Music
Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94
Pete Seeger: A Life Lived in the Power of Song
Pete Seeger was quite a character whose desire to help out the less fortunate sometimes led him into awful blind alleys and embarrassment, such as his being used by Al Sharpton et. al. in the Trewana Brawley hoax...I remember reading about how Seeger at the time had just penned his "Ballad of Trewana Brawley" only with the exposure of all the hoax ( and Sharpton's elaborate slander of the police involved in the case, which he always knew to be false) left a rather stunned Seeger telling the NY TV reporters that he hoped to salvage the song somehow anyway, because if it was about something that didn't happen, it was about something that COULD have happened ...a rather sad and awfully lame reaction to the whole affair. I noticed that after the Brawley case Seeger retreated from the political stage to a large extent and stuck with his Hudson River water clean up activities.
Personally, however, I will remember Seeger for all his great songs and compassionate spirit, especially the ballad "Turn, Turn, Turn" which still speaks to us today...
via Reuters
Pete Seeger,
the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an
American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as
both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He
was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.
His
death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he
died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Mr.
Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10
to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for
contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities
Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.
For
Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and
where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.
In
his hearty tenor, Mr. Seeger, a beanpole of a man who most often played
12-string guitar or five-string banjo, sang topical songs and
children’s songs, humorous tunes and earnest anthems, always encouraging
listeners to join in. His agenda paralleled the concerns of the
American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s,
for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and
for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. “We Shall
Overcome,” which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil
rights anthem.
Mr.
Seeger was a prime mover in the folk revival that transformed popular
music in the 1950s. As a member of the Weavers, he sang hits including
Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” — which reached No. 1 — and “If I Had a Hammer,” which he wrote with the group’s Lee Hays. Another of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” became an antiwar standard. And in 1965, the Byrds had a No. 1 hit with a folk-rock version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Mr. Seeger’s setting of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Mr.
Seeger was a mentor to younger folk and topical singers in the ‘50s and
‘60s, among them Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who
founded Sweet Honey in the Rock. Decades later, Bruce Springsteen drew
the songs on his 2006 album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,”
from Mr. Seeger’s repertoire of traditional music about a turbulent
American experience, and in 2009 he performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land
Is Your Land” with Mr. Seeger at the Obama inaugural.
At a Madison Square Garden concert celebrating Mr. Seeger’s 90th
birthday, Mr. Springsteen introduced him as “a living archive of
America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and
culture to nudge history along.”
Although
he recorded more than 100 albums, Mr. Seeger distrusted commercialism
and was never comfortable with the idea of stardom. He invariably tried
to use his celebrity to bring attention and contributions to the causes
that moved him, or to the traditional songs he wanted to preserve.
Mr.
Seeger saw himself as part of a continuing folk tradition, constantly
recycling and revising music that had been honed by time.
During
the McCarthy era Mr. Seeger’s political affiliations, including
membership in the Communist Party in the 1940s, led to his being
blacklisted and later indicted for contempt of Congress. The pressure
broke up the Weavers, and Mr. Seeger disappeared from television until
the late 1960s. But he never stopped recording, performing and listening
to songs from ordinary people. Through the decades, his songs have
become part of America’s folklore.
“My
job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in
this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”
Peter
Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, to Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and
Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, a concert violinist. His parents later
divorced.
He
began playing the ukulele while attending Avon Old Farms, a private
boarding school in Connecticut. His father and his stepmother, the
composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, were collecting and transcribing rural
American folk music, as were folklorists like John and Alan Lomax. He
heard the five-string banjo, which would become his main instrument,
when his father took him to a square-dance festival in North Carolina.
Young
Pete became enthralled by rural traditions. “I liked the strident vocal
tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing,” he is quoted in “How Can I
Keep From Singing,” a biography by David Dunaway. “The words of the
songs had all the meat of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was
not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.”
Planning
to be a journalist, Mr. Seeger attended Harvard, where he founded a
radical newspaper and joined the Young Communist League. After two
years, he dropped out and came to New York City, where Mr. Lomax
introduced him to the blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead
Belly. Mr. Lomax also helped Mr. Seeger find a job cataloging and
transcribing music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library
of Congress.
Mr.
Seeger met Mr. Guthrie, a songwriter who shared his love of vernacular
music and agitprop ambitions, in 1940, when they performed at a benefit
concert for migrant California workers. Traveling across the United
States with Mr. Guthrie, Mr. Seeger picked up some of his style and
repertory. He also hitchhiked and hopped freight trains by himself,
trading and learning songs.
When
he returned to New York later in 1940, Mr. Seeger made his first
albums. He, Millard Lampell and Mr. Hays founded the Almanac Singers,
who performed union songs and, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union,
antiwar songs, following the Communist Party line. Mr. Guthrie soon
joined the group.
During World War II
the Almanac Singers’s repertory turned to patriotic, antifascist songs,
bringing them a broad audience, including a prime-time national radio
spot. But the group’s earlier antiwar songs, the target of an F.B.I.
investigation, came to light, and the group’s career plummeted.
Before
the group completely dissolved, however, Mr. Seeger was drafted in 1942
and assigned to a unit of performers. He married Toshi-Aline Ohta while
on furlough in 1943.
When
he returned from the war he founded People’s Songs Inc., which
published political songs and presented concerts for several years
before going bankrupt. He also started his nightclub career, performing
at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Mr. Seeger and Paul
Robeson toured with the campaign of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party
presidential candidate, in 1948.
Mr.
Seeger invested $1,700 in 17 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River
in Beacon and began building a log cabin there in the late 1940s. In
1949, Mr. Seeger, Mr. Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman started
working together as the Weavers. They were signed to Decca Records by
Gordon Jenkins, the company’s music director and an arranger for Frank
Sinatra. With Mr. Jenkins’s elaborate orchestral arrangements, the group
recorded a repertoire that stretched from “If I Had a Hammer” to a
South African song, “Wimoweh” (the title was Mr. Seeger’s mishearing of
“Mbube,” the name of a South African hit by Solomon Linda), to an
Israeli soldiers’ song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” to a cleaned-up version
of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” Onstage, they also sang more pointed
topical songs.
In
1950 and 1951 the Weavers were national stars, with hit singles and
engagements at major nightclubs. Their hits included “Kisses Sweeter
Than Wine” and Mr. Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” and
they sold an estimated four million singles and albums.
But
“Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet listing performers with
suspected Communist ties, appeared in June 1950 and listed Mr. Seeger,
although by then he had quit the Communist Party. He would later
criticize himself for having not left the party sooner, though he
continued to describe himself as a “communist with a small ‘c.’ ”
Despite
the Weavers’ commercial success, by the summer of 1951 the “Red
Channels” citation and leaks from F.B.I. files had led to the
cancellation of television appearances. In 1951, the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee investigated the Weavers for sedition. And in
February 1952, a former member of People’s Songs testified before the
House Un-American Activities Committee that three of the four Weavers
were members of the Communist Party.
As
engagements dried up the Weavers disbanded, though they reunited
periodically in the mid-1950s. After the group recorded an advertisement
for Lucky Strike cigarettes, Mr. Seeger left, citing his objection to
promoting tobacco use.
Shut
out of national exposure, Mr. Seeger returned primarily to solo
concerts, touring college coffeehouses, churches, schools and summer
camps, building an audience for folk music among young people. He
started to write a long-running column for the folk-song magazine Sing
Out! And he recorded prolifically for the independent Folkways label,
singing everything from children’s songs to Spanish Civil War anthems.
In
1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
where he testified, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done
anything of any conspiratorial nature.” He also stated: “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.”
Mr. Seeger offered to sing the songs mentioned by the congressmen who questioned him. The committee declined.
Mr.
Seeger was indicted in 1957 on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He
was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison, but the next
year an appeals court dismissed the indictment as faulty. After the
indictment, Mr. Seeger’s concerts were often picketed by the John Birch
Society and other rightist groups. “All those protests did was sell
tickets and get me free publicity,” he later said. “The more they
protested, the bigger the audiences became.”
By
then, the folk revival was prospering. In 1959, Mr. Seeger was among
the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. The Kingston Trio’s version
of Mr. Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” reached the Top 40 in
1962, soon followed by Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a
Hammer,” which rose to the Top 10.
Mr.
Seeger was signed to a major label, Columbia Records, in 1961, but he
remained unwelcome on network television. “Hootenanny,” an early-1960s
show on ABC that capitalized on the folk revival, refused to book Mr.
Seeger, causing other performers (including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and
Peter, Paul and Mary) to boycott it. “Hootenanny” eventually offered to
present Mr. Seeger if he would sign a loyalty oath. He refused.
He
toured the world, performing and collecting folk songs, in 1963, and
returned to serenade civil rights advocates, who had made a rallying
song of his “We Shall Overcome.”
Like
many of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “We Shall Overcome” had convoluted
traditional roots. It was based on old gospel songs, primarily “I’ll
Overcome,” a hymn that striking tobacco workers had sung on a picket
line in South Carolina. A slower version, “We Will Overcome,” was
collected from one of the workers, Lucille Simmons, by Zilphia Horton,
the musical director of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn.,
which trained union organizers.
Ms.
Horton taught it to Mr. Seeger, and her version of “We Will Overcome”
was published in the People’s Songs newsletter. Mr. Seeger changed “We
will” to “We shall” and added verses (“We’ll walk hand in hand”). He
taught it to the singers Frank Hamilton, who would join the Weavers in
1962, and Guy Carawan, who became musical director at Highlander in the
‘50s. Mr. Carawan taught the song to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee at its founding convention.
The
song was copyrighted by Mr. Seeger, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Carawan and Ms.
Horton. “At that time we didn’t know Lucille Simmons’s name,” Mr. Seeger
wrote in his 1993 autobiography, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” All
of the song’s royalties go to the “We Shall Overcome” Fund,
administered by what is now the Highlander Research and Education
Center, which provides grants to African-Americans organizing in the
South.
Along
with many elders of the protest-song movement, Mr. Seeger felt betrayed
when Bob Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud
electric blues band. Reports emerged that Mr. Seeger had tried to cut
the power cable with an ax, but witnesses including the producer George
Wein and the festival’s production manager, Joe Boyd (later a leading
folk-rock record producer), said he did not go that far. (An ax was
available, however. A group of prisoners had used it while singing a
logging song.)
As
the United States grew divided over the Vietnam War, Mr. Seeger wrote
“Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an antiwar song with the refrain “The big
fool says to push on.” He performed the song during a taping of “The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in September 1967, his return to network
television, but it was cut before the show was broadcast. After the
Smothers Brothers publicized the censorship, Mr. Seeger returned to
perform the song for broadcast in February 1968.
During
the late 1960s Mr. Seeger started an improbable project: a sailing ship
that would crusade for cleaner water on the Hudson River. Between other
benefit concerts he raised money to build the Clearwater, a 106-foot
sloop that was launched in June 1969 with a crew of musicians. The ship
became a symbol and a rallying point for antipollution efforts and
education.
In
May 2009, after decades of litigation and environmental activism led by
Mr. Seeger’s nonprofit environmental organization, Hudson River Sloop
Clearwater, General Electric began dredging sediment containing PCBs it
had dumped into the Hudson. Mr. Seeger and his wife also helped organize
a yearly summer folk festival named after the Clearwater.
In
the ‘80s and ‘90s Mr. Seeger toured regularly with Arlo Guthrie,
Woody’s son, and continued to lead singalongs and perform benefit
concerts. Recognition and awards arrived. He was elected to the
Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972, and in 1993 he was given a lifetime
achievement Grammy Award.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton handed him the National Medal of Arts,
America’s highest arts honor, given by the National Endowment for the
Arts. In 1999, he traveled to Cuba to receive the Order of Félix Varela,
Cuba’s highest cultural award, for his “humanistic and artistic work in
defense of the environment and against racism.”
In
1996, Mr. Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an
early influence. Arlo Guthrie, who paid tribute at the ceremony,
mentioned that the Weavers’ hit “Goodnight, Irene” reached No. 1, only
to add, “I can’t think of a single event in Pete’s life that is probably
less important to him.” Mr. Seeger made no acceptance speech, but he
did lead a singalong of “Goodnight, Irene,” flanked by Stevie Wonder,
David Byrne and members of the Jefferson Airplane.
Mr.
Seeger won Grammy Awards for best traditional folk album in 1997, for
the album “Pete,” and in 2009, for the album “At 89.” He also won a
Grammy in the children’s music category in 2011 for “Tomorrow’s
Children.”
Mr.
Seeger kept performing into the 21st century, despite a flagging voice;
audiences happily sang along more loudly. He celebrated his 90th
birthday, on May 3, 2009, at a Madison Square Garden concert — a benefit
for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater — with Mr. Springsteen, Dave
Matthews, John Mellencamp, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Roger McGuinn of the
Byrds, Emmylou Harris and dozens of other musicians paying tribute. In
August he was back in Newport for the 50th anniversary of the Newport
Folk Festival.
Mr.
Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died in 2013, days before the couple’s 70th
anniversary. Survivors include his son, Daniel; his daughters, Mika and
Tinya; a half-sister, Peggy; and six grandchildren, including the
musician Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, who performed with him at the Obama
inaugural. His half-brother Mike Seeger, a folklorist and performer who
founded the New Lost City Ramblers, died in 2009.
Through
the years, Mr. Seeger remained determinedly optimistic. “The key to the
future of the world,” he said in 1994, “is finding the optimistic
stories and letting them be known.”
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