceived as a nationwide organization with branches on both coasts that was designed to "Create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People" With Pete Seeger as its director, People's Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt's former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a third party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket. Despite having attracted enormous crowds nationwide, however, Wallace only won in New York City, and, in the red-baiting frenzy that followed, he was excoriated (as Roosevelt had not been) for accepting the help in his campaign of Communists and fellow travelers such as Seeger and Paul Robeson.

1950s and early 1960s

In the fifties, and indeed, consistently throughout his life, Seeger continued his principled support of civil and labor rights, racial equality, international understanding, and anti-militarism (all of which had characterized the Wallace campaign) and he continued to believe that songs could help people achieve these goals. With the ever-growing revelations of Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, however, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Communism. In his PBS biography, Seeger said he "drifted away" from the CPUSA beginning in 1949 but remained friends with some who did not leave it, though he argued with them about it.

On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of court, Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment (which asserted that his testimony might be self incriminating) and instead (as the Hollywood Ten had done) refused to name personal and political associations on the grounds that this 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 of contempt of court in March 1961, and sentenced to 10 years in jail (to be served simultaneously), but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

In 2007, Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin, "Big Joe Blues", and also a letter to historian Ron Radosh, a lapsed Communist who has been a neoconservative critic of Seeger, apologizing for being blind to Stalin's failings. "I think you’re right," wrote Seeger, "I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R [in 1965]". On the other hand, he has also said he does not regret the songs he has sung and the books he has written, and continues to be a communist with a small "c".

Vietnam War era

A longstanding opponent of the arms race and of the Vietnam War, 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." 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.

Inspired by Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled "This machine kills fascists,"^photo Seeger's banjo was emblazoned with the motto "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender."^photo

Environment

Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he co-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 from Maine to South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, and thence to the Hudson River. 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.

Seeger wrote and performed "That Lonesome Valley" about the then-polluted Hudson River in 1969, and his band members also wrote and performed songs commemorating the Clearwater.

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."
• "There is hope for the world." - in Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

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."

See also

• Tao Rodríguez-Seeger - grandson
• Tom Winslow - former band member

References

• Forbes, Linda C. "Pete Seeger on Environmental Advocacy, Organizing, and Education in the Hudson River Valley: An Interview with the Folk Music Legend, Author and Storyteller, Political and Environmental Activist, and Grassroots Organizer." Organization & Environment, 17, No. 4, 2004: 513-522.
• 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. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Gardner, Elysa. "Seeger: A 'Power' in music, politics." USA Today, February 27, 2008. p. 8D.

External links

• PBS's American Masters site for "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song"
• Pete Seeger Appreciation Page, a site originally created by Jim Capaldi
• "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)
• 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.
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• Matthews, Scott (2008-08-06). "John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival". Southern Spaces.