Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger has long been a hero of mine, as he should be to anyone who values the courage of one's convictions. PBS tends to show the documentary made about him--Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, whenever they have a beg-a-thon, and both the Philadelphia and New York affiliates ran it again last night. I still haven't seen it all the way through, but I think I've caught most of it in two or three viewings.

The film itself is a hagiography, and you're left wondering could any man be that selfless. Surely he must have kicked a dog once or twice, but hey, maybe not. What you do get from the film is how the guy has been a key element in the history of folk music in the twentieth century, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to the musicians of today (at the end of the film there's a nice shot of a concert at Carnegie Hall where he's singing Guantanamera with Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son, and Pete's own grandson, Tao Rodriquez-Seeger). You will also be left with the firm impression that Seeger always stuck to his principles, even when they seemed incredibly naive. Why? The guy has always been an optimist. When he was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to testify at the HUAC committee during the Red Scare, his son asks him if he was ever worried that he was going to go to jail. Seeger answers that he may be foolish, but he had the belief, deep down, that things like that didn't happen in America. He turned out to be right in this instance, as his conviction was overturned.

Seeger was son of a musicologist, and went for a while to Harvard, but after learning the banjo as a teenager that was all she wrote, and he ended up in The Almanack Singers with Woody Guthrie. Later he would be one of The Weavers, who had a huge hit with the Ledbelly song, Goodnight, Irene (thirteen weeks at number one). They played the fanciest nightclubs, but Seeger had been a communist, and that glory was short-lived (Seeger says he drifted away from communism in 1949, and admits that at the time he was shortsighted about the evils of Stalinism). The Weavers did make a comeback, managing to sell out Carnegie Hall to lefties who didn't care about Joe McCarthy, but he quit the group when they agreed to do a song for a cigarette commercial. "We didn't need the money that bad," he said.

Seeger wouldn't be on network television for seventeen years. When the Smothers Brothers booked him CBS agreed, but when he performed a song called "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," which was a thinly-veiled critique of LBJ's Vietnam policy, they snipped it from the broadcast. After a hue and cry, he was invited back to perform it.

Over the years he's been involved in many issues, perhaps none so important as the civil rights movement. It was he that introduced the old song "We Shall Overcome" to Martin Luther King, Jr. He also wrote the well-known songs If I Had a Hammer, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and Turn, Turn, Turn (words from Ecclesiastes). To signal just how true that song is, that there is a time for everything, Seeger, who was at one time a finger in the government's eye, ended up being honored by the government at the Kennedy Center Honors.

While Seeger was in the wilderness, unable to appear on TV or radio or give big concerts, he went from school to school, performing for kids. The FBI didn't seem to think he could any harm there. Well, he probably managed to influence America more that way than any other, sparking the folk revival of the fifties and sixties and making sure that every school kid knew the lyrics to If I Had a Hammer and This Land is Your Land. Even today Seeger loves to perform for kids, as he says that when you look at their little faces it's hard not to feel hope.

Seeger is 89 and still going pretty strong. He's still a muckraker, and has spent a great deal of time and energy in a successful effort to clean up the Hudson River, where he lives. And he seems to be a genuinely nice man who anyone with any sense would love to have around, singing songs and swapping stories. One of my favorite records that I own is a double album of a concert he and Arlo Guthrie did some thirty-five years ago (Guthrie has a song on it called The Watergate Rag, to give you an indication how old it is). The two of them work so well together that even listening on vinyl you can feel the camaraderie and the pureness of spirit. Long may Pete Seeger continue to play the banjo.