Pete Seeger: Folk music hero and political activist
1919-2014
PETE Seeger, who has died aged 94, was the protest singer and political activist variously described as the “godfather of folk” and “America’s tuning fork”.
Seeger was the first to concede that he was not the finest of singers, or even a great banjo player, neither did he consider himself a particularly gifted songwriter. Rather, he thought of himself as a facilitator of the tradition of radical songmaking. His great gift was as a communicator and he used it to maximum effect.
A major influence on Bob Dylan, Seeger was ubiquitous at folk festivals and political gatherings. Playing the five-string banjo and singing from a vast repertoire of songs, he expounded ideas of justice and freedom in a strong, clear voice. His appearances amounted to a roll call of the human rights conflicts of the 20th century.
Having begun his performing career at fundraisers for Depression-era economic migrants, he graduated to the integrated school movement of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. He was central to the civil rights struggle, a passionate anti-Vietnam War protester and, in old age, a committed environmentalist.
He also supported a variety of less high-profile causes, was a co-founder of People’s Songs (an organisation to “create, pro- mote and distribute songs of labour and the American people”) and helped to establish the Newport Folk Festival.
His political activism did not go unnoticed. In 1955, he was required, with Arthur Miller, to appear before the House Committee on un-American Activities to explain his “communist sympathies”. When he dramatically cited the First Amendment, he was jailed for contempt of Congress.
Although he was soon released, his songs with the group
Life has been easier on me than any lazy person like myself has the right to expect
The Weavers were banned on the radio and many of his concerts were cancelled. But he battled on, recording some of the most important protest ballads of the era, including Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Turn, Turn, Turn, We Shall Overcome and If I Had a Hammer.
A prolific songwriter who collected and adapted poems, religious texts, passages from literature and traditional ballads, Seeger considered himself no more than “a link in a chain”, extending the oral tradition by travelling the US as a trouba- dour. His credo was “If there’s a future, it won’t be because of big organisations, the church or movements, but tens of thousands of little miracles and little efforts”.
Seeger was born in Patterson, New York, on May 3 1919. His parents taught at the Juilliard School of Music, although he and his musically inclined siblings, Mike and Peggy, showed little interest in classical music.
He was educated at Avon Old Farms Boarding School in Connecticut, but his imagination was fired by a trip he made as a teenager to a square dance festival in North Carolina, where he “fell in love with the fivestring banjo rippling out a rhythm to one fascinating song after another. I liked the melodies, time-tested by generations of singers. Above all, I liked the words . . . they seemed straightforward, honest.”
Nursing a desire to become a political journalist, he went to Harvard but dropped out in his sophomore year. While working at the American Archive of Folk Song in New York, he taught himself the banjo, and the tall, slim balladeer became a familiar sight at protest rallies, county fairs and street parties.
On March 3 1940, he met Woody Guthrie at a “Grapes of Wrath” Californian migrant workers’ benefit concert. It was a date that, according to the singer Alan Lomax, could be described as “the birth of mod- ern folk music”. He became part of the loose collective called The Almanac Singers, which included Guthrie, Lomax and, periodically, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly.
In 1942, he was drafted and “shipped out to the west Pacific and put in charge of hospital entertainment”. He was demobbed as a corporal in 1945. Back in the US, he formed People’s Songs, a musicians’ union designed to bind folk singers and labour movements. But in the Cold War climate of fear and anti-communist paranoia, the labour unions were unwilling to be linked to radical folk singers.
Although he resigned his Communist Party membership in 1950, he observed 50 years later: “I still call myself a com- munist because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the church made of it. But if communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail.”
In 1948, he campaigned in the South alongside the Progressive Party presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, an experience he found deeply depressing. The following year, his car was attacked and his wife and child injured by shattered glass in the Peekskill Riot in New York.
Undeterred, he formed The Weavers with Lee Hays (with whom he wrote the optimistic paean to social change If I Had a Hammer), Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert. They enjoyed immediate success, topping the charts with Goodnight Irene and Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, and established Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land as part of US culture. He also found time to establish the Newport Folk Festival and sell out Carnegie Hall as a solo performer.
But when Senator McCarthy began his anti-communist “witch-hunts“, The Weavers were banned from appearing on radio and television and at countless venues. He was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Being forced to discuss his views and expose his associates, he claimed, would be a violation of his rights under the First Amendment.
When he was sentenced to a year’s jail for contempt of Congress, he expressed his belief in the redemptive power of music and offered to play for the court — an offer that was refused. In the event, he served only four days, but his blacklisting lasted 12 years.
Although kept off the air, Seeger performed at fairs and festivals, in parks, on campuses and street corners — wherever a collection, however small, of like-minded radicals congregated. He also wrote the definitive book How To Play The 5-String Banjo. During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, his performance at Carnegie Hall of We Shall Overcome— adapted from a Negro spiritual — not only announced the arrival of the movement in New York, but also became its standard.
Having recorded the seminal Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and Turn, Turn, Turn, Seeger found himself accorded god-like status among young Sixties radicals. The respect was not always returned, however. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan “went electric”, Seeger was horrified to hear music “so distorted you couldn’t hear the words” and shouted at the PA engineers to pull the plug. When they refused, he shouted: “If I had an axe, I’d cut the cable!”
A vocal anti-Vietnam War protester, he became a familiar figure alongside performers such as Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.
When his blacklisting was finally lifted, he celebrated by singing an anti-war song, Waist Deep in Big Muddy, which was promptly censored by the CBS television network. But, as a singer with a profound belief in the power of song (“I’d sing for the John Birch Society if they asked, which they haven’t”), he travelled to Vietnam to rally the troops’ morale.
As the Sixties drew to a close and optimism waned, he began to devote his energies to the environment.
Having been awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts and a Kennedy Centre Award, in 1996 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received the Harvard Arts Medal. The following year he won a Grammy award for best traditional folk album for Pete. In all, he recorded more than 100 albums.
In 1990, he said: “Life has been easier on me than any lazy person like myself has the right to expect.”
In 2009, at President Barack Obama’s inauguration concert, he joined Bruce Springsteen in performing This Land is Your Land.
In 1943, he married Toshi-Aline Ohta. She died in 2013 and he is survived by their son and two daughters. —