Remembering folk legend Pete Seeger
Outspoken singer ran afoul of McCarthyism
ALBANY, N.Y. — Pete Seeger — the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage — died Monday at the age of 94.
Seeger’s grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days. Family members were with him.
“He was chopping wood 10 days ago,” Cahill-Jackson recalled.
With his lanky frame, useworn banjo and full white beard, Seeger was an iconic figure in folk music who outlived his peers. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and wrote or co-wrote If I Had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, Where Have All the Flowers Gone and Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.
He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his fingers poised over the strings of his banjo.
In 2011, Seeger walked more than three kilometres down the streets of Manhattan with hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters swirling around him holding signs and guitars. With a simple gesture — extending his friendship — Seeger gave the protesters and even their opponents a moment of brotherhood the short-lived Occupy movement sorely needed.
When a policeman approached, Tao RodriguezSeeger said at the time he feared his grandfather would be hassled.
“He reached out and shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, this is beautiful,’” Rodriguez-Seeger said. “That really did it for me. The cops recognized what we were about. They wanted to help our march. They actually wanted to protect our march because they saw something beautiful. It’s very hard to be anti-something beautiful.”
That was a message Seeger spread his entire life.
With The Weavers, a quartet organized in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group — Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman — churned out hit recordings of Goodnight Irene, Tzena, Tzena and On Top of Old Smokey.
Seeger also was credited with popularizing We Shall Overcome, which he printed in his publication People’s Song in 1948.
He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from “will” to “shall,” which he said “opens up the mouth better.”
“Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger,” Arlo Guthrie once said.
His musical career was always braided tightly with political activism; he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.
His return to television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist.
By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honours.
Official Washington sang along when it lionized him at the Kennedy Center in 1994. Then-president Bill Clinton hailed him as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them.”
Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honoured him with We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.