[BwayDems] Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94

[Paula Diamond Roman]

Pete
Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94
New York Times, Jon Pareles, January 28, 2014 
 
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 on Monday in Manhattan. He was 94.
 
His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital,
was confirmed by his grandson Kitama Cahill Jackson.
 
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.
 
In 2007, Pete Seeger performed in Beacon,
N.Y. and spoke with The Times’s Andrew C. Revkin about climate change. Mr.
Seeger died on Monday at age 94.
 
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 commercial
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, N.Y., and began building a log
cabin there in the late 1940s. (He lived in Beacon for the rest of his life.)
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 set aside protest songs for
electric rock. When Mr. Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a
loud electric blues band, some listeners booed, and reports emerged that Mr.
Seeger had tried to cut the power cable with an ax. But witnesses including the
festival’s producer, George Wein, and 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.)
 
In later recountings, Mr. Seeger said he grew
angry because the music was so loud and distorted that he couldn’t hear the
words.
 
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, he was given a Kennedy Center Honor and 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. That 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; two half-sisters, Peggy, also a folk singer, and
Barbara; eight grandchildren, including Mr. Jackson and the musician Tao
Rodriguez-Seeger, who performed with him at the Obama inaugural; and four
great-grandchildren. 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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