The singalong revolutionary the White House couldn’t crush
As folk king Pete Seeger dies aged 94
HE ONCE tried to take an axe to the power cables of Bob Dylan’s backing band in his fury at the electrified noise, but Pete Seeger was otherwise the gentle king of folk music.
More than most, he inspired the hippy generation by wrapping his radical Leftwing views in delicate melodies and singalong tunes. His death at the age of 94 marks the passing of an era of popular music so different to today’s soulless and narcissistic products of TV talent shows.
For whatever you might think of Seeger’s sometimes sanctimonious politics, they weren’t some marketing gimmick but a way of life and, so he believed, a tool for change.
The lanky American singer- songwriter gave passionate support to striking unions in the Forties, marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King and had his career almost wiped out by a vengeful establishment after he stood up to the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts in the Fifties.
For that achievement he was treated with almost godlike status by liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, BBC Radio 4 led its 8am news bulletin with his death yesterday even though one wonders how many of its listeners had heard of him.
When Seeger and long-time admirer Bruce Springsteen were invited to sing the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land at Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration concert in 2009, fans saw it as the healing of an old wound after previous White House administrations tried to bury Seeger’s career.
The singers’ inclusion of a new verse attacking the notion of private property perfectly suited the happy-clappy ‘times are a changing’ mood.
A heroic figure to generations of musicians including Bob Dylan and Springsteen (who called him the ‘father of American folk music’), Seeger injected radical and pacifist views into most of his 70-year career of songwriting that reached a peak in the Fifties and produced more than 100 albums.
Invariably, he would urge his concert audiences to sing along, but it was the simple beauty of his acoustic melodies — played usually on his five-string banjo — for which he will be best remembered.
ALTHOUGH the titles do not trip off the tongue, many were made famous by other singers. There was Marlene Dietrich’s haunting rendition of Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone, inspired by a Ukrainian poem concerning the futility of men losing their lives in war. And there was Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season), a musicalised extract from the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes made famous by Sixties group The Byrds.
If I Had A Hammer was a freedom song chanted by U.S. civil rights marchers. It has since from Leonard eared radical WikiLeaks film Spock. been Nimoy, star anti- has covered Not Debbie chosen Star secrecy surprisingly, Trek’s by Reynolds it everyone as pointy- group their the to official Seeger And though was song. probably he didn’t the artist write most it, responsible protest song for We popularising Shall Overcome, the anthem of the Sixties AfricanAmerican civil rights movement and staple hymn of solidarity of every student or eco-warrior sit-in that has ever graced the planet.
His hit version of Little Boxes was an early satire of suburbia (the title being a reference to middle-class homes) and suburban values.
The brilliant humorist Tom Lehrer called it the ‘most sanctimonious song ever written’, but his criticism was drowned out by the gushing praise of liberal America.
Seeger also became a staple of right-minded school listening lists with a string of children’s albums.
The child of artistic New York parents, Seeger (who never claimed working-class roots) was educated at private boarding school and later at Harvard, dropping out in 1938 to ride a bicycle across the country. Like other Left-wingers bowled over by the apparent wonders of the Soviet Union, the wide- eyed Seeger became an apologist for Stalinism. Unlike many of those targeted by Senator Joe McCarthy’s hysterical Red-baiting campaign, Seeger made no secret of his communist sympathies. In 1942, when admiration for the Soviet Union was at its highest, he joined the Communist Party USA, having signed up to the Young Communist League as a 17-year-old. Though he insisted he was virulently anti-Nazi as a student in the Thirties, his group, the Almanac Singers, later put out a pro-isolationist album whose songs’ lyrics accused the then U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of pushing to side with Britain in World War II because he was a war-mongering lackey of Wall Street bankers. This was during the ‘honeymoon’ period between Hitler and Stalin. When Hitler later turned on his ally and invaded the Soviet Union, with other embarrassed communists Seeger found himself having to do an about-turn on the war. He had copies of the album removed from the shelves and the entire stock destroyed. The group made a new — prowar — album called Dear Mr President with the lyrics ‘So what I want is you to give me a gun/So we can hurry up and get the job done!’ Seeger served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific — playing his banjo to entertain the troops.
The singer met his future wife, a Japanese-American, in 1939 and they married four years later, moving to a log cabin without electricity or running water on the banks of the Hudson river in New York.
Although Seeger clearly made an exception in his anti-militarism for the fight against Hitler, he returned to his anti-war stance during the Cold War and Vietnam War, and emblazoned his banjo with the motto ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate And Forces It To Surrender’.
With his communist past and support for Left-wing causes, he was hauled before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 but refused to testify about his political sympathies. (He offered to sing the offending songs, but Congressmen declined). Seeger was given a one-year jail sentence for contempt of Congress, which was later overturned.
Even so, Seeger’s new group, The Weavers, were blackballed by radio stations and their concert bookings were cancelled or picketed by conservative protesters.
Seeger toured student campuses prolifically. Indeed, the Sixties hippy movement inevitably clutched the folk singer to its heart, and numerous musicians recorded versions of his songs as he toured the world.
Although when Bob Dylan — hailed as the young saviour of acoustic folk — appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud electric blues band, Seeger wasn’t the only member of the old guard who felt this was musical heresy.
Reports emerged that he tried to cut the band’s power cables with an axe, although some witnesses insisted it had only been a threat.
In later years, he attempted to rectify the one blind spot in his quest for social justice — his former enthusiasm for the Soviet Union.
By the Nineties, he explained that he had left the Moscow-controlled Communist Party in 1949 and insisted he was only a communist with a small ‘c’. He later apologised for ‘following the party line so slavishly’ and admitted he should have seen Stalin’s ‘cruelty’ earlier.
Still feeling guilty in 2007, he wrote an anti-Stalin song, The Big Joe Blues, and referring to an uncritical 1965 visit to the Soviet Union, wrote: ‘I think you’re right, I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in the USSR.’
But past errors never stopped Seeger from campaigning.
OVER the years, he championed almost as many causes as he had songs, from aiding small farmers and Native American tribes to opposing oil fracking and the big banks. His most cherished project was a local one — the building of a 106ft sloop, the Clearwater, that he filled with musicians and sailed up and down the Hudson River, campaigning against pollution.
Seeger’s 90th birthday was celebrated with a concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden with performances by Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez and Kris Kristofferson.
Even at 92 and leaning on two canes, he joined a solidarity march two years ago through New York as part of the anti- capitalist Occupy Wall Street campaign.
After his death on Monday, one fan compared him to St Francis of Assisi and even Jesus.
The British singer Billy Bragg said: ‘ Peter Seeger towered over the folk scene like a mighty redwood for 75 years. His songs will be sung wherever people struggle for their rights.’
Seeger himself would probably have been embarrassed by such eulogising and realised he was a divisive figure.
Perhaps his epitaph should be his testimony to the McCarthy hearings when he said: ‘I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.’
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