He lived a long life, but I’m sad to see Pete Seeger go anyway.
He was one of the good guys. We have too few of them.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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There are no words for the sadness this news brings but he did such a tireless job of gathering our folk roots over his many years and putting them to good use to sway generations toward a common good and then there’s his inspiration for many, like Springsteen to carry his music and message forward.
Watching him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Springsteen, This Land is Your Land for Obama’s inaugural was precious.
Tears.
Perhaps a time to yet again put Seeger’s words to good use at tonight’s SOTU “This Land is Your Land” a good place to start and finish. The middle would be well served by “We shall overcome”…
The inauguration concert is one of my favorite memories of him. We also enjoyed seeing him at the Clearwater Festival with boran2, ask, and curly a few years back.
The way he put his music to use in inspiring people to support the causes dear to him, the breadth of those causes, and that he did it for so many years without tiring, is truly amazing. I was sad when his wife died last year, because I knew his passing was coming and it’s a shame for the world to lose such a shining light.
Springsteen tribute with backstory of their taking the stage at the inauguration.
My first thoughts about losing Pete Seeger weren’t thoughts at all, but tears running down my cheeks.
My next thought was of Pete Seeger at Lincoln Memorial, so happy that he lived to see Obama as president, and so very happy that Barack had honored him so publicly, preserved for all time.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get another handkerchief from my drawer.
He lived a good, honest long life, fighting the principled fight til the end. Nothing really to be sad about as he served out his full term honorably.
I recall watching his 1968 Smothers Bros tv appearance at the time and learning as a kid about something called the blacklist. Apparently the Bros had to get permission from CBS before he would be allowed on the show.
He sang “Knee Deep in the Big Muddy–and the Big Old Fool Keeps Pushing On”. The BOF being an obvious reference to LBJ.
Pete Seeger was a giant among men.
He actually was a communist in the midst of the Cold War.
Love his music, saw him in a live show years ago here in Pittsburgh.
But I can’t say unequivocally that he was, at all points in his life, one of the good guys.
“I got out in ”49, though . . . I should have left much earlier. It was stupid of me not to . . . I didn”t realize the danger the world was in”
Apparently even some people that populate left of center blogs still don’t get that and remain stuck in a Cold War world mentality.
@ Philo how useless a judgemental comment!
So tell me, unequivocally, who you would call one of the (at all times) good guys?
Your bias against the term “communist” fails to understand the meaning of the word and proclaims it as a label with a capital C. No different than the red-baiting of McCarthy.
Does it also work in reverse? Does the other capital C label- “Christian”- excuse or condemn pious jim crow segregationists and abortion doctor killers?
Pete Seeger’s minor change of “I will” to “We shall” really changed the tenor and meaning of that song.
I don’t know how the “folk song revival” happened, but I know that Pete Seeger, Josh White, Lead Belly, and a bunch of blacklisted artists nurtured something that sneaked out in the Mitch Miller Show and then the ABC show Hootenanny. The music first reach a market through crew-cut groups like the Kingston Trio, “Caribbean” musicians like Harry Belafonte, country singers like Tennessee Ernie Ford (what the heck did you think Sixteen Tons was about but mineworkers).
I don’t know when it happened elsewhere, but in 1963 the full folk revival hit. I was in high school and it was big. And the songs were traditional, not rock; parents pushed the heck out of it. Church groups had hootenannies and the kids who played guitar got to show off their musical knowledge of the latest Joan Baez, Kingston Trio, and Peter, Paul, & Mary tracks. And Methodist Youth Fellowships (and even Baptist Young Peoples Unions) in South Carolina in addition to singing Kum Bah Yah would also sing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, “We Shall Overcome”, “If I Had a Hammer”. And after listening to those emotionally powerful songs over and over–it was one of the big fads my junior and senior years of high school–some of the words began to strike home.
“How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?”
“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
And then you notice the bylines on the album. One is by Bob Dylan and the other is by Pete Seeger. You notice that these folks also have complete albums, and you are initiated into some very familiar patriotic thinking that doesn’t pull the punch at the end. You start thinking that there is no “except for black people” in the stirring words of the opening of Declaration of Independence. You start noticing the dynamics of a nation formed by war. The rigid ideological framework of Southern segregation, brought to visibility by the civil rights movement, becomes something to pick apart, examine its assumptions, sort through, and come out determining that this should not continue into the future society of the South. The rigid ideological framework of the Cold War, which demands a gratuitous stance of anti-communism in order to utter any criticism at all of the status quo, that framework crumbles in the knowledge that thermonuclear war is a decision, not an inevitability.
Pete Seeger was at the core of all those trends and that self-examination that released minds in the 1960s.
Pete Seeger raised questions that truly changed the direction of my life.
I might not be one of his proteges, but he was definitely and important mentor at an important time.
Ninety-four years. Well done. Our sole defense, our only weapon, is a life lived with integrity. I forget who said that, but it speaks to the power Pete Seeger.
And he didn’t turn down invitations to sing, as he told the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The song goes on.
I was just thinking how in the 60’s the folk heroes raised an awareness that opened the door for Martin Luther King to speak to.
The Beatles may have helped ‘bring down that wall’ for Reagan but Pete Seeger played a big role in tearing down America’s walls ‘one teaspoon’ at a time as he was fond of saying.
Hootenanny: I recall spending a number of hours ca 1963 watching in fascination — Saturday nights? Unlike the overproduced, over-edited “live in concert” stuff that gets shown today, Hoot had a natural live feel to it — not enhanced or spiced up audience reactions, a fair sense of almost being there, non-slick performances.
Folk music was huge in the early 60s — then in early ’64 the Beatles arrived and folk music was suddenly passé. And instead of the relatively organic fresh-from-the-farm Hootenanny, we Young People were served up the slick overproduced “live before a tv studio audience” canned shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo. Lip synching, mostly, substituting for live.
ABC Hootenanny blacklisted Pete Seeger. In response Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary would not appear. So later when that was known, it added a little transgressive thrill to listening to Pete Seeger’s records.
Figgers. All those networks were the same when it came to corp censorship. Things haven’t changed either.
Pete Seeger Dies: Where Have All the Folk Legends Gone?
I see that Arlo Guthrie has been asked by the family to write the obituary. He has a nice piece up about how he was talking to Pete last night asking him about his thoughts, and then the beautiful song “How can I keep from singing?”
I am struck. By how much of my view of what is right and good about America came from Seeger songs I Hearn as a kid.