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Pete Seeger

January 20, 2024

Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.

Pete Seeger
Seeger playing the banjo in 1955
Background information
Birth namePeter Seeger
Born(1919-05-03)May 3, 1919
New York City, U.S.
DiedJanuary 27, 2014(2014-01-27) (aged 94)
New York City, U.S.
Genres
Occupation(s)
  • Musician
  • songwriter
  • social activist
Instrument(s)
DiscographyPete Seeger discography
Years active1939–2014
Labels
Military career
BranchUnited States Army
Years of service1942–1945
RankCorporal
UnitUnited States Army Band
Battles/warsWorld War II
Awards

A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (also with Hays), and "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963) while The Byrds had a number one hit with "Turn! Turn! Turn!" in 1965.

Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists), which became the acknowledged anthem of the civil rights movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters episode "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song", Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".

Early years edit

Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, at the French Hospital, in New York City.[1] His family, which Seeger called "enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition",[2] traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a physician from Württemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s.[3]

Seeger's father, the Harvard-trained composer and musicologist[4] Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to American parents. Charles established the first musicology curriculum in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1913; helped found the American Musicological Society; and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology. Pete's mother, Constance de Clyver Seeger (née Edson), raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.[5]

 
Peter Seeger (on father's lap) with his father and mother, Charles and Constance Seeger and brothers on a camping trip (May 23, 1921)

In 1912, his father, Charles Seeger, was hired to establish the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, but was forced to resign in 1918 because of his outspoken pacifism during World War I.[6] Charles and Constance moved back east, making Charles's parents' estate in Patterson, New York, just north of New York City, their base of operations. When baby Pete was eighteen months old, they set out with him and his two older brothers in a homemade trailer to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South.[7] Upon their return, Constance taught violin and Charles taught composition at the New York Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard), whose president, family friend Frank Damrosch, was Constance's adoptive "uncle". Charles also taught part-time at the New School for Social Research. Career and money tensions led to quarrels and reconciliations, but when Charles discovered Constance had opened a secret bank account in her own name, they separated, and Charles took custody of their three sons.[8] Beginning in 1936, Charles held various administrative positions in the federal government's Farm Resettlement program, the WPA's Federal Music Project (1938–1940) and the wartime Pan American Union. After World War II, he taught ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University.[9][10]

Charles and Constance divorced when Pete was seven and in 1932 Charles married his composition student and assistant, Ruth Crawford, now considered by many to be one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century.[11] Deeply interested in folk music, Ruth had contributed musical arrangements to Carl Sandburg's extremely influential folk song anthology, the American Songbag (1927), and later created significant original settings for eight of Sandburg's poems.[12] Pete's eldest brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older brother, John Seeger, taught in the 1950s at the Dalton School in Manhattan and was the principal from 1960 to 1976 at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx.[13] Pete's uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted American war poet ("I Have a Rendezvous with Death"), had been one of the first American soldiers to be killed in World War I. All four of Pete's half-siblings from his father's second marriage—Margaret (Peggy), Mike, Barbara, and Penelope (Penny)—became folk singers. Peggy Seeger, a well-known performer in her own right, married British folk singer and activist Ewan MacColl. Mike Seeger was a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, married Pete's half-sister Penny, also a talented singer, who died young. Barbara Seeger joined her siblings in recording folk songs for children. In 1935, Pete attended Camp Rising Sun, an international leadership camp held every summer in upstate New York, which influenced his life's work. His final visit occurred in 2012.[citation needed]

Career edit

Early work edit

 
Seeger in 1979

At four, Seeger was sent away to boarding school, but came home two years later when his parents learned the school had failed to inform them he had contracted scarlet fever.[14] He attended first and second grades in Nyack, New York, where his mother lived, before entering boarding school in Ridgefield, Connecticut.[15] Despite being classical musicians, his parents did not press him to play an instrument. On his own, the otherwise bookish and withdrawn boy gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. At thirteen, Seeger enrolled in the Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1936. He was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the George E. Jonas Foundation's international summer leadership program. During the summer of 1936, while traveling with his father and stepmother, Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville, organized by local folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom Charles Seeger had hired for Farm Resettlement music projects.[16] The festival took place in a covered baseball field. There the Seegers:

watched square-dance teams from Bear Wallow, Happy Hollow, Cane Creek, Spooks Branch, Cheoah Valley, Bull Creek, and Soco Gap; heard the five-string banjo player Samantha Bumgarner; and family string bands, including a group of Indians from the Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads. They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field, hearing music being made there as well. As Lunsford's daughter would later recall, those country people "held the riches that Dad had discovered. They could sing, fiddle, pick the banjos, and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains. I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park."[17]

For the Seegers, experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a "conversion experience". Pete was deeply affected and, after learning basic strokes from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo.[17] The teenage Seeger also sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita. Benton, a lover of Americana, played "Cindy" and "Old Joe Clark" with his students Charlie and Jackson Pollock; friends from the "hillbilly" recording industry; and avant-garde composers Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell. It was at one of Benton's parties that Pete heard "John Henry" for the first time.[18]

Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938.[19] He dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art as well. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. He polished his performance skills during a summer stint of touring New York state with the Vagabond Puppeteers (Jerry Oberwager, 22; Mary Wallace, 22; and Harriet Holtzman, 23), a traveling puppet theater "inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico".[20] One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers. The group reprised its act in October in New York City. An article in the October 2, 1939, Daily Worker reported on the Puppeteers' six-week tour this way:

During the entire trip the group never ate once in a restaurant. They slept out at night under the stars and cooked their own meals in the open, very often they were the guests of farmers. At rural affairs and union meetings, the farm women would bring "suppers" and would vie with each other to see who could feed the troupe most, and after the affair the farmers would have earnest discussions about who would have the honor of taking them home for the night.

"They fed us too well", the girls reported. "And we could live the entire winter just by taking advantage of all the offers to spend a week on the farm".

In the farmers' homes they talked about politics and the farmers' problems, about antisemitism and Unionism, about war and peace and social security—"and always", the puppeteers report, "the farmers wanted to know what can be done to create a stronger unity between themselves and city workers". They felt the need of this more strongly than ever before, and the support of the CIO in their milk strike has given them a new understanding and a new respect for the power that lies in solidarity. One summer has convinced us that a minimum of organized effort on the part of city organizations—unions, consumers' bodies, the American Labor Party and similar groups—can not only reach the farmers but weld them into a pretty solid front with city folks that will be one of the best guarantees for progress.[21]

That fall, Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to help Lomax sift through commercial "race" and "hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938–1953).[22] Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk-singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940–41) alongside Josh White, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast.[23] The show was a success, but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast. During the war, Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin.

From 1942 to 1945, Seeger served in the Army, as an Entertainment Specialist.[24]

 
Pete Seeger entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt (center), honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine's Day party marking the opening of the United Federal Labor Canteen, CIO, in then-segregated Washington, D.C., 1944[25]

In 1949, Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York.

Early activism edit

In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its influence. In 1942, he became a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) itself,[26] but he left in 1949.[27]

In the spring of 1941, the twenty-one-year-old Seeger performed as a member of the Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Butch Hawes and Bess Lomax Hawes, and Lee Hays. Seeger and the Almanacs cut several albums of 78s on Keynote and other labels: Songs for John Doe (recorded in late February or March and released in May 1941), Talking Union, and an album each of sea shanties and pioneer songs. Written by Millard Lampell, Songs for John Doe was performed by Lampell, Seeger, and Hays, joined by Josh White and Sam Gary. It contained lines, such as "It wouldn't be much thrill to die for Du Pont in Brazil," that were sharply critical of Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft (enacted in September 1940). This anti-war/anti-draft tone reflected the Communist Party line after the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which maintained that the war was "phony" and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia. Seeger has said he believed this line of argument at the time, as did many fellow members of the Young Communist League (YCL). Though nominally members of the Popular Front, which was allied with Roosevelt and more moderate liberals, the YCL's members still smarted from Roosevelt and Churchill's arms embargo on Loyalist Spain (which Roosevelt later called a mistake),[28] and the alliance frayed in the confusing welter of events.

A June 16, 1941, review in Time magazine, which, under its owner, Henry Luce, had become very interventionist, denounced the Almanacs' John Doe, accusing it of scrupulously echoing what it called "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war". Eleanor Roosevelt, a fan of folk music, reportedly found the album "in bad taste", though President Roosevelt, when the album was shown to him, merely observed, correctly, as it turned out, that few people would ever hear it. More alarmist was the reaction of eminent German-born Harvard Professor of Government Carl Joachim Friedrich, an adviser on domestic propaganda to the United States military. In a review in the June 1941 Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Poison in Our System", he pronounced Songs for John Doe "strictly subversive and illegal", "whether Communist or Nazi financed", and "a matter for the attorney general", observing further that "mere" legal "suppression" would not be sufficient to counteract this type of populist poison,[29] the poison being folk music and the ease with which it could be spread.[30]

While the U.S. had not officially declared war on the Axis powers in the summer of 1941, the country was energetically producing arms and ammunition for its allies overseas. Despite the boom in manufacturing this concerted rearming effort brought, African Americans were barred from working in defense plants. Racial tensions rose as Black labor leaders (such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin) and their white allies began organizing protests and marches. To combat this social unrest, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act) on 25 June 1941. The order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, at which time the Communist Party quickly directed its members to get behind the draft and forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war—angering some leftists. Copies of Songs for John Doe were removed from sale, and the remaining inventory destroyed, though a few copies may exist in the hands of private collectors.[31] The Almanac Singers' Talking Union album, on the other hand, was reissued as an LP by Folkways (FH 5285A) in 1955 and is still available. The following year, the Almanacs issued Dear Mr. President, an album in support of Roosevelt and the war effort. The title song, "Dear Mr. President", was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his lifelong credo:

Now, Mr. President,
We haven't always agreed in the past, I know,
But that ain't at all important now.
What is important is what we got to do,
We got to lick Mr. Hitler, and until we do,
Other things can wait.

Now, as I think of our great land ...
I know it ain't perfect, but it will be someday,
Just give us a little time.

This is the reason that I want to fight,
Not 'cause everything's perfect, or everything's right.
No, it's just the opposite: I'm fightin' because
I want a better America, and better laws,
And better homes, and jobs, and schools,
And no more Jim Crow, and no more rules like
"You can't ride on this train 'cause you're a Negro,"
"You can't live here 'cause you're a Jew,"
"You can't work here 'cause you're a union man."

So, Mr. President,
We got this one big job to do
That's lick Mr. Hitler and when we're through,
Let no one else ever take his place
To trample down the human race.
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done.

Seeger's critics, however, continued to bring up the Almanacs' repudiated Songs for John Doe. In 1942, a year after the John Doe album's brief appearance (and disappearance), the FBI decided that the now-pro-war Almanacs were still endangering the war effort by subverting recruitment. According to the New York World Telegram (February 14, 1942), Carl Friedrich's 1941 article "The Poison in Our System" was printed up as a pamphlet and distributed by the Council for Democracy (an organization that Friedrich and Henry Luce's right-hand man, C. D. Jackson, Vice President of Time magazine, had founded "to combat all the Nazi, fascist, communist, pacifist" antiwar groups in the United States).[32]

Seeger served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific.[33] He was trained as an airplane mechanic, but was reassigned to entertain the American troops with music.[citation needed] Later, when people asked him what he did in the war, he always answered: "I strummed my banjo."[This quote needs a citation] After returning from service, Seeger and others established People's Songs, conceived as a nationwide organization with branches on both coasts and designed to "create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People".[34] With Pete Seeger as its director, People's Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt's former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket. Despite having attracted enormous crowds nationwide, however, Wallace won only in New York City, and following the election, he was excoriated for accepting the help in his campaign of Communists and fellow travelers, such as Seeger and singer Paul Robeson.[35]

Spanish Civil War songs edit

Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. In 1943, with Tom Glazer and Bess and Baldwin Hawes, he recorded an album of 78s called Songs of the Lincoln Battalion on Moe Asch's Stinson label. This included such songs as "There's a Valley in Spain Called Jarama" and "Viva la Quince Brigada". In 1960, this collection was re-issued by Moe Asch as one side of a Folkways LP called Songs of the Lincoln and International Brigades. On the other side was a reissue of the legendary Six Songs for Democracy (originally recorded in Barcelona in 1938 while bombs were falling), performed by Ernst Busch and a chorus of members of the Thälmann Battalion, made up of volunteers from Germany. The songs were "Moorsoldaten" ("Peat Bog Soldiers", composed by political prisoners of German concentration camps); "Die Thaelmann-Kolonne", "Hans Beimler", "Das Lied von der Einheitsfront" ("Song of the United Front" by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht), "Lied der Internationalen Brigaden" ("Song of the International Brigades"), and "Los cuatro generales" ("The Four Generals", known in English as "The Four Insurgent Generals").

Group recordings edit

As a self-described "split tenor" (between a tenor and a countertenor),[36] Pete Seeger was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups: the Almanac Singers and the Weavers. The Almanac Singers, which Seeger co-founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays, was a topical group, designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement,[37] racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, Sis Cunningham, Josh White, and Sam Gary. As a controversial Almanac singer, the 21-year-old Seeger performed under the stage name "Pete Bowers" to avoid compromising his father's government career.

In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as the Weavers, named after the title of an 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann, about a workers' strike (which contained the lines "We'll stand it no more, come what may!"). They did benefits for strikers, at which they sang songs such as "Talking Union", about the struggles for unionisation of industrial workers such as miners and automobile workers.[38] Besides Pete Seeger (performing under his own name), members of the Weavers included charter Almanac member Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman; later Frank Hamilton, Erik Darling, and Bernie Krause serially took Seeger's place. In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare, the Weavers' repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language—arguably rendering it even more powerful. The Weavers on occasion performed in tuxedos (unlike the Almanacs, who had dressed informally) and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues. The Weavers' string of major hits began with "On Top of Old Smoky" and an arrangement of Lead Belly's signature waltz, "Goodnight, Irene",[4] which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950[39] and was covered by many other pop singers. On the flip side of "Irene" was the Israeli song "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena".[4] Other Weavers hits included "Dusty Old Dust" ("So Long It's Been Good to Know You" by Woody Guthrie), "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (by Hays, Seeger, and Lead Belly), and the Zulu song by Solomon Linda, "Wimoweh" (about Shaka), among others.

The Weavers' performing career was abruptly derailed in 1953, at the peak of their popularity, when blacklisting prompted radio stations to refuse to play their records and all their bookings were canceled. They briefly returned to the stage, however, at a sold-out reunion at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and in a subsequent reunion tour, which produced a hit version of Merle Travis's "Sixteen Tons", as well as LPs of their concert performances. "Kumbaya", a Gullah black spiritual dating from slavery days, was also introduced to wide audiences by Pete Seeger and the Weavers (in 1959), becoming a staple of Boy and Girl Scout campfires.

In the late 1950s, the Kingston Trio was formed in direct imitation of (and homage to) the Weavers, covering much of the latter's repertoire, though with a more buttoned-down, uncontroversial, and mainstream collegiate persona. The Kingston Trio produced another phenomenal succession of Billboard chart hits and, in its turn, spawned a legion of imitators, laying the groundwork for the 1960s commercial folk revival.

In the documentary film Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007), Seeger states that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial.

Banjo and 12-string guitar edit

 
Four long-neck banjos inspired by Seeger's. The instrument on far left was closely constructed to match Seeger's. American Banjo Museum.

In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many[who?] banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He went on to invent the long-neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo. Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region,[citation needed] the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Seeger's championing of and improvements to it. According to an unnamed musician quoted in David King Dunaway's biography, "by nesting a resonant chord between two precise notes, a melody note and a chiming note on the fifth string", Pete Seeger "gentrified" the more percussive traditional Appalachian "frailing" style, "with its vigorous hammering of the forearm and its percussive rapping of the fingernail on the banjo head".[40] Although what Dunaway's informant describes is the age-old droned frailing style, the implication is that Seeger made this more acceptable to mass audiences by omitting some of its percussive complexities, while presumably still preserving the characteristic driving rhythmic quality associated with the style.

From the late 1950s on, Seeger also accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin that had been associated with Lead Belly, who had styled himself "the King of the 12-String Guitar". Seeger's distinctive custom-made guitars had a triangular soundhole. He combined the long scale length (approximately 28") and capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop-D (DADGBE) tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks.[41]

Interest in steelpan edit

In 1956, then "Peter" Seeger (see film credits) and his wife, Toshi, traveled to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to seek out information on the steelpan, sometimes called a steel drum, or "ping-pong". The two searched out a local panyard director, Isaiah, and proceeded to film the construction, tuning and playing of the then-new national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago. He was attempting to include the unique flavor of the steelpan in American folk music.

McCarthy era edit

In the 1950s, and indeed consistently throughout his life, Seeger continued his support of civil and labor rights, racial equality, international understanding, and anti-militarism (all of which had characterized the Wallace campaign), and he continued to believe that songs could help people achieve these goals. However, with the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.[42][43]

On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment (which would have asserted that his testimony might be self-incriminating) and instead, as the Hollywood Ten had done, refused to name personal and political associations on the grounds that this would violate his First Amendment rights: "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."[44][45] Seeger's refusal to answer questions that he believed violated his fundamental constitutional rights led to a March 26, 1957, indictment for contempt of Congress; for some years, he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York. He was convicted in a jury trial of contempt of Congress in March 1961, and sentenced to ten one-year terms in jail (to be served simultaneously), but in May 1962, an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.[46][47]

In 1960, the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government. Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled. Almost 50 years later, in February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of its predecessors.[48]

Folk music revival edit

To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger worked gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps, and traveled the college campus circuit. He also recorded as many as five albums a year for Moe Asch's Folkways Records label. As the nuclear disarmament movement picked up steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger's anti-war songs, such as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (co-written with Joe Hickerson), "Turn! Turn! Turn!"[49] adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and "The Bells of Rhymney" by the Welsh poet Idris Davies[50] (1957), gained wide currency. Seeger was the first person to make a studio recording of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" in 1956. Seeger also was closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall concert, featuring the youthful Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This event, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of that same year, brought the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" to wide audiences. He sang it on the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, along with 1,000 other marchers.[51] By this time, Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village, as a longtime columnist in Sing Out!, the successor to the People's Songs Bulletin, and as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine. To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers, he coined the phrase "Woody's children", alluding to his associate and traveling companion, Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. This urban folk-revival movement, a continuation of the activist tradition of the 1930s and 1940s and of People's Songs, used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics to effect social change, a practice that goes back to the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies' Little Red Song Book, compiled by Swedish-born union organizer Joe Hill (1879–1915) (the Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie, who was known to carry it around).[52]

Seeger toured Australia in 1963. His single "Little Boxes", written by Malvina Reynolds, was number one in the nation's Top 40. That tour sparked a folk boom throughout the country at a time when popular music tastes, post–Kennedy assassination, competed between folk, the surfing craze, and the British rock boom that gave the world the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, among others. Folk clubs sprang up all over the nation; folk performers were accepted in established venues; Australian performers singing Australian folk songs—many of their own composing—emerged in concerts and festivals, on television, and on recordings; and overseas performers were encouraged to tour Australia.[citation needed]

The long television blacklist of Seeger began to end in the mid-1960s when he hosted a regionally broadcast educational folk-music television show, Rainbow Quest. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, the Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Hedy West, Donovan, The Clancy Brothers, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, the Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, Malvina Reynolds, Sonia Malkine, and Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine[42] hour-long programs were recorded at WNJU's Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi, with Sholom Rubinstein. The Smothers Brothers ended Seeger's national blacklisting by broadcasting him singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" on their CBS variety show on February 25, 1968, after his similar performance in September 1967 was censored by CBS.[53]

In November 1976, Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song "Delbert Tibbs", about the death-row inmate Delbert Tibbs, who was later exonerated. Seeger wrote the music and selected the words from poems written by Tibbs.[54]

 
Seeger at 86 on the cover of Sing Out! (Summer 2005), a magazine he helped found in 1950

Seeger also supported the Jewish Camping Movement. He came to Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring, New York, over the summer many times.[55] He sang and inspired countless campers.[56]

Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan edit

Pete Seeger was one of the earliest backers of Bob Dylan; he was responsible for urging A&R man John Hammond to produce Dylan's first LP on Columbia, and for inviting him to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, of which Seeger was a board member.[57] There was a widely repeated story that Seeger was so upset over the extremely loud amplified sound that Dylan, backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, brought into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that he threatened to disconnect the equipment. There are multiple versions of what went on, some fanciful. What is certain is that tensions had been running high between Dylan's manager Albert Grossman and Festival board members (who besides Seeger also included Theodore Bikel, Bruce Jackson, Alan Lomax, festival MC Peter Yarrow, and George Wein) over the scheduling of performers and other matters. Two days earlier, there had been a scuffle and a brief exchange of blows between Grossman and Alan Lomax, and the board, in an emergency session, had voted to ban Grossman from the grounds, but had backed off when George Wein pointed out that Grossman also managed highly popular draws Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary.[58] Seeger has been portrayed as a folk "purist" who was one of the main opponents to Dylan's "going electric",[59] but when asked in 2001 about how he recalled his "objections" to the electric style, he said:

I couldn't understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, "Maggie's Farm," and the sound was distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, "Fix the sound so you can hear the words." He hollered back, "This is the way they want it." I said "Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now." But I was at fault. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, "you didn't boo Howlin' Wolf yesterday. He was electric!" Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term.[60]

Vietnam War era and beyond edit

 
Pete Seeger, Stern Grove, San Francisco, August 6, 1978

A longstanding opponent of the arms race and of the Vietnam War, Seeger satirically attacked then-President Lyndon Johnson with his 1966 recording, on the album Dangerous Songs!?, of Len Chandler's children's song "Beans in My Ears". Beyond Chandler's lyrics, Seeger said that "Mrs. Jay's little son Alby" had "beans in his ears", which, as the lyrics imply,[61] ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them. To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War, the phrase implied that "Alby Jay", a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ", did not listen to anti-war protests as he too had "beans in his ears".

During 1966, Seeger and Malvina Reynolds took part in environmental activism. The album God Bless the Grass was released in January of that year and became the first album in history wholly dedicated to songs about environmental issues. Their politics were informed by the same ideologies of nationalism, populism, and criticism of big business.[62]

Seeger attracted wider attention starting in 1967 with his song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy", about a captain—referred to in the lyrics as "the big fool"—who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II. With its lyrics about a platoon being led into danger by an ignorant captain, the song's anti-war message was obvious—the line "the big fool said to push on" is repeated several times.[63] In the face of arguments with the management of CBS about whether the song's political weight was in keeping with the usually light-hearted entertainment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the final lines were "Every time I read the paper/those old feelings come on/We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on." The lyrics could be interpreted as an allegory of Johnson as the "big fool" and the Vietnam War as the foreseeable danger. Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show,[64] after wide publicity,[65] it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers' Brothers show on February 25, 1968.[66]

At the November 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington, DC, Seeger led 500,000 protesters in singing John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as they rallied across from the White House. Seeger's voice carried over the crowd, interspersing phrases like "Are you listening, Nixon?" between the choruses of protesters singing, "All we are saying ... is give peace a chance."[67]

Inspired by Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled "This machine kills fascists",photo Seeger's banjo was emblazoned with the motto "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender."[68]

In the documentary film The Power of Song, Seeger mentions that he and his family visited North Vietnam in 1972.[69]

Being a supporter of progressive labor unions, Seeger had supported Ed Sadlowski in his bid for the presidency of the United Steelworkers of America. In 1977, Seeger appeared at a fundraiser in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1978, Seeger joined American folk, blues, and jazz singer Barbara Dane at a rally in New York for striking coal miners.[70] He also headlined a benefit concert—with bluegrass artist Hazel Dickens—for the striking coal miners of Stearns, Kentucky, at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 1979.[71]

In 1980, Pete Seeger performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The performance was later released by Smithsonian Folkways as the album Singalong Sanders Theater, 1980.[72]

Hudson River sloop Clearwater edit

 
Sloop Clearwater sailing up the Hudson River

In 1966, Seeger and his wife Toshi founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a nonprofit organization based in Poughkeepsie, New York, that sought to protect the Hudson River and surrounding wetlands and waterways through advocacy and public education. It constructed a floating ambassador for this environmental mission, the sloop Clearwater, and began an annual music and environmental festival, today known as the Great Hudson River Revival.[73]

Reflection on support for Soviet communism edit

In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form.[74] In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change and that "the most lasting revolutions are those that take place over a period of time".[74] In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997, reissued in 2009), Seeger wrote, "Should I apologize for all this? I think so." He went on to put his thinking in context:

How could Hitler have been stopped? Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in '36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger's book, From Yale to Jail ... [75] At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader". I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She's part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let's look ahead.[76][77]

 
Seeger in 1999

In a 1995 interview, however, he insisted that "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it".[78] In later years, as the aging Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism, he also found himself criticized once again for his opinions and associations of the 1930s and 1940s. In 2006, David Boaz—Voice of America and NPR commentator and president of the libertarian Cato Institute—wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian, entitled "Stalin's Songbird", in which he excoriated The New Yorker and The New York Times for lauding Seeger. He characterized Seeger as "someone with a longtime habit of following the party line" who had only "eventually" parted ways with the CPUSA. In support of this view, he quoted lines from the Almanac Singers' May 1941 Songs for John Doe, contrasting them darkly with lines supporting the war from Dear Mr. President, issued in 1942, after the United States and the Soviet Union had entered the war.[79][80]

In 2007, in response to criticism from historian Ron Radosh, a former Trotskyite who now writes for the conservative National Review, Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin, "Big Joe Blues":[81]

I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe.
He ruled with an iron hand.
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land.
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race.
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place.
I got the Big Joe Blues.
Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.
I got the Big Joe Blues.
Do this job, no questions asked.
I got the Big Joe Blues.[82]

The song was accompanied by a letter to Radosh, in which Seeger stated, "I think you're right, I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R. [in 1965]."[77]

Later work edit

 
Seeger (left), performing with Kabir Suman at Kolkata in 1996
 
Seeger at the Clearwater Festival in June 2007

On March 16, 2007, Pete Seeger, his sister Peggy, his brothers Mike and John, his wife Toshi, and other family members spoke and performed at a symposium and concert sponsored by the American Folklife Center in honor of the Seeger family, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.,[83] where Pete Seeger had been employed by the Archive of American Folk Song 67 years earlier.

 
Pete Seeger (right), 88 years old, photographed in March 2008 with his friend, the writer and musician Ed Renehan

In September 2008, Appleseed Recordings released At 89, Seeger's first studio album in 12 years. On September 29, 2008, the 89-year-old singer-activist, once banned from commercial TV, made a rare national TV appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, singing "Take It From Dr. King".

On January 18, 2009, Seeger and his grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen and the crowd in singing the Woody Guthrie song "This Land Is Your Land" in the finale of Barack Obama's inaugural concert in Washington, D.C.[84][85] The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of two verses not often included in the song, one about a "private property" sign the narrator cheerfully ignores, and the other making a passing reference to a Depression-era relief office. The former's final line, however, "This land was made for you and me", is modified to "That side was made for you and me".[84][86]

Over the years, he lent his fame to support numerous environmental organizations, including South Jersey's Bayshore Center, the home of New Jersey's tall ship, the oyster schooner A.J. Meerwald. Seeger's benefit concerts helped raise funds for groups so they could continue to educate and spread environmental awareness.[87] On May 3, 2009, at the Clearwater Concert, dozens of musicians gathered in New York at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Seeger's 90th birthday (which was later televised on PBS during the summer),[88] ranging from Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Eric Weissberg, Ani DiFranco and Roger McGuinn to Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Joanne Shenandoah, R. Carlos Nakai, Bill Miller, Joseph Fire Crow, Margo Thunderbird, Tom Paxton, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Arlo Guthrie. Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez was also invited to appear, but his visa was not approved in time by the United States government. Consistent with Seeger's longtime advocacy for environmental concerns, the proceeds from the event benefited the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater,[89] a non-profit organization founded by Seeger in 1966, to defend and restore the Hudson River. Seeger's 90th birthday was also celebrated at The College of Staten Island on May 4.[90][91][92] On September 19, 2009, Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival, which was particularly notable because the festival does not normally feature folk artists.

In 2010, still active at the age of 91, Seeger co-wrote and performed the song "God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" with Lorre Wyatt, commenting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[93] A performance of the song by Seeger, Wyatt, and friends was recorded and filmed aboard the sloop Clearwater in August for a single and video produced by Richard Barone and Matthew Billy, released on election day, November 6, 2012.[94]

External videos
 
  Civil Rights History Project: Pete Seeger, 57:42, Library of Congress[95]

On October 21, 2011, at age 92, Pete Seeger was part of a solidarity march with Occupy Wall Street to Columbus Circle in New York City.[96] The march began with Seeger and fellow musicians exiting Symphony Space (95th and Broadway), where they had performed as part of a benefit for Seeger's Clearwater organization. Thousands of people crowded Pete Seeger by the time they reached Columbus Circle, where he performed with his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, David Amram, and other celebrated musicians.[97] The event, promoted under the name OccupyTheCircle, was livestreamed, and was dubbed by some "the Pete Seeger March".

In January 2012, Seeger joined the Rivertown Kids in paying tribute to his friend Bob Dylan, performing Dylan's "Forever Young" on the Amnesty International album Chimes of Freedom.[98] This song, Seeger's last single, marked Seeger's only music video, which went viral in the wake of his death two years later.[99]

On December 14, 2012, Seeger performed, along with Harry Belafonte, Jackson Browne, Common, and others, at a concert to bring awareness to the 37-year-long ordeal of Native American activist Leonard Peltier. The concert was held at the Beacon Theatre in New York City.[100]

On April 9, 2013, Hachette Audio Books issued an audiobook entitled Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems. This two-CD spoken-word work was conceived of and produced by noted percussionist Jeff Haynes and presents Pete Seeger telling the stories of his life against a background of music performed by more than 40 musicians of varied genres.[101] The launch of the audiobook was held at the Dia:Beacon on April 11, 2013, to an enthusiastic audience of around two hundred people, and featured many of the musicians from the project (among them Samite, Dar Williams, Dave Eggar, and of the Horse Flies and Natalie Merchant) performing live under the direction of producer and percussionist Haynes.[102] April 15, 2013, Sirius XM Book Radio presented the Dia:Beacon concert as a special episode of Cover to Cover Live with Maggie Linton and Kim Alexander, entitled "Pete Seeger: The Storm King and Friends".[103]

On August 9, 2013, one month widowed, Seeger was in New York City for the 400-year commemoration of the Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Iroquois and the Dutch. On an interview he gave that day to Democracy Now!, Seeger sang "I Come and Stand at Every Door", as it was also the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.[104][105]

On September 21, 2013, Pete Seeger performed at Farm Aid at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York. Joined by Wille Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews, he sang "This Land Is Your Land",[106] and included a verse he said he had written specifically for the Farm Aid concert.

Personal life edit

Seeger married Toshi Aline Ohta in 1943, whom he credited with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. The couple remained married until Toshi's death in July 2013.[107] Their first child, Peter Ōta Seeger, was born in 1944 and died at six months, while Pete was deployed overseas. Pete never saw him.[108] They went on to have three more children: Daniel (an accomplished photographer and filmmaker), Mika (a potter and muralist), and Tinya (a potter), as well as grandchildren Tao Rodríguez-Seeger (a musician), Cassie (an artist), Kitama Cahill-Jackson (a psychotherapist), Moraya (a marriage and family therapist married to the NFL player Chris DeGeare), Penny, and Isabelle, and great-grandchildren Dio and Gabel. Tao, a folk musician in his own right, sings and plays guitar, banjo, and harmonica with the Mammals. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the 2007 PBS documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

When asked by Beliefnet about his religious or spiritual beliefs, and his definition of God, Seeger replied:

Nobody knows for sure. But people undoubtedly get feelings which are not explainable and they feel they're talking to God or they're talking to their parents who are long dead. I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I'm looking at God. Whenever I'm listening to something I'm listening to God. I've had preachers of the gospel, Presbyterians and Methodists, saying, "Pete, I feel that you are a very spiritual person". And maybe I am. I feel strongly that I'm trying to raise people's spirits to get together. ... I tell people I don't think God is an old white man with a long white beard and no navel; nor do I think God is an old black woman with white hair and no navel. But I think God is literally everything, because I don't believe that something can come out of nothing. And so there's always been something. Always is a long time.

He was a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York.[110]

Seeger lived in Beacon, New York. He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949 and lived there first in a trailer, then in a log cabin they built themselves. He remained engaged politically and maintained an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley region of New York throughout his life. For years during the Iraq War, Seeger maintained a weekly protest vigil alongside Route 9 in Wappingers Falls, near his home. He told a New York Times reporter that "working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side of a large scale, trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the opposite side." He went on to say, "Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons ... It's leaking out as fast as it goes in and they're all laughing at us. But we're still getting people with teaspoons. I get letters from people saying, 'I'm still on the teaspoon brigade.'"[111]

Toshi died in Beacon on July 9, 2013, at the age of 91,[107][112] and Pete died at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 27, 2014, at the age of 94.[113]

Legacy edit

Response and reaction to Seeger's death quickly poured in. President Barack Obama noted that Seeger had been called "America's tuning fork"[114] and that he believed in "the power of song" to bring social change, "Over the years, Pete used his voice and his hammer to strike blows for workers' rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation, and he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger."[115] Folksinger and fellow activist Billy Bragg wrote that "Pete believed that music could make a difference. Not change the world, he never claimed that – he once said that if music could change the world he'd only be making music – but he believed that while music didn't have agency, it did have the power to make a difference."[116] Bruce Springsteen said of Seeger's death, "I lost a great friend and a great hero last night, Pete Seeger," before performing "We Shall Overcome" while on tour in South Africa.[117]

Tributes edit

External audio
  “Fresh Air with Terry Gross, January 28, 2014: Obituary for Pete Seeger", Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Scroll down to 'View online' to hear the audio interview.
  • A proposal was made in 2009 to name the Walkway Over the Hudson in his honor.[118]
  • A posthumous suggestion that Seeger's name be applied to the replacement Tappan Zee Bridge being built over the Hudson River was made by a local town supervisor.[73][119] Seeger's boat, the sloop Clearwater, is based at Beacon, New York, just upriver from the bridge and frequently sails down to Manhattan to continuing spreading Seeger's message and music.[120]
  • Oakwood Friends School, located in Poughkeepsie New York, not far from Seeger's home, performed "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" at one of their worship meetings. The collaboration was with three teachers (playing guitar and vocals) as well as a student harmonica player and a student vocalist.
  • A free five-day memorial called Seeger Fest took place on July 17–21, 2014, featuring Judy Collins, Peter Yarrow, Harry Belafonte, Anti-Flag, Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root, Steve Earle, Holly Near, Fred Hellerman, Guy Davis, DJ Logic, Paul Winter Consort, Dar Williams, DJ Kool Herc, The Rappers Delight Experience, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, David amram, Mike + Ruthy, Tom Chapin, James Maddock, The Chapin Sisters, Rebel Diaz, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emma's Revolution, Toni Blackman, Kim & Reggie Harris, Magpie, Abrazos Orchestra, Nyraine, George Wein, The Vanaver Caravan, White Tiger Society, Lorre Wyatt, AKIR, Adira & Alana Amram, Aurora Barnes, The Owens Brothers, The Tony Lee Thomas Band, Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, New York City Labor Chorus, Roland Moussa, Roots Revelators, Kristen Graves, Bob Reid, Hudson River Sloop Singers, Walkabout Clearwater Chorus, Betty & The baby Boomers, Work O' The Weavers, Jacob Bernz * Sarah Armour, and Amanda Palmer.[121]
  • In 2006, thirteen folk music songs made popular by Pete Seeger were reinterpreted by Bruce Springsteen on his fourteenth studio album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
  • In 2014, Wepecket Island Records recorded a Pete Seeger tribute album called For Pete's Sake.
  • In 2020, Kronos Quartet released Long Time Passing, an album of all new arrangements of Pete Seeger's music commissioned by the FreshGrass Foundation and released on Smithsonian Folkways.
  • On July 21, 2022, the United States Postal Service issued a Pete Seeger "Forever" stamp. The stamp is based on a photograph of Seeger playing a long neck banjo, taken by Seeger's son Daniel some time in the early 1960s. It's a commemorative in the Music Icons series, with a print quantity of 22,000,000. [122]

Awards edit

Seeger received many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including:

Selected discography edit

Main article: Pete Seeger discography

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Clapp, E.P. (September 14, 2013). "Honor Pete Seeger". The Huffington Post. Retrieved July 13, 2013.
  2. ^ David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing (New York: [Random House, 1981, 1990], revised edition, Villard Books, 2008), p. 17.
  3. ^ See Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life in American Music (University of Pittsburgh, 1992), pp. 4–5.
  4. ^ a b c Pete Seeger interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)
  5. ^ Dunaway (2008), p. 20.
  6. ^ According to Dunaway, the British-born president of the university "all but fired" Charles Seeger (How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 26).
  7. ^ Ann Pescatello, Charles Seeger: A Life In Music, 83–85.
  8. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 32. Frank Damrosch, siding with Constance, fired Charles from Juilliard, see Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: a Composer's Search for American Music (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 224–25.
  9. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, pp. 22, 24.
  10. ^ Winkler (2009), p. 4.
  11. ^ See Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: a Composer's Search for American Music (1997).
  12. ^ "David Lewis, Ruth Crawford Seeger Biography in 600 Words on website of her daughter, Peggy Seeger". Peggyseeger.com. February 14, 2005. Retrieved August 28, 2012.
  13. ^ "John Seeger Dies at 95". WordPress.com. January 18, 2010. Retrieved November 5, 2010.
  14. ^ Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006) p. 50 and Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 32.
  15. ^ Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 43.
  16. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, pp. 48–49.
  17. ^ a b Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, p. 239.
  18. ^ Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, p. 235. According to John Szwed, Jackson Pollock, later famous for his "drip" paintings, played harmonica, having smashed his violin in frustration, see: Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking, 2010), p. 88.
  19. ^ According to Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006), p. 51, after failing one of his winter exams and losing his scholarship.
  20. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, pp. 61–63.
  21. ^ Emery, Lawrence, "Interesting Summer: Young Puppeteers in Unique Tour of Rural Areas", quoted on
  22. ^ The resultant 22-page mimeographed "List of American Folk Music on Commercial Recordings", issued in 1940 and mailed by Lomax out to academic folklore scholars, became the basis of Harry Smith's celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways Records. Seeger also did similar work for Lomax at Decca in the late 1940s.
  23. ^ , Time, March 3, 1941
  24. ^ "Seeger, Pete, Cpl". army.togetherweserved.com. Retrieved April 1, 2020.
  25. ^ From the Washington Post, February 12, 1944: "The Labor Canteen, sponsored by the United Federal Workers of America, CIO, will be opened at 8 p.m. tomorrow at 1212 18th st. nw. Mrs. Roosevelt is expected to attend at 8:30 p.m."
  26. ^ Reineke, Hank (2023). Rising Son: The Life and Music of Arlo Guthrie. American Popular Music. Vol. 10. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 42. ISBN 9780806193588.
  27. ^ He later commented "Innocently I became a member of the Communist Party, and when they said fight for peace, I did, and when they said fight Hitler, I did. I got out in '49, though. ... I should have left much earlier. It was stupid of me not to. My father had got out in '38, when he read the testimony of the trials in Moscow, and he could tell they were forced confessions. We never talked about it, though, and I didn't examine closely enough what was going on. ... I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin, and had no idea how cruel a leader he was." Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006), p. 52; see also The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait (2009), p. 116.
  28. ^ Dallek, Robert (1995). "'Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945"'. Oxford University Press. p. 180. ISBN 9780199826667. Retrieved August 28, 2012.
  29. ^ "The Poison in Our System" (excerpt from the Atlantic Monthly) by Carl Joachim Friedrich June 3, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Note: Dunaway misses the significance of military propagandist Carl Joachim Friedrich, when he mistakenly refers to him as "Karl Frederick," an error other writers who relied on Dunaway repeated.
  30. ^ Friedrich's review concluded: "The three records sell for one dollar and you are asked to 'play them in your home, play them in your union hall, take them back to your people.' Probably some of these songs fall under the criminal provisions of the Selective Service Act, and to that extent it is a matter for the Attorney-General. But you never can handle situations of this kind democratically by mere suppression. Unless civic groups and individuals will make a determined effort to counteract such appeals by equally effective methods, democratic morale will decline." Upon United States entry into the war in 1942, Friedrich became chairman of the Executive Committee of the Council for Democracy, charged with combatting isolationism, and had his article on the Almanacs June 3, 2013, at the Wayback Machine reprinted as one of several pamphlets which he sent to radio network executives.
  31. ^ Although the Almanacs were accused – both at the time and in subsequent histories – of reversing their attitudes in response to the Communist Party's new party line, "Seeger has pointed out that virtually all progressives reversed course and supported the war. He insists that no one, Communist Party or otherwise, told the Almanacs to change their songs. (Seeger interview with [Richard A.] Reuss 4/9/68)" quoted in William G. Roy, "Who Shall Not Be Moved? Folk Music, Community and Race in the American The Communist Party and the Highlander School," ff p. 16. March 2, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  32. ^ Blanche Wiessen Cook, Eisenhower Declassified (Doubleday, 1981), page 122. "The Council was a limited affair," Cook writes, "... that served mostly to highlight Jackson's talents as a propagandist."
  33. ^ Billboard Magazine – Article on Pete Seegar 12/19/2015| https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/military-fbi-woody-guthrie-pete-seeger-wartime-world-war-two-6813894/
  34. ^ People's Songs Inc. People's Songs Newsletter No 1. February 1946. Old Town School of Folk Music Resource center collection.
  35. ^ American Masters: "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song – KQED Broadcast 2-27-08.
  36. ^ Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006), p. 47.
  37. ^ See Wikipedia entry on the CIO.
  38. ^ Ingram, David. "The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960." Humanities Source. 2010 Vol. 7. Retrieved October 14, 2014.
  39. ^ Alec Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer: Pete Seeger and American folk music," in The New Yorker (April 17, 2006), pp. 44–53.
  40. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, p. 100.
  41. ^ . Acousticguitar.com. Archived from the original on September 13, 2012. Retrieved November 20, 2012.
  42. ^ a b "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song" August 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine – PBS American Masters, February 27, 2008
  43. ^ Pete Seeger Interview[permanent dead link] PBS American Masters.
  44. ^ Pete Seeger to the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 18, 1955. Quoted, along with some other exchanges from that hearing, in Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006), p. 53.
  45. ^ United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities (August 17–18, 1955). Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area— Part VII (Entertainment). Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, First Session, August 17 And 18, 1955. Vol. pt. 7. Washington, U.S. Govt. Print. Off. pp. Testimony of Peter Seeger, p. 2447–2459.
  46. ^ United States v. Seeger, 303 F. 2d 478 (2d Cir. 1962).
  47. ^ Wilkinson, "The Protest Singer" (2006), p. 53.
  48. ^ Dillon, Raquel Maria. "School board offers apology to singer Pete Seeger". Sign on San Diego. Retrieved February 13, 2011.
  49. ^ Pete Seeger interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)
  50. ^ "BBC News – South East Wales". BBC. Retrieved November 20, 2012.
  51. ^ Whitehead, John. "Pete Seeger: Changing the World One Song at a Time." Waxahachie Daily Light. May 30, 2013. Rutherford Institute. Accessed on October 14, 2014.
  52. ^ Briley, Ronald (2006). ""Woody Sez": Woody Guthrie, the "People's Daily World," and Indigenous Radicalism". California History. 84 (1): 34. doi:10.2307/25161857. ISSN 0162-2897. JSTOR 25161857.
  53. ^ Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, by David Bianculli, Touchstone, 2009.
  54. ^ . Peteseeger.net. July 28, 1976. Archived from the original on September 12, 2012. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
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  56. ^ Bank, Justin (January 28, 2014). "Pete Seeger, Neil Diamond and me". Washington Post. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  57. ^ Fellow Newport Board member Bruce Jackson writes, "Pete Seeger, more than any of the other board members, had a personal connection with Bob Dylan: it was he who [in 1962] had convinced the great Columbia A and R man John Hammond, famous for his work with jazz and blues musicians, to produce Dylan's eponymous first album, Bob Dylan. If anyone was responsible for Bob Dylan's presence on the Newport Stage [in 1965], it was Pete Seeger". See Bruce Jackson, The Story Is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), p. 148.
  58. ^ John Szwed, Alan Lomax, 'The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking, 2010), p. 354. The Butterfield Blues Band, a new, integrated Chicago-based electric band, was the closer in an afternoon blues workshop entitled "Blues: Origins and Offshoots", hosted by Lomax, that had included African-American blues greats Willie Dixon, Son House, Memphis Slim, and a prison work group from Texas, along with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys. Lomax, upset that Butterfield's group had been shoehorned into his workshop, reportedly complained aloud about how long they took to set up their electrical equipment and introduced them with the words, "Now, let's find out if these guys can play at all." This infuriated Grossman (who was angling to manage the new group), and he responded by attacking Lomax physically. Michael Bloomfield stated, "Alan Lomax, the great folklorist and musicologist, gave us some kind of introduction that I didn't even hear, but Albert found it offensive. And Albert went upside his head. The next thing we knew, right in the middle of our show, Lomax and Grossman were kicking ass on the floor in the middle of thousands of people at the Newport Folk Festival. Tearing each other's clothes off. We had to pull 'em apart. We figured 'Albert, man, now there's a manager!'" quoted in Jan Mark Wolkin, Bill Keenom, and Carlos Santana's, Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books), p. 102. See also Ronald D. Cohen's introduction to "Part III, The Folk Revival (1960s)" in Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, Ronald D. Cohen, ed. (London: Routledege), p. 192.
  59. ^ Rock critic Greil Marcus wrote: "Backstage, Peter Seeger and the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax attempted to cut the band's power cables with an axe." See Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic, the Story of the Basement Tapes [1998], republished in paperback as The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York: Holt, 2001), p. 12. Marcus's apocryphal story was elaborated by Maria Muldaur and Paul Nelson in Martin Scorsese's film No Direction Home (2005)
  60. ^ David Kupfer, Longtime Passing: An interview with Pete Seeger April 25, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, Whole Earth magazine, Spring 2001. Accessed online October 16, 2007.
  61. ^ "Beans in My Ears". Sniff.numachi.com. Retrieved November 20, 2012.
  62. ^ Ingram, David (2008). 'My Dirty Stream : Pete Seeger, American Folk Music, and Environmental Protest', Popular Music Vol. 31, pp22. Routeledge Taylor & Francis Group. October 14, 2014
  63. ^ Gibson, Megan. "Songs of Peace and Protest: 6 Essential Cuts From Pete Seeger." Time.com, January 28, 2014. p.1 Business Source Complete. October 14, 2014.
  64. ^ Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, CBS, Season 2, Episode 1, September 10, 1967.
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  66. ^ Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, CBS, Season 2, Episode 24, February 25, 1968.
  67. ^ See, for example, this PBS documentary March 22, 2017, at the Wayback Machine and this recording on YouTube.
  68. ^ "Pete Seeger's banjo". Flickr. March 18, 2006. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  69. ^ Brown, Jim (Director) (2005). The Power of Song (DVD). Genius Products LLC. ISBN 1-59445-156-7.
  70. ^ Cohen, Ronald D.; Capaldi, James (December 16, 2013). The Pete Seeger Reader. Oxford University Press. p. 209. ISBN 9780199336128 – via Google Books.
  71. ^ Dickens, Hazel (2008). Working girl blues : the life and music of Hazel Dickens. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-09097-4. OCLC 809471478.
  72. ^ "Singalong Sanders Theater, 1980". Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Retrieved November 1, 2018.
  73. ^ a b Harrington, Gerry (January 31, 2014). "Movement afoot to name bridge after Pete Seeger". United Press International. Retrieved February 3, 2014.
  74. ^ a b David King Dunaway (2008), p. 103.
  75. ^ David T. Dellinger, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993 ISBN 0-679-40591-7).
  76. ^ Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Musical Autobiography, edited by Peter Blood (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: A Sing Out Publication, 1993, 1997), page 22.
  77. ^ a b Daniel J. Wakin, "This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago", New York Times, September 1, 2007. Accessed October 16, 2007.
  78. ^ "The Old Left". The New York Times Magazine. January 22, 1995. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
  79. ^ Boaz, David (April 14, 2006). "Stalin's songbird". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2009.
  80. ^ Boaz's article is reprinted in his book, The Politics of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute, 2008) pp. 283–84
  81. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 422.
  82. ^ Seeger turns on Uncle Joe, NewStatesMan, September 27, 2007.
  83. ^ "How Can I Keep from Singing?": A Seeger Family Tribute. 2007 symposium and concert, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (web presentation includes program, photographs, and webcasts).
  84. ^ a b Tommy Stevenson, "'This Land Is Your Land' Like Woody Wrote It" February 20, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, Truthout, January 19, 2009. Accessed February 3, 2014.
  85. ^ Maria Puente and Elysa Gardner, "Inauguration opening concert celebrates art of the possible", USA Today, January 19, 2008. Accessed January 20, 2009.
  86. ^ Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen at the inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on YouTube. Accessed December 3, 2014.
  87. ^ Jennings, Jennifer. "Pete Seeger: The environmental side of his activism." Atlantic City Natural Health Examiner. January 28, 2014. Atlantic City Examiner. Accessed on October 5, 2014.
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  91. ^ "Yahoo". Upcoming.yahoo.com. Archived from the original on July 15, 2012. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  92. ^ "Pete Seeger 90th birthday celebrations". Unionsong.com. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  93. ^ Patrick Doyle, , Rolling Stone online, July 26, 2010. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
  94. ^ "Pete Seeger - God's Counting On Me, God's Counting On You (Sloop Mix) (feat. Lorre Wyatt & friends)". YouTube. November 5, 2012. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved July 22, 2015.
  95. ^ "Civil Rights History Project". Library of Congress. Retrieved March 11, 2016.
  96. ^ Moynihan, Colin (October 22, 2011). "Pete Seeger Leads Protesters in New York, on Foot and in Song". The New York Times. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  97. ^ "Pete Seeger and Occupy Wall Street Sing 'We Shall Overcome' at Columbus Circle (10/21/11)". Youtube. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved November 20, 2012.
  98. ^ Stafford, David (December 4, 2014). "Pete Seeger, "Forever Young"". WWOZ. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
  99. ^ Lewis, Randy (January 30, 2014). "Pete Seeger's 'Forever Young' music video goes viral". Washington Post. Retrieved December 16, 2022.
  100. ^ . indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com. Archived from the original on March 27, 2013. Retrieved April 23, 2013.
  101. ^ (PDF). www.hachettebookgroup.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 19, 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2013.
  102. ^ "Barry, John, "Seeger Legacy Grows With Release of New Album 'Storm King'; DIA-Beacon Event Offers a Taste of Folk Singer's Spoken-Word Recordings"". Poughkeepsiejournal.com. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
  103. ^ [1][dead link]
  104. ^ "Shows featuring Pete Seeger". Democracy Now!. Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  105. ^ "Pete Seeger & Onondaga Leader Oren Lyons on Fracking, Indigenous Struggles and Hiroshima Bombing". Democracy Now!. August 9, 2013. Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  106. ^ "Pete Seeger – This Land is Your Land (Live at Farm Aid 2013)". YouTube. September 21, 2013. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021. Retrieved December 5, 2013.
  107. ^ a b Martin, Douglas (July 12, 2013). "Toshi Seeger, Wife of Folk-Singing Legend, Dies at 91". The New York Times. Retrieved July 12, 2013.
  108. ^ Dunaway, How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 131.
  109. ^ Wendy Schuman. "Pete Seeger's Session". Beliefnet, Inc. Retrieved August 16, 2013.
  110. ^ Unitaritian Universalist Association, "Unitarian Universalist History". . Archived from the original on July 2, 2014. Retrieved September 30, 2013.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) Retrieved August 17, 2019.
  111. ^ Gaffney, Dennis (June 22, 2008). "At a Roadside Vigil, an Iconic Voice of Protest". The New York Times. Retrieved December 30, 2021.
  112. ^ Wilkinson, The Protest Singer (2006), pp. 47–48.
  113. ^ Pareles, Jon (January 28, 2014). "Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94". The New York Times. from the original on July 14, 2015. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  114. ^ The phrase "America's tuning fork" is usually attributed to poet Carl Sandburg, for example, see Corey Sandler, Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsessions (New York: Kensington Books, 2007), p. 203. It is unclear when and where Sandburg, who thought highly of the Weavers, said this. Studs Terkel, who introduced Seeger as "America's tuning fork" at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival (see George Wein, Nate Chinen, Myself Among Others: A Life in Music [Da Capo Press, 2009], p. 314), later wrote that he had seen the phase in DownBeat jazz magazine (see Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping The Faith In Troubled Times [New York: The New Press], p. 249). The phrase was picked up in a photo spread on Seeger by Life Magazine (October 9, 1964), p. 61 (see also Ronald D. Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–70 [University of Massachusetts Press, 1970], p. 223).
  115. ^ "Obama memorializes Pete Seeger". USA Today. January 28, 2014. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  116. ^ Bragg, Billy (January 28, 2014). "Pete Seeger: folk activist who believed music could make a difference". The Guardian.
  117. ^ Diane Vadino, "Bruce Springsteen Honors Pete Seeger With a Stirring 'We Shall Overcome September 17, 2017, at the Wayback Machine," Rolling Stone, January 29, 2014.
  118. ^ Alan Chartock, "New York has a chance to honor an American hero," Legislative Gazette, April 24, 2009, found at Legislative Gazette website August 2, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. Accessed April 29, 2009.
  119. ^ "Pete Seeger should have new Tappan Zee Bridge named for him, downstate politician says". Dailyfreeman.com. January 28, 2014. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  120. ^ "Clearwater". Clearwater.org. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  121. ^ "Folk singer, activist Pete Seeger dies in New York". September 18, 2014. Retrieved September 18, 2014.
  122. ^ "Pete Seeger Stamps". store.usps.com. Retrieved September 21, 2022.
  123. ^ . songwritershalloffame.org. 1972. Archived from the original on February 9, 2014. Retrieved January 28, 2014.
  124. ^ . Grammy.org. Archived from the original on July 3, 2017. Retrieved August 28, 2012.
  125. ^ . Smithsonian Institution. Archived from the original on June 17, 2017. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  126. ^ Courage of Conscience Award Winners June 10, 2014, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved August 7, 2012.
  127. ^ "Pete Seeger: The Storm King Project". Peteseegerthestormking.com. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  128. ^ "56th Annual GRAMMY Awards Winners & Nominees: Best Spoken Word Album". grammy.com. January 2014. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  129. ^ "Pete Seeger gets a posthumous prize — and a sing-along". USA Today. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  130. ^ "Pete Seeger Discography". Discogs.com. May 3, 1919. Retrieved November 20, 2012.
  131. ^ . Folkways.si.edu. Archived from the original on April 24, 2009. Retrieved November 20, 2012.

References edit

  • Dunaway, David K. How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger. [McGraw Hill (1981), DaCapo (1990)] Revised Edition. New York: Villard Trade Paperback, 2008 ISBN 0-07-018150-0, ISBN 0-07-018151-9, ISBN 0-306-80399-2, ISBN 0-345-50608-1.
  • Dunaway, David K. Pete Seeger: How Can I Keep From Singing. three one-hour radio documentaries, Public Radio International, 2008
  • Dunaway, David K. The Pete Seeger Discography. Scarecrow Press: Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010.
  • Forbes, Linda C. "Pete Seeger on Environmental Advocacy, Organizing, and Education in the Hudson River Valley: An Interview with the Folk Music Legend, Author and Storyteller, Political and Environmental Activist, and Grassroots Organizer." Organization & Environment, 17, No. 4, 2004: pp. 513–522.
  • Gardner, Elysa. "Seeger: A 'Power' in music, politics." USA Today, February 27, 2008. p. 8D.
  • Seeger, Pete. How to Play the Five-String Banjo, New York: People's Songs, 1948. 3rd edition, New York: Music Sales Corporation, 1969. ISBN 0-8256-0024-3.
  • Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music. Oxford University Press, 1997.
  • Wilkinson, Alec. "The Protest Singer: Pete Seeger and American folk music," The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, pp. 44–53.
  • Wilkinson, Alec. The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger. New York: Knopf, 2009.
  • Winkler, Allan M. (2009). To everything there is a season: Pete Seeger and the power of song. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press.
  • Zollo, Paul (January 7, 2005). . GRAMMY Magazine. Archived from the original on November 24, 2005.

Further reading edit

  • Briggs, John, Pete Seeger, The People's Singer, Atombank Books, 2015, ISBN 0990516075
  • "The Music Man" (profile and interview). In Something to Say: Thoughts on Art and Politics in America, text by Richard Klin, photos by Lily Prince, Leapfrog Press, 2011.
  • Reich, Susanna, Stand Up and Sing! Pete Seeger, Folk Music and the Path to Justice, Bloomsbury, 2017. ISBN 978-0802738127
  • Renehan, Edward, , New Street Communications, LLC, 2014. ISBN 978-0615998138
  • Seeger, Pete (Edited by Rob and Sam Rosenthal), , Paradigm Publishers, 2012. ISBN 1612052185. ISBN 978-1612052182
  • Seeger, Pete (Edited by Ronald D. Cohen and James Capaldi), The Pete Seeger Reader, Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780199862016
  • Seeger, Pete (Edited by Jo Metcalf Schwartz), The Incompleat Folksinger, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. ISBN 0-671-20954-X () Also, reprinted in a Bison Book edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8032-9216-3.

External links edit

  • David Dunaway (Seeger biographer and original site creator). . peteseeger.org. Archived from the original on January 28, 2014. Retrieved September 29, 2008.
  • Jim Capaldi (original site creator). . peteseeger.net. Archived from the original on December 20, 2012.
  • Matthews, Scott (August 6, 2008). "John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky: Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival". Southern Spaces.
  • Pareles, Jon (January 28, 2014). "Obituary: Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94". The New York Times.
  • "Peter Seeger b. 3 May 1919 d. 27 January 2014 – Full Tree". rodovid. Retrieved September 28, 2016.
  • "Pete Seeger's FBI File Reveals How the Folk Legend First Became a Target of the Feds", Mother Jones, 2015
  • Pete Seeger Interview at NAMM Oral History Collection

January 20, 2024
pete, seeger, peter, seeger, 1919, january, 2014, american, folk, singer, social, activist, fixture, nationwide, radio, 1940s, seeger, also, string, records, during, early, 1950s, member, weavers, notably, their, recording, lead, belly, goodnight, irene, which. Peter Seeger May 3 1919 January 27 2014 was an American folk singer and social activist A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers notably their recording of Lead Belly s Goodnight Irene which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950 Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era In the 1960s Seeger re emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament civil rights counterculture workers rights and environmental causes Pete SeegerSeeger playing the banjo in 1955Background informationBirth namePeter SeegerBorn 1919 05 03 May 3 1919New York City U S DiedJanuary 27 2014 2014 01 27 aged 94 New York City U S GenresAmerican folk music protest music AmericanaOccupation s Musiciansongwritersocial activistInstrument s Vocals banjo guitarDiscographyPete Seeger discographyYears active1939 2014LabelsFolkways Columbia CBS Vanguard Verve Sony Kids Music SMEMilitary careerBranchUnited States ArmyYears of service1942 1945RankCorporalUnitUnited States Army BandBattles warsWorld War IIAwardsAmerican Campaign Medal Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal World War II Victory Medal A prolific songwriter his best known songs include Where Have All the Flowers Gone with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson If I Had a Hammer The Hammer Song with Lee Hays of the Weavers Kisses Sweeter Than Wine also with Hays and Turn Turn Turn To Everything There Is a Season which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement Flowers was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio 1962 Marlene Dietrich who recorded it in English German and French 1962 and Johnny Rivers 1965 If I Had a Hammer was a hit for Peter Paul and Mary 1962 and Trini Lopez 1963 while The Byrds had a number one hit with Turn Turn Turn in 1965 Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual We Shall Overcome also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer activists which became the acknowledged anthem of the civil rights movement soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC in 1960 In the PBS American Masters episode Pete Seeger The Power of Song Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional We will overcome to the more singable We shall overcome Contents 1 Early years 2 Career 2 1 Early work 2 2 Early activism 2 3 Spanish Civil War songs 2 4 Group recordings 2 5 Banjo and 12 string guitar 2 6 Interest in steelpan 2 7 McCarthy era 2 8 Folk music revival 2 8 1 Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan 2 9 Vietnam War era and beyond 2 10 Hudson River sloop Clearwater 2 11 Reflection on support for Soviet communism 2 12 Later work 3 Personal life 4 Legacy 4 1 Tributes 4 2 Awards 5 Selected discography 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksEarly years editSeeger was born on May 3 1919 at the French Hospital in New York City 1 His family which Seeger called enormously Christian in the Puritan Calvinist New England tradition 2 traced its genealogy back over 200 years A paternal ancestor Karl Ludwig Seeger a physician from Wurttemberg Germany had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s 3 Seeger s father the Harvard trained composer and musicologist 4 Charles Louis Seeger Jr was born in Mexico City Mexico to American parents Charles established the first musicology curriculum in the United States at the University of California Berkeley in 1913 helped found the American Musicological Society and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology Pete s mother Constance de Clyver Seeger nee Edson raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School 5 nbsp Peter Seeger on father s lap with his father and mother Charles and Constance Seeger and brothers on a camping trip May 23 1921 In 1912 his father Charles Seeger was hired to establish the music department at the University of California Berkeley but was forced to resign in 1918 because of his outspoken pacifism during World War I 6 Charles and Constance moved back east making Charles s parents estate in Patterson New York just north of New York City their base of operations When baby Pete was eighteen months old they set out with him and his two older brothers in a homemade trailer to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South 7 Upon their return Constance taught violin and Charles taught composition at the New York Institute of Musical Art later Juilliard whose president family friend Frank Damrosch was Constance s adoptive uncle Charles also taught part time at the New School for Social Research Career and money tensions led to quarrels and reconciliations but when Charles discovered Constance had opened a secret bank account in her own name they separated and Charles took custody of their three sons 8 Beginning in 1936 Charles held various administrative positions in the federal government s Farm Resettlement program the WPA s Federal Music Project 1938 1940 and the wartime Pan American Union After World War II he taught ethnomusicology at the University of California Berkeley and Yale University 9 10 Charles and Constance divorced when Pete was seven and in 1932 Charles married his composition student and assistant Ruth Crawford now considered by many to be one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century 11 Deeply interested in folk music Ruth had contributed musical arrangements to Carl Sandburg s extremely influential folk song anthology the American Songbag 1927 and later created significant original settings for eight of Sandburg s poems 12 Pete s eldest brother Charles Seeger III was a radio astronomer and his next older brother John Seeger taught in the 1950s at the Dalton School in Manhattan and was the principal from 1960 to 1976 at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx 13 Pete s uncle Alan Seeger a noted American war poet I Have a Rendezvous with Death had been one of the first American soldiers to be killed in World War I All four of Pete s half siblings from his father s second marriage Margaret Peggy Mike Barbara and Penelope Penny became folk singers Peggy Seeger a well known performer in her own right married British folk singer and activist Ewan MacColl Mike Seeger was a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers one of whose members John Cohen married Pete s half sister Penny also a talented singer who died young Barbara Seeger joined her siblings in recording folk songs for children In 1935 Pete attended Camp Rising Sun an international leadership camp held every summer in upstate New York which influenced his life s work His final visit occurred in 2012 citation needed Career editEarly work edit nbsp Seeger in 1979At four Seeger was sent away to boarding school but came home two years later when his parents learned the school had failed to inform them he had contracted scarlet fever 14 He attended first and second grades in Nyack New York where his mother lived before entering boarding school in Ridgefield Connecticut 15 Despite being classical musicians his parents did not press him to play an instrument On his own the otherwise bookish and withdrawn boy gravitated to the ukulele becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport At thirteen Seeger enrolled in the Avon Old Farms School in Avon Connecticut from which he graduated in 1936 He was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun the George E Jonas Foundation s international summer leadership program During the summer of 1936 while traveling with his father and stepmother Pete heard the five string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville organized by local folklorist lecturer and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford whom Charles Seeger had hired for Farm Resettlement music projects 16 The festival took place in a covered baseball field There the Seegers watched square dance teams from Bear Wallow Happy Hollow Cane Creek Spooks Branch Cheoah Valley Bull Creek and Soco Gap heard the five string banjo player Samantha Bumgarner and family string bands including a group of Indians from the Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field hearing music being made there as well As Lunsford s daughter would later recall those country people held the riches that Dad had discovered They could sing fiddle pick the banjos and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park 17 For the Seegers experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a conversion experience Pete was deeply affected and after learning basic strokes from Lunsford spent much of the next four years trying to master the five string banjo 17 The teenage Seeger also sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita Benton a lover of Americana played Cindy and Old Joe Clark with his students Charlie and Jackson Pollock friends from the hillbilly recording industry and avant garde composers Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell It was at one of Benton s parties that Pete heard John Henry for the first time 18 Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship He dropped out of college in 1938 19 He dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art as well His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School where his aunt was principal He polished his performance skills during a summer stint of touring New York state with the Vagabond Puppeteers Jerry Oberwager 22 Mary Wallace 22 and Harriet Holtzman 23 a traveling puppet theater inspired by rural education campaigns of post revolutionary Mexico 20 One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers The group reprised its act in October in New York City An article in the October 2 1939 Daily Worker reported on the Puppeteers six week tour this way During the entire trip the group never ate once in a restaurant They slept out at night under the stars and cooked their own meals in the open very often they were the guests of farmers At rural affairs and union meetings the farm women would bring suppers and would vie with each other to see who could feed the troupe most and after the affair the farmers would have earnest discussions about who would have the honor of taking them home for the night They fed us too well the girls reported And we could live the entire winter just by taking advantage of all the offers to spend a week on the farm In the farmers homes they talked about politics and the farmers problems about antisemitism and Unionism about war and peace and social security and always the puppeteers report the farmers wanted to know what can be done to create a stronger unity between themselves and city workers They felt the need of this more strongly than ever before and the support of the CIO in their milk strike has given them a new understanding and a new respect for the power that lies in solidarity One summer has convinced us that a minimum of organized effort on the part of city organizations unions consumers bodies the American Labor Party and similar groups can not only reach the farmers but weld them into a pretty solid front with city folks that will be one of the best guarantees for progress 21 That fall Seeger took a job in Washington D C assisting Alan Lomax a friend of his father s at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress Seeger s job was to help Lomax sift through commercial race and hillbilly music and select recordings that best represented American folk music a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union later the Organization of American States of whose music division his father Charles Seeger was head 1938 1953 22 Lomax also encouraged Seeger s folk singing vocation and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray s weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From 1940 41 alongside Josh White Burl Ives Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie whom he had first met at Will Geer s Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3 1940 Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast 23 The show was a success but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast During the war Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin From 1942 to 1945 Seeger served in the Army as an Entertainment Specialist 24 nbsp Pete Seeger entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt center honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine s Day party marking the opening of the United Federal Labor Canteen CIO in then segregated Washington D C 1944 25 In 1949 Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village New York Early activism edit In 1936 at the age of 17 Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League YCL then at the height of its influence In 1942 he became a member of the Communist Party USA CPUSA itself 26 but he left in 1949 27 In the spring of 1941 the twenty one year old Seeger performed as a member of the Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell Cisco Houston Woody Guthrie Butch Hawes and Bess Lomax Hawes and Lee Hays Seeger and the Almanacs cut several albums of 78s on Keynote and other labels Songs for John Doe recorded in late February or March and released in May 1941 Talking Union and an album each of sea shanties and pioneer songs Written by Millard Lampell Songs for John Doe was performed by Lampell Seeger and Hays joined by Josh White and Sam Gary It contained lines such as It wouldn t be much thrill to die for Du Pont in Brazil that were sharply critical of Roosevelt s unprecedented peacetime draft enacted in September 1940 This anti war anti draft tone reflected the Communist Party line after the 1939 Molotov Ribbentrop Pact which maintained that the war was phony and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia Seeger has said he believed this line of argument at the time as did many fellow members of the Young Communist League YCL Though nominally members of the Popular Front which was allied with Roosevelt and more moderate liberals the YCL s members still smarted from Roosevelt and Churchill s arms embargo on Loyalist Spain which Roosevelt later called a mistake 28 and the alliance frayed in the confusing welter of events A June 16 1941 review in Time magazine which under its owner Henry Luce had become very interventionist denounced the Almanacs John Doe accusing it of scrupulously echoing what it called the mendacious Moscow tune that Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J P Morgan war Eleanor Roosevelt a fan of folk music reportedly found the album in bad taste though President Roosevelt when the album was shown to him merely observed correctly as it turned out that few people would ever hear it More alarmist was the reaction of eminent German born Harvard Professor of Government Carl Joachim Friedrich an adviser on domestic propaganda to the United States military In a review in the June 1941 Atlantic Monthly entitled The Poison in Our System he pronounced Songs for John Doe strictly subversive and illegal whether Communist or Nazi financed and a matter for the attorney general observing further that mere legal suppression would not be sufficient to counteract this type of populist poison 29 the poison being folk music and the ease with which it could be spread 30 While the U S had not officially declared war on the Axis powers in the summer of 1941 the country was energetically producing arms and ammunition for its allies overseas Despite the boom in manufacturing this concerted rearming effort brought African Americans were barred from working in defense plants Racial tensions rose as Black labor leaders such as A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and their white allies began organizing protests and marches To combat this social unrest President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 the Fair Employment Act on 25 June 1941 The order came three days after Hitler broke the non aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union at which time the Communist Party quickly directed its members to get behind the draft and forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war angering some leftists Copies of Songs for John Doe were removed from sale and the remaining inventory destroyed though a few copies may exist in the hands of private collectors 31 The Almanac Singers Talking Union album on the other hand was reissued as an LP by Folkways FH 5285A in 1955 and is still available The following year the Almanacs issued Dear Mr President an album in support of Roosevelt and the war effort The title song Dear Mr President was a solo by Pete Seeger and its lines expressed his lifelong credo Now Mr President We haven t always agreed in the past I know But that ain t at all important now What is important is what we got to do We got to lick Mr Hitler and until we do Other things can wait Now as I think of our great land I know it ain t perfect but it will be someday Just give us a little time This is the reason that I want to fight Not cause everything s perfect or everything s right No it s just the opposite I m fightin because I want a better America and better laws And better homes and jobs and schools And no more Jim Crow and no more rules like You can t ride on this train cause you re a Negro You can t live here cause you re a Jew You can t work here cause you re a union man So Mr President We got this one big job to do That s lick Mr Hitler and when we re through Let no one else ever take his place To trample down the human race So what I want is you to give me a gun So we can hurry up and get the job done Seeger s critics however continued to bring up the Almanacs repudiated Songs for John Doe In 1942 a year after the John Doe album s brief appearance and disappearance the FBI decided that the now pro war Almanacs were still endangering the war effort by subverting recruitment According to the New York World Telegram February 14 1942 Carl Friedrich s 1941 article The Poison in Our System was printed up as a pamphlet and distributed by the Council for Democracy an organization that Friedrich and Henry Luce s right hand man C D Jackson Vice President of Time magazine had founded to combat all the Nazi fascist communist pacifist antiwar groups in the United States 32 Seeger served in the U S Army in the Pacific 33 He was trained as an airplane mechanic but was reassigned to entertain the American troops with music citation needed Later when people asked him what he did in the war he always answered I strummed my banjo This quote needs a citation After returning from service Seeger and others established People s Songs conceived as a nationwide organization with branches on both coasts and designed to create promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People 34 With Pete Seeger as its director People s Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt s former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry A Wallace who ran as a third party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket Despite having attracted enormous crowds nationwide however Wallace won only in New York City and following the election he was excoriated for accepting the help in his campaign of Communists and fellow travelers such as Seeger and singer Paul Robeson 35 Spanish Civil War songs edit Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War In 1943 with Tom Glazer and Bess and Baldwin Hawes he recorded an album of 78s called Songs of the Lincoln Battalion on Moe Asch s Stinson label This included such songs as There s a Valley in Spain Called Jarama and Viva la Quince Brigada In 1960 this collection was re issued by Moe Asch as one side of a Folkways LP called Songs of the Lincoln and International Brigades On the other side was a reissue of the legendary Six Songs for Democracy originally recorded in Barcelona in 1938 while bombs were falling performed by Ernst Busch and a chorus of members of the Thalmann Battalion made up of volunteers from Germany The songs were Moorsoldaten Peat Bog Soldiers composed by political prisoners of German concentration camps Die Thaelmann Kolonne Hans Beimler Das Lied von der Einheitsfront Song of the United Front by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht Lied der Internationalen Brigaden Song of the International Brigades and Los cuatro generales The Four Generals known in English as The Four Insurgent Generals Group recordings edit As a self described split tenor between a tenor and a countertenor 36 Pete Seeger was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups the Almanac Singers and the Weavers The Almanac Singers which Seeger co founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays was a topical group designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement 37 racial and religious inclusion and other progressive causes Its personnel included at various times Woody Guthrie Bess Lomax Hawes Sis Cunningham Josh White and Sam Gary As a controversial Almanac singer the 21 year old Seeger performed under the stage name Pete Bowers to avoid compromising his father s government career In 1950 the Almanacs were reconstituted as the Weavers named after the title of an 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann about a workers strike which contained the lines We ll stand it no more come what may They did benefits for strikers at which they sang songs such as Talking Union about the struggles for unionisation of industrial workers such as miners and automobile workers 38 Besides Pete Seeger performing under his own name members of the Weavers included charter Almanac member Lee Hays Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman later Frank Hamilton Erik Darling and Bernie Krause serially took Seeger s place In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare the Weavers repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been and its progressive message was couched in indirect language arguably rendering it even more powerful The Weavers on occasion performed in tuxedos unlike the Almanacs who had dressed informally and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues The Weavers string of major hits began with On Top of Old Smoky and an arrangement of Lead Belly s signature waltz Goodnight Irene 4 which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950 39 and was covered by many other pop singers On the flip side of Irene was the Israeli song Tzena Tzena Tzena 4 Other Weavers hits included Dusty Old Dust So Long It s Been Good to Know You by Woody Guthrie Kisses Sweeter Than Wine by Hays Seeger and Lead Belly and the Zulu song by Solomon Linda Wimoweh about Shaka among others The Weavers performing career was abruptly derailed in 1953 at the peak of their popularity when blacklisting prompted radio stations to refuse to play their records and all their bookings were canceled They briefly returned to the stage however at a sold out reunion at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and in a subsequent reunion tour which produced a hit version of Merle Travis s Sixteen Tons as well as LPs of their concert performances Kumbaya a Gullah black spiritual dating from slavery days was also introduced to wide audiences by Pete Seeger and the Weavers in 1959 becoming a staple of Boy and Girl Scout campfires In the late 1950s the Kingston Trio was formed in direct imitation of and homage to the Weavers covering much of the latter s repertoire though with a more buttoned down uncontroversial and mainstream collegiate persona The Kingston Trio produced another phenomenal succession of Billboard chart hits and in its turn spawned a legion of imitators laying the groundwork for the 1960s commercial folk revival In the documentary film Pete Seeger The Power of Song 2007 Seeger states that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial Banjo and 12 string guitar edit nbsp Four long neck banjos inspired by Seeger s The instrument on far left was closely constructed to match Seeger s American Banjo Museum In 1948 Seeger wrote the first version of How to Play the Five String Banjo a book that many who banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument He went on to invent the long neck or Seeger banjo This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5 string banjo Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region citation needed the five string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence largely thanks to Seeger s championing of and improvements to it According to an unnamed musician quoted in David King Dunaway s biography by nesting a resonant chord between two precise notes a melody note and a chiming note on the fifth string Pete Seeger gentrified the more percussive traditional Appalachian frailing style with its vigorous hammering of the forearm and its percussive rapping of the fingernail on the banjo head 40 Although what Dunaway s informant describes is the age old droned frailing style the implication is that Seeger made this more acceptable to mass audiences by omitting some of its percussive complexities while presumably still preserving the characteristic driving rhythmic quality associated with the style From the late 1950s on Seeger also accompanied himself on the 12 string guitar an instrument of Mexican origin that had been associated with Lead Belly who had styled himself the King of the 12 String Guitar Seeger s distinctive custom made guitars had a triangular soundhole He combined the long scale length approximately 28 and capo to key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop D DADGBE tuning tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings which he played with thumb and finger picks 41 Interest in steelpan edit In 1956 then Peter Seeger see film credits and his wife Toshi traveled to Port of Spain Trinidad to seek out information on the steelpan sometimes called a steel drum or ping pong The two searched out a local panyard director Isaiah and proceeded to film the construction tuning and playing of the then new national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago He was attempting to include the unique flavor of the steelpan in American folk music McCarthy era edit In the 1950s and indeed consistently throughout his life Seeger continued his support of civil and labor rights racial equality international understanding and anti militarism all of which had characterized the Wallace campaign and he continued to believe that songs could help people achieve these goals However with the ever growing revelations of Joseph Stalin s atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism He left the CPUSA in 1949 but remained friends with some who did not leave it although he argued with them about it 42 43 On August 18 1955 Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un American Activities Committee HUAC Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment which would have asserted that his testimony might be self incriminating and instead as the Hollywood Ten had done refused to name personal and political associations on the grounds that this would violate his First Amendment rights 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 44 45 Seeger s refusal to answer questions that he believed violated his fundamental constitutional rights led to a March 26 1957 indictment for contempt of Congress for some years he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York He was convicted in a jury trial of contempt of Congress in March 1961 and sentenced to ten one year terms in jail to be served simultaneously but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction 46 47 In 1960 the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government Seeger refused and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district allowing the concert to go on as scheduled Almost 50 years later in February 2009 the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of its predecessors 48 Folk music revival edit To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s Seeger worked gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps and traveled the college campus circuit He also recorded as many as five albums a year for Moe Asch s Folkways Records label As the nuclear disarmament movement picked up steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s Seeger s anti war songs such as Where Have All the Flowers Gone co written with Joe Hickerson Turn Turn Turn 49 adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes and The Bells of Rhymney by the Welsh poet Idris Davies 50 1957 gained wide currency Seeger was the first person to make a studio recording of Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream in 1956 Seeger also was closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall concert featuring the youthful Freedom Singers as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee This event and Martin Luther King Jr s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of that same year brought the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome to wide audiences He sang it on the 50 mile walk from Selma to Montgomery Alabama along with 1 000 other marchers 51 By this time Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village as a longtime columnist in Sing Out the successor to the People s Songs Bulletin and as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers he coined the phrase Woody s children alluding to his associate and traveling companion Woody Guthrie who by this time had become a legendary figure This urban folk revival movement a continuation of the activist tradition of the 1930s and 1940s and of People s Songs used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics to effect social change a practice that goes back to the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies Little Red Song Book compiled by Swedish born union organizer Joe Hill 1879 1915 the Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie who was known to carry it around 52 Seeger toured Australia in 1963 His single Little Boxes written by Malvina Reynolds was number one in the nation s Top 40 That tour sparked a folk boom throughout the country at a time when popular music tastes post Kennedy assassination competed between folk the surfing craze and the British rock boom that gave the world the Beatles and The Rolling Stones among others Folk clubs sprang up all over the nation folk performers were accepted in established venues Australian performers singing Australian folk songs many of their own composing emerged in concerts and festivals on television and on recordings and overseas performers were encouraged to tour Australia citation needed The long television blacklist of Seeger began to end in the mid 1960s when he hosted a regionally broadcast educational folk music television show Rainbow Quest Among his guests were Johnny Cash June Carter Reverend Gary Davis Mississippi John Hurt Doc Watson the Stanley Brothers Elizabeth Cotten Patrick Sky Buffy Sainte Marie Tom Paxton Judy Collins Hedy West Donovan The Clancy Brothers Richard Farina and Mimi Farina Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee Mamou Cajun Band Bernice Johnson Reagon the Beers Family Roscoe Holcomb Malvina Reynolds Sonia Malkine and Shawn Phillips Thirty nine 42 hour long programs were recorded at WNJU s Newark studios in 1965 and 1966 produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi with Sholom Rubinstein The Smothers Brothers ended Seeger s national blacklisting by broadcasting him singing Waist Deep in the Big Muddy on their CBS variety show on February 25 1968 after his similar performance in September 1967 was censored by CBS 53 In November 1976 Seeger wrote and recorded the anti death penalty song Delbert Tibbs about the death row inmate Delbert Tibbs who was later exonerated Seeger wrote the music and selected the words from poems written by Tibbs 54 nbsp Seeger at 86 on the cover of Sing Out Summer 2005 a magazine he helped found in 1950Seeger also supported the Jewish Camping Movement He came to Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring New York over the summer many times 55 He sang and inspired countless campers 56 Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan edit Pete Seeger was one of the earliest backers of Bob Dylan he was responsible for urging A amp R man John Hammond to produce Dylan s first LP on Columbia and for inviting him to perform at the Newport Folk Festival of which Seeger was a board member 57 There was a widely repeated story that Seeger was so upset over the extremely loud amplified sound that Dylan backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band brought into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that he threatened to disconnect the equipment There are multiple versions of what went on some fanciful What is certain is that tensions had been running high between Dylan s manager Albert Grossman and Festival board members who besides Seeger also included Theodore Bikel Bruce Jackson Alan Lomax festival MC Peter Yarrow and George Wein over the scheduling of performers and other matters Two days earlier there had been a scuffle and a brief exchange of blows between Grossman and Alan Lomax and the board in an emergency session had voted to ban Grossman from the grounds but had backed off when George Wein pointed out that Grossman also managed highly popular draws Odetta and Peter Paul and Mary 58 Seeger has been portrayed as a folk purist who was one of the main opponents to Dylan s going electric 59 but when asked in 2001 about how he recalled his objections to the electric style he said I couldn t understand the words I wanted to hear the words It was a great song Maggie s Farm and the sound was distorted I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted Fix the sound so you can hear the words He hollered back This is the way they want it I said Damn it if I had an axe I d cut the cable right now But I was at fault I was the MC and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob you didn t boo Howlin Wolf yesterday He was electric Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic some of his electric songs are absolutely great Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century to use my father s old term 60 Vietnam War era and beyond edit nbsp Pete Seeger Stern Grove San Francisco August 6 1978A longstanding opponent of the arms race and of the Vietnam War Seeger satirically attacked then President Lyndon Johnson with his 1966 recording on the album Dangerous Songs of Len Chandler s children s song Beans in My Ears Beyond Chandler s lyrics Seeger said that Mrs Jay s little son Alby had beans in his ears which as the lyrics imply 61 ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War the phrase implied that Alby Jay a loose pronunciation of Johnson s nickname LBJ did not listen to anti war protests as he too had beans in his ears During 1966 Seeger and Malvina Reynolds took part in environmental activism The album God Bless the Grass was released in January of that year and became the first album in history wholly dedicated to songs about environmental issues Their politics were informed by the same ideologies of nationalism populism and criticism of big business 62 Seeger attracted wider attention starting in 1967 with his song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy about a captain referred to in the lyrics as the big fool who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II With its lyrics about a platoon being led into danger by an ignorant captain the song s anti war message was obvious the line the big fool said to push on is repeated several times 63 In the face of arguments with the management of CBS about whether the song s political weight was in keeping with the usually light hearted entertainment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour the final lines were Every time I read the paper those old feelings come on We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on The lyrics could be interpreted as an allegory of Johnson as the big fool and the Vietnam War as the foreseeable danger Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show 64 after wide publicity 65 it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers Brothers show on February 25 1968 66 At the November 15 1969 Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington DC Seeger led 500 000 protesters in singing John Lennon s song Give Peace a Chance as they rallied across from the White House Seeger s voice carried over the crowd interspersing phrases like Are you listening Nixon between the choruses of protesters singing All we are saying is give peace a chance 67 Inspired by Woody Guthrie whose guitar was labeled This machine kills fascists photo Seeger s banjo was emblazoned with the motto This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender 68 In the documentary film The Power of Song Seeger mentions that he and his family visited North Vietnam in 1972 69 Being a supporter of progressive labor unions Seeger had supported Ed Sadlowski in his bid for the presidency of the United Steelworkers of America In 1977 Seeger appeared at a fundraiser in Homestead Pennsylvania In 1978 Seeger joined American folk blues and jazz singer Barbara Dane at a rally in New York for striking coal miners 70 He also headlined a benefit concert with bluegrass artist Hazel Dickens for the striking coal miners of Stearns Kentucky at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington D C on June 8 1979 71 In 1980 Pete Seeger performed in Cambridge Massachusetts The performance was later released by Smithsonian Folkways as the album Singalong Sanders Theater 1980 72 Hudson River sloop Clearwater edit nbsp Sloop Clearwater sailing up the Hudson RiverIn 1966 Seeger and his wife Toshi founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater a nonprofit organization based in Poughkeepsie New York that sought to protect the Hudson River and surrounding wetlands and waterways through advocacy and public education It constructed a floating ambassador for this environmental mission the sloop Clearwater and began an annual music and environmental festival today known as the Great Hudson River Revival 73 Reflection on support for Soviet communism edit In 1982 Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger s decades long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form 74 In the late 1980s Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change and that the most lasting revolutions are those that take place over a period of time 74 In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone 1993 1997 reissued in 2009 Seeger wrote Should I apologize for all this I think so He went on to put his thinking in context How could Hitler have been stopped Litvinov the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in 36 proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger s book From Yale to Jail 75 At any rate today I ll apologize for a number of things such as thinking that Stalin was merely a hard driver and not a supremely cruel misleader I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition the burning of heretics by Protestants the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders White people in the U S A ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests Mongolians for Genghis Khan And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza of Southern White Democrats of Franco Spain for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to She s part African part European part Chinese part Japanese part Native American Let s look ahead 76 77 nbsp Seeger in 1999In a 1995 interview however he insisted that I still call myself a communist because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it 78 In later years as the aging Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism he also found himself criticized once again for his opinions and associations of the 1930s and 1940s In 2006 David Boaz Voice of America and NPR commentator and president of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian entitled Stalin s Songbird in which he excoriated The New Yorker and The New York Times for lauding Seeger He characterized Seeger as someone with a longtime habit of following the party line who had only eventually parted ways with the CPUSA In support of this view he quoted lines from the Almanac Singers May 1941 Songs for John Doe contrasting them darkly with lines supporting the war from Dear Mr President issued in 1942 after the United States and the Soviet Union had entered the war 79 80 In 2007 in response to criticism from historian Ron Radosh a former Trotskyite who now writes for the conservative National Review Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin Big Joe Blues 81 I m singing about old Joe cruel Joe He ruled with an iron hand He put an end to the dreams Of so many in every land He had a chance to make A brand new start for the human race Instead he set it back Right in the same nasty place I got the Big Joe Blues Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast I got the Big Joe Blues Do this job no questions asked I got the Big Joe Blues 82 The song was accompanied by a letter to Radosh in which Seeger stated I think you re right I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U S S R in 1965 77 Later work edit nbsp Seeger left performing with Kabir Suman at Kolkata in 1996 nbsp Seeger at the Clearwater Festival in June 2007On March 16 2007 Pete Seeger his sister Peggy his brothers Mike and John his wife Toshi and other family members spoke and performed at a symposium and concert sponsored by the American Folklife Center in honor of the Seeger family held at the Library of Congress in Washington D C 83 where Pete Seeger had been employed by the Archive of American Folk Song 67 years earlier nbsp Pete Seeger right 88 years old photographed in March 2008 with his friend the writer and musician Ed RenehanIn September 2008 Appleseed Recordings released At 89 Seeger s first studio album in 12 years On September 29 2008 the 89 year old singer activist once banned from commercial TV made a rare national TV appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman singing Take It From Dr King On January 18 2009 Seeger and his grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen and the crowd in singing the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land in the finale of Barack Obama s inaugural concert in Washington D C 84 85 The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of two verses not often included in the song one about a private property sign the narrator cheerfully ignores and the other making a passing reference to a Depression era relief office The former s final line however This land was made for you and me is modified to That side was made for you and me 84 86 Over the years he lent his fame to support numerous environmental organizations including South Jersey s Bayshore Center the home of New Jersey s tall ship the oyster schooner A J Meerwald Seeger s benefit concerts helped raise funds for groups so they could continue to educate and spread environmental awareness 87 On May 3 2009 at the Clearwater Concert dozens of musicians gathered in New York at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Seeger s 90th birthday which was later televised on PBS during the summer 88 ranging from Dave Matthews John Mellencamp Billy Bragg Bruce Springsteen Tom Morello Eric Weissberg Ani DiFranco and Roger McGuinn to Joan Baez Richie Havens Joanne Shenandoah R Carlos Nakai Bill Miller Joseph Fire Crow Margo Thunderbird Tom Paxton Ramblin Jack Elliott and Arlo Guthrie Cuban singer songwriter Silvio Rodriguez was also invited to appear but his visa was not approved in time by the United States government Consistent with Seeger s longtime advocacy for environmental concerns the proceeds from the event benefited the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater 89 a non profit organization founded by Seeger in 1966 to defend and restore the Hudson River Seeger s 90th birthday was also celebrated at The College of Staten Island on May 4 90 91 92 On September 19 2009 Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival which was particularly notable because the festival does not normally feature folk artists In 2010 still active at the age of 91 Seeger co wrote and performed the song God s Counting on Me God s Counting on You with Lorre Wyatt commenting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill 93 A performance of the song by Seeger Wyatt and friends was recorded and filmed aboard the sloop Clearwater in August for a single and video produced by Richard Barone and Matthew Billy released on election day November 6 2012 94 External videos nbsp nbsp Civil Rights History Project Pete Seeger 57 42 Library of Congress 95 On October 21 2011 at age 92 Pete Seeger was part of a solidarity march with Occupy Wall Street to Columbus Circle in New York City 96 The march began with Seeger and fellow musicians exiting Symphony Space 95th and Broadway where they had performed as part of a benefit for Seeger s Clearwater organization Thousands of people crowded Pete Seeger by the time they reached Columbus Circle where he performed with his grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger Arlo Guthrie David Amram and other celebrated musicians 97 The event promoted under the name OccupyTheCircle was livestreamed and was dubbed by some the Pete Seeger March In January 2012 Seeger joined the Rivertown Kids in paying tribute to his friend Bob Dylan performing Dylan s Forever Young on the Amnesty International album Chimes of Freedom 98 This song Seeger s last single marked Seeger s only music video which went viral in the wake of his death two years later 99 On December 14 2012 Seeger performed along with Harry Belafonte Jackson Browne Common and others at a concert to bring awareness to the 37 year long ordeal of Native American activist Leonard Peltier The concert was held at the Beacon Theatre in New York City 100 On April 9 2013 Hachette Audio Books issued an audiobook entitled Pete Seeger The Storm King Stories Narratives Poems This two CD spoken word work was conceived of and produced by noted percussionist Jeff Haynes and presents Pete Seeger telling the stories of his life against a background of music performed by more than 40 musicians of varied genres 101 The launch of the audiobook was held at the Dia Beacon on April 11 2013 to an enthusiastic audience of around two hundred people and featured many of the musicians from the project among them Samite Dar Williams Dave Eggar and Richie Stearns of the Horse Flies and Natalie Merchant performing live under the direction of producer and percussionist Haynes 102 April 15 2013 Sirius XM Book Radio presented the Dia Beacon concert as a special episode of Cover to Cover Live with Maggie Linton and Kim Alexander entitled Pete Seeger The Storm King and Friends 103 On August 9 2013 one month widowed Seeger was in New York City for the 400 year commemoration of the Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Iroquois and the Dutch On an interview he gave that day to Democracy Now Seeger sang I Come and Stand at Every Door as it was also the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki 104 105 On September 21 2013 Pete Seeger performed at Farm Aid at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs New York Joined by Wille Nelson Neil Young John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews he sang This Land Is Your Land 106 and included a verse he said he had written specifically for the Farm Aid concert Personal life editThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Pete Seeger news newspapers books scholar JSTOR October 2023 Learn how and when to remove this template message Seeger married Toshi Aline Ohta in 1943 whom he credited with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible The couple remained married until Toshi s death in July 2013 107 Their first child Peter Ōta Seeger was born in 1944 and died at six months while Pete was deployed overseas Pete never saw him 108 They went on to have three more children Daniel an accomplished photographer and filmmaker Mika a potter and muralist and Tinya a potter as well as grandchildren Tao Rodriguez Seeger a musician Cassie an artist Kitama Cahill Jackson a psychotherapist Moraya a marriage and family therapist married to the NFL player Chris DeGeare Penny and Isabelle and great grandchildren Dio and Gabel Tao a folk musician in his own right sings and plays guitar banjo and harmonica with the Mammals Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the 2007 PBS documentary Pete Seeger The Power of Song When asked by Beliefnet about his religious or spiritual beliefs and his definition of God Seeger replied Nobody knows for sure But people undoubtedly get feelings which are not explainable and they feel they re talking to God or they re talking to their parents who are long dead I feel most spiritual when I m out in the woods I feel part of nature Or looking up at the stars I used to say I was an atheist Now I say it s all according to your definition of God According to my definition of God I m not an atheist Because I think God is everything Whenever I open my eyes I m looking at God Whenever I m listening to something I m listening to God I ve had preachers of the gospel Presbyterians and Methodists saying Pete I feel that you are a very spiritual person And maybe I am I feel strongly that I m trying to raise people s spirits to get together I tell people I don t think God is an old white man with a long white beard and no navel nor do I think God is an old black woman with white hair and no navel But I think God is literally everything because I don t believe that something can come out of nothing And so there s always been something Always is a long time He was a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York 110 Seeger lived in Beacon New York He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949 and lived there first in a trailer then in a log cabin they built themselves He remained engaged politically and maintained an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley region of New York throughout his life For years during the Iraq War Seeger maintained a weekly protest vigil alongside Route 9 in Wappingers Falls near his home He told a New York Times reporter that working for peace was like adding sand to a basket on one side of a large scale trying to tip it one way despite enormous weight on the opposite side He went on to say Some of us try to add more sand by teaspoons It s leaking out as fast as it goes in and they re all laughing at us But we re still getting people with teaspoons I get letters from people saying I m still on the teaspoon brigade 111 Toshi died in Beacon on July 9 2013 at the age of 91 107 112 and Pete died at New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 27 2014 at the age of 94 113 Legacy editResponse and reaction to Seeger s death quickly poured in President Barack Obama noted that Seeger had been called America s tuning fork 114 and that he believed in the power of song to bring social change Over the years Pete used his voice and his hammer to strike blows for workers rights and civil rights world peace and environmental conservation and he always invited us to sing along For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger 115 Folksinger and fellow activist Billy Bragg wrote that Pete believed that music could make a difference Not change the world he never claimed that he once said that if music could change the world he d only be making music but he believed that while music didn t have agency it did have the power to make a difference 116 Bruce Springsteen said of Seeger s death I lost a great friend and a great hero last night Pete Seeger before performing We Shall Overcome while on tour in South Africa 117 Tributes edit External audio nbsp Fresh Air with Terry Gross January 28 2014 Obituary for Pete Seeger Fresh Air with Terry Gross Scroll down to View online to hear the audio interview A proposal was made in 2009 to name the Walkway Over the Hudson in his honor 118 A posthumous suggestion that Seeger s name be applied to the replacement Tappan Zee Bridge being built over the Hudson River was made by a local town supervisor 73 119 Seeger s boat the sloop Clearwater is based at Beacon New York just upriver from the bridge and frequently sails down to Manhattan to continuing spreading Seeger s message and music 120 Oakwood Friends School located in Poughkeepsie New York not far from Seeger s home performed Where Have All the Flowers Gone at one of their worship meetings The collaboration was with three teachers playing guitar and vocals as well as a student harmonica player and a student vocalist A free five day memorial called Seeger Fest took place on July 17 21 2014 featuring Judy Collins Peter Yarrow Harry Belafonte Anti Flag Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root Steve Earle Holly Near Fred Hellerman Guy Davis DJ Logic Paul Winter Consort Dar Williams DJ Kool Herc The Rappers Delight Experience Tiokasin Ghosthorse David amram Mike Ruthy Tom Chapin James Maddock The Chapin Sisters Rebel Diaz Sarah Lee Guthrie amp Johnny Irion Elizabeth Mitchell Emma s Revolution Toni Blackman Kim amp Reggie Harris Magpie Abrazos Orchestra Nyraine George Wein The Vanaver Caravan White Tiger Society Lorre Wyatt AKIR Adira amp Alana Amram Aurora Barnes The Owens Brothers The Tony Lee Thomas Band Jay Ungar amp Molly Mason New York City Labor Chorus Roland Moussa Roots Revelators Kristen Graves Bob Reid Hudson River Sloop Singers Walkabout Clearwater Chorus Betty amp The baby Boomers Work O The Weavers Jacob Bernz Sarah Armour and Amanda Palmer 121 In 2006 thirteen folk music songs made popular by Pete Seeger were reinterpreted by Bruce Springsteen on his fourteenth studio album We Shall Overcome The Seeger Sessions In 2014 Wepecket Island Records recorded a Pete Seeger tribute album called For Pete s Sake In 2020 Kronos Quartet released Long Time Passing an album of all new arrangements of Pete Seeger s music commissioned by the FreshGrass Foundation and released on Smithsonian Folkways On July 21 2022 the United States Postal Service issued a Pete Seeger Forever stamp The stamp is based on a photograph of Seeger playing a long neck banjo taken by Seeger s son Daniel some time in the early 1960s It s a commemorative in the Music Icons series with a print quantity of 22 000 000 122 Awards edit Seeger received many awards and recognitions throughout his career including Induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame 1972 123 The Eugene V Debs Award 1979 The Letelier Moffitt Human Rights Award 1986 The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award 1993 124 The National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts 1994 Kennedy Center Honor 1994 The Harvard Arts Medal 1996 The James Smithson Bicentennial Medal 1996 125 Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 1996 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 1996 for his record Pete 1997 The Felix Varela Medal Cuba s highest honor for his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism 1999 The Schneider Family Book Award for his children s picture book The Deaf Musicians 2007 The Mid Hudson Civic Center Hall of Fame 2008 Seeger and Arlo Guthrie performed the first public concert at the Poughkeepsie New York not for profit family entertainment venue close to Seeger s home in 1976 Grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger accepted the Hall of Fame plaque on behalf of his grandfather Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 2008 for his record At 89 2009 The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award 126 for his commitment to peace and social justice as a musician songwriter activist and environmentalist that spans over sixty years 2008 The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize 2009 Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children of 2010 for his record album Tomorrow s Children with the Rivertown Kids and Friends 2011 George Peabody Medal 2013 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album of 2013 nomination for Pete Seeger The Storm King Stories Narratives Poems 2014 127 128 Woody Guthrie Prize 2014 inaugural recipient 129 Selected discography editMain article Pete Seeger discography American Folk Songs for Children 1953 American Industrial Ballads 1956 American Favorite Ballads Vol 2 1958 Gazette Vol 1 1958 Sleep Time Songs amp Stories 1958 God Bless the Grass 1966 Dangerous Songs 1966 Rainbow Race 1973 American Folk Songs for Children 1990 At 89 2008 130 131 See also editList of banjo players List of peace activists Tom Winslow Clearwater singer and songwriter Union BoysNotes edit Clapp E P September 14 2013 Honor Pete Seeger The Huffington Post Retrieved July 13 2013 David King Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing New York Random House 1981 1990 revised edition Villard Books 2008 p 17 See Ann M Pescatello Charles Seeger A Life in American Music University of Pittsburgh 1992 pp 4 5 a b c Pete Seeger interviewed on the Pop Chronicles 1969 Dunaway 2008 p 20 According to Dunaway the British born president of the university all but fired Charles Seeger How Can I Keep From Singing p 26 Ann Pescatello Charles Seeger A Life In Music 83 85 Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing p 32 Frank Damrosch siding with Constance fired Charles from Juilliard see Judith Tick Ruth Crawford Seeger a Composer s Search for American Music Oxford University Press 1997 pp 224 25 Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing pp 22 24 Winkler 2009 p 4 See Judith Tick Ruth Crawford Seeger a Composer s Search for American Music 1997 David Lewis Ruth Crawford Seeger Biography in 600 Words on website of her daughter Peggy Seeger Peggyseeger com February 14 2005 Retrieved August 28 2012 John Seeger Dies at 95 WordPress com January 18 2010 Retrieved November 5 2010 Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 50 and Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing p 32 Alec Wilkinson The Protest Singer An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger New York Knopf 2009 p 43 Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing pp 48 49 a b Judith Tick Ruth Crawford Seeger p 239 Judith Tick Ruth Crawford Seeger p 235 According to John Szwed Jackson Pollock later famous for his drip paintings played harmonica having smashed his violin in frustration see Alan Lomax The Man Who Recorded the World Viking 2010 p 88 According to Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 51 after failing one of his winter exams and losing his scholarship Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing pp 61 63 Emery Lawrence Interesting Summer Young Puppeteers in Unique Tour of Rural Areas quoted on Pete Seeger website The resultant 22 page mimeographed List of American Folk Music on Commercial Recordings issued in 1940 and mailed by Lomax out to academic folklore scholars became the basis of Harry Smith s celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways Records Seeger also did similar work for Lomax at Decca in the late 1940s Folk Songs in the White House Time March 3 1941 Seeger Pete Cpl army togetherweserved com Retrieved April 1 2020 From the Washington Post February 12 1944 The Labor Canteen sponsored by the United Federal Workers of America CIO will be opened at 8 p m tomorrow at 1212 18th st nw Mrs Roosevelt is expected to attend at 8 30 p m Reineke Hank 2023 Rising Son The Life and Music of Arlo Guthrie American Popular Music Vol 10 University of Oklahoma Press p 42 ISBN 9780806193588 He later commented Innocently I became a member of the Communist Party and when they said fight for peace I did and when they said fight Hitler I did I got out in 49 though I should have left much earlier It was stupid of me not to My father had got out in 38 when he read the testimony of the trials in Moscow and he could tell they were forced confessions We never talked about it though and I didn t examine closely enough what was going on I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin and had no idea how cruel a leader he was Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 52 see also The Protest Singer An Intimate Portrait 2009 p 116 Dallek Robert 1995 Franklin D Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932 1945 Oxford University Press p 180 ISBN 9780199826667 Retrieved August 28 2012 The Poison in Our System excerpt from the Atlantic Monthly by Carl Joachim Friedrich Archived June 3 2013 at the Wayback Machine Note Dunaway misses the significance of military propagandist Carl Joachim Friedrich when he mistakenly refers to him as Karl Frederick an error other writers who relied on Dunaway repeated Friedrich s review concluded The three records sell for one dollar and you are asked to play them in your home play them in your union hall take them back to your people Probably some of these songs fall under the criminal provisions of the Selective Service Act and to that extent it is a matter for the Attorney General But you never can handle situations of this kind democratically by mere suppression Unless civic groups and individuals will make a determined effort to counteract such appeals by equally effective methods democratic morale will decline Upon United States entry into the war in 1942 Friedrich became chairman of the Executive Committee of the Council for Democracy charged with combatting isolationism and had his article on the Almanacs Archived June 3 2013 at the Wayback Machine reprinted as one of several pamphlets which he sent to radio network executives Although the Almanacs were accused both at the time and in subsequent histories of reversing their attitudes in response to the Communist Party s new party line Seeger has pointed out that virtually all progressives reversed course and supported the war He insists that no one Communist Party or otherwise told the Almanacs to change their songs Seeger interview with Richard A Reuss 4 9 68 quoted in William G Roy Who Shall Not Be Moved Folk Music Community and Race in the American The Communist Party and the Highlander School ff p 16 Archived March 2 2009 at the Wayback Machine Blanche Wiessen Cook Eisenhower Declassified Doubleday 1981 page 122 The Council was a limited affair Cook writes that served mostly to highlight Jackson s talents as a propagandist Billboard Magazine Article on Pete Seegar 12 19 2015 https www billboard com music music news military fbi woody guthrie pete seeger wartime world war two 6813894 People s Songs Inc People s Songs Newsletter No 1 February 1946 Old Town School of Folk Music Resource center collection American Masters Pete Seeger The Power of Song KQED Broadcast 2 27 08 Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 47 See Wikipedia entry on the CIO Ingram David The Jukebox in the Garden Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960 Humanities Source 2010 Vol 7 Retrieved October 14 2014 Alec Wilkinson The Protest Singer Pete Seeger and American folk music in The New Yorker April 17 2006 pp 44 53 Dunaway How Can I Keep from Singing p 100 Acoustic Guitar Central Acousticguitar com Archived from the original on September 13 2012 Retrieved November 20 2012 a b Pete Seeger The Power of Song Archived August 24 2008 at the Wayback Machine PBS American Masters February 27 2008 Pete Seeger Interview permanent dead link PBS American Masters Pete Seeger to the House Un American Activities Committee August 18 1955 Quoted along with some other exchanges from that hearing in Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 53 United States Congress House Committee on Un American Activities August 17 18 1955 Investigation of Communist Activities New York Area Part VII Entertainment Hearings Before the Committee on Un American Activities House of Representatives Eighty Fourth Congress First Session August 17 And 18 1955 Vol pt 7 Washington U S Govt Print Off pp Testimony of Peter Seeger p 2447 2459 United States v Seeger 303 F 2d 478 2d Cir 1962 Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 p 53 Dillon Raquel Maria School board offers apology to singer Pete Seeger Sign on San Diego Retrieved February 13 2011 Pete Seeger interviewed on the Pop Chronicles 1969 BBC News South East Wales BBC Retrieved November 20 2012 Whitehead John Pete Seeger Changing the World One Song at a Time Waxahachie Daily Light May 30 2013 Rutherford Institute Accessed on October 14 2014 Briley Ronald 2006 Woody Sez Woody Guthrie the People s Daily World and Indigenous Radicalism California History 84 1 34 doi 10 2307 25161857 ISSN 0162 2897 JSTOR 25161857 Dangerously Funny The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by David Bianculli Touchstone 2009 Songwriter Pete Seeger and Writing For Freedom Peteseeger net July 28 1976 Archived from the original on September 12 2012 Retrieved September 5 2012 Turton Michael August 14 2011 Surprise Lake Camp Rich History Big Presence Highlands Current Retrieved January 28 2014 Bank Justin January 28 2014 Pete Seeger Neil Diamond and me Washington Post Retrieved January 28 2014 Fellow Newport Board member Bruce Jackson writes Pete Seeger more than any of the other board members had a personal connection with Bob Dylan it was he who in 1962 had convinced the great Columbia A and R man John Hammond famous for his work with jazz and blues musicians to produce Dylan s eponymous first album Bob Dylan If anyone was responsible for Bob Dylan s presence on the Newport Stage in 1965 it was Pete Seeger See Bruce Jackson The Story Is True The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories Philadelphia Temple University Press 2008 p 148 John Szwed Alan Lomax The Man Who Recorded the World Viking 2010 p 354 The Butterfield Blues Band a new integrated Chicago based electric band was the closer in an afternoon blues workshop entitled Blues Origins and Offshoots hosted by Lomax that had included African American blues greats Willie Dixon Son House Memphis Slim and a prison work group from Texas along with bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys Lomax upset that Butterfield s group had been shoehorned into his workshop reportedly complained aloud about how long they took to set up their electrical equipment and introduced them with the words Now let s find out if these guys can play at all This infuriated Grossman who was angling to manage the new group and he responded by attacking Lomax physically Michael Bloomfield stated Alan Lomax the great folklorist and musicologist gave us some kind of introduction that I didn t even hear but Albert found it offensive And Albert went upside his head The next thing we knew right in the middle of our show Lomax and Grossman were kicking ass on the floor in the middle of thousands of people at the Newport Folk Festival Tearing each other s clothes off We had to pull em apart We figured Albert man now there s a manager quoted in Jan Mark Wolkin Bill Keenom and Carlos Santana s Michael Bloomfield If You Love These Blues San Francisco Miller Freeman Books p 102 See also Ronald D Cohen s introduction to Part III The Folk Revival 1960s in Alan Lomax Selected Writings Ronald D Cohen ed London Routledege p 192 Rock critic Greil Marcus wrote Backstage Peter Seeger and the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax attempted to cut the band s power cables with an axe See Greil Marcus Invisible Republic the Story of the Basement Tapes 1998 republished in paperback as The Old Weird America The World of Bob Dylan s Basement Tapes New York Holt 2001 p 12 Marcus s apocryphal story was elaborated by Maria Muldaur and Paul Nelson in Martin Scorsese s film No Direction Home 2005 David Kupfer Longtime Passing An interview with Pete Seeger Archived April 25 2017 at the Wayback Machine Whole Earth magazine Spring 2001 Accessed online October 16 2007 Beans in My Ears Sniff numachi com Retrieved November 20 2012 Ingram David 2008 My Dirty Stream Pete Seeger American Folk Music and Environmental Protest Popular Music Vol 31 pp22 Routeledge Taylor amp Francis Group October 14 2014 Gibson Megan Songs of Peace and Protest 6 Essential Cuts From Pete Seeger Time com January 28 2014 p 1 Business Source Complete October 14 2014 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour CBS Season 2 Episode 1 September 10 1967 How Waist Deep in the Big Muddy Finally Got on Network Television in 1968 Peteseeger net Archived from the original on August 5 2013 Retrieved November 20 2012 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour CBS Season 2 Episode 24 February 25 1968 See for example this PBS documentary Archived March 22 2017 at the Wayback Machine and this recording on YouTube Pete Seeger s banjo Flickr March 18 2006 Retrieved September 5 2012 Brown Jim Director 2005 The Power of Song DVD Genius Products LLC ISBN 1 59445 156 7 Cohen Ronald D Capaldi James December 16 2013 The Pete Seeger Reader Oxford University Press p 209 ISBN 9780199336128 via Google Books Dickens Hazel 2008 Working girl blues the life and music of Hazel Dickens Urbana University of Illinois Press ISBN 978 0 252 09097 4 OCLC 809471478 Singalong Sanders Theater 1980 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Retrieved November 1 2018 a b Harrington Gerry January 31 2014 Movement afoot to name bridge after Pete Seeger United Press International Retrieved February 3 2014 a b David King Dunaway 2008 p 103 David T Dellinger From Yale to Jail The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter New York Pantheon Books 1993 ISBN 0 679 40591 7 Where Have All the Flowers Gone A Musical Autobiography edited by Peter Blood Bethlehem Pennsylvania A Sing Out Publication 1993 1997 page 22 a b Daniel J Wakin This Just In Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago New York Times September 1 2007 Accessed October 16 2007 The Old Left The New York Times Magazine January 22 1995 Retrieved May 22 2010 Boaz David April 14 2006 Stalin s songbird The Guardian London Retrieved March 27 2009 Boaz s article is reprinted in his book The Politics of Freedom Washington D C The Cato Institute 2008 pp 283 84 Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing p 422 Seeger turns on Uncle Joe NewStatesMan September 27 2007 How Can I Keep from Singing A Seeger Family Tribute 2007 symposium and concert American Folklife Center Library of Congress web presentation includes program photographs and webcasts a b Tommy Stevenson This Land Is Your Land Like Woody Wrote It Archived February 20 2014 at the Wayback Machine Truthout January 19 2009 Accessed February 3 2014 Maria Puente and Elysa Gardner Inauguration opening concert celebrates art of the possible USA Today January 19 2008 Accessed January 20 2009 Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen at the inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on YouTube Accessed December 3 2014 Jennings Jennifer Pete Seeger The environmental side of his activism Atlantic City Natural Health Examiner January 28 2014 Atlantic City Examiner Accessed on October 5 2014 Web site announcing Seeger s 90th birthday celebration Seeger90 com Archived from the original on March 21 2009 Retrieved August 28 2012 Hudson River Sloop Clearwater Clearwater org Retrieved November 20 2012 For Pete s Sake Sing Ithaca NY Jimharpermusic com May 3 2009 Archived from the original on April 28 2009 Retrieved November 4 2015 Yahoo Upcoming yahoo com Archived from the original on July 15 2012 Retrieved July 22 2015 Pete Seeger 90th birthday celebrations Unionsong com Retrieved July 22 2015 Patrick Doyle Video Pete Seeger Debuts New BP Protest Song Songwriter talks inspiration behind God s Counting on Me God s Counting on You Rolling Stone online July 26 2010 Retrieved July 27 2010 Pete Seeger God s Counting On Me God s Counting On You Sloop Mix feat Lorre Wyatt amp friends YouTube November 5 2012 Archived from the original on December 11 2021 Retrieved July 22 2015 Civil Rights History Project Library of Congress Retrieved March 11 2016 Moynihan Colin October 22 2011 Pete Seeger Leads Protesters in New York on Foot and in Song The New York Times Retrieved September 5 2012 Pete Seeger and Occupy Wall Street Sing We Shall Overcome at Columbus Circle 10 21 11 Youtube Archived from the original on December 11 2021 Retrieved November 20 2012 Stafford David December 4 2014 Pete Seeger Forever Young WWOZ Retrieved December 16 2022 Lewis Randy January 30 2014 Pete Seeger s Forever Young music video goes viral Washington Post Retrieved December 16 2022 Simon Moya Smith Celebrity Activists Harry Belafonte Pete Seeger Common and Michael Moore Come Together for Leonard Peltier indiancountrytodaymedianetwork com Archived from the original on March 27 2013 Retrieved April 23 2013 Hachette Book Group Hachette Audio and Jeff Haynes Introduce Pete Seeger the Storm King Stories Narratives Poems Seeger s Spoken Word Set to All New Multi Genre Music PDF www hachettebookgroup com Archived from the original PDF on March 19 2013 Retrieved March 17 2013 Barry John Seeger Legacy Grows With Release of New Album Storm King DIA Beacon Event Offers a Taste of Folk Singer s Spoken Word Recordings Poughkeepsiejournal com Retrieved April 22 2013 1 dead link Shows featuring Pete Seeger Democracy Now Retrieved September 20 2013 Pete Seeger amp Onondaga Leader Oren Lyons on Fracking Indigenous Struggles and Hiroshima Bombing Democracy Now August 9 2013 Retrieved September 20 2013 Pete Seeger This Land is Your Land Live at Farm Aid 2013 YouTube September 21 2013 Archived from the original on December 11 2021 Retrieved December 5 2013 a b Martin Douglas July 12 2013 Toshi Seeger Wife of Folk Singing Legend Dies at 91 The New York Times Retrieved July 12 2013 Dunaway How Can I Keep From Singing p 131 Wendy Schuman Pete Seeger s Session Beliefnet Inc Retrieved August 16 2013 Unitaritian Universalist Association Unitarian Universalist History Unitarian Universalist History UUA Archived from the original on July 2 2014 Retrieved September 30 2013 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link Retrieved August 17 2019 Gaffney Dennis June 22 2008 At a Roadside Vigil an Iconic Voice of Protest The New York Times Retrieved December 30 2021 Wilkinson The Protest Singer 2006 pp 47 48 Pareles Jon January 28 2014 Pete Seeger Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music Dies at 94 The New York Times Archived from the original on July 14 2015 Retrieved January 28 2014 The phrase America s tuning fork is usually attributed to poet Carl Sandburg for example see Corey Sandler Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsessions New York Kensington Books 2007 p 203 It is unclear when and where Sandburg who thought highly of the Weavers said this Studs Terkel who introduced Seeger as America s tuning fork at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival see George Wein Nate Chinen Myself Among Others A Life in Music Da Capo Press 2009 p 314 later wrote that he had seen the phase in DownBeat jazz magazine see Terkel Hope Dies Last Keeping The Faith In Troubled Times New York The New Press p 249 The phrase was picked up in a photo spread on Seeger by Life Magazine October 9 1964 p 61 see also Ronald D Cohen Rainbow Quest The Folk Music Revival and American Society 1940 70 University of Massachusetts Press 1970 p 223 Obama memorializes Pete Seeger USA Today January 28 2014 Retrieved January 28 2014 Bragg Billy January 28 2014 Pete Seeger folk activist who believed music could make a difference The Guardian Diane Vadino Bruce Springsteen Honors Pete Seeger With a Stirring We Shall Overcome Archived September 17 2017 at the Wayback Machine Rolling Stone January 29 2014 Alan Chartock New York has a chance to honor an American hero Legislative Gazette April 24 2009 found at Legislative Gazette website Archived August 2 2012 at the Wayback Machine Accessed April 29 2009 Pete Seeger should have new Tappan Zee Bridge named for him downstate politician says Dailyfreeman com January 28 2014 Retrieved January 29 2014 Clearwater Clearwater org Retrieved January 29 2014 Folk singer activist Pete Seeger dies in New York September 18 2014 Retrieved September 18 2014 Pete Seeger Stamps store usps com Retrieved September 21 2022 Songwriters Hall of Fame Pete Seeger Exhibit Home songwritershalloffame org 1972 Archived from the original on February 9 2014 Retrieved January 28 2014 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards Grammy org Archived from the original on July 3 2017 Retrieved August 28 2012 Awards and Medals 1996 Smithsonian Institution Archived from the original on June 17 2017 Retrieved January 29 2014 Courage of Conscience Award Winners Archived June 10 2014 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved August 7 2012 Pete Seeger The Storm King Project Peteseegerthestormking com Retrieved January 29 2014 56th Annual GRAMMY Awards Winners amp Nominees Best Spoken Word Album grammy com January 2014 Retrieved January 29 2014 Pete Seeger gets a posthumous prize and a sing along USA Today Retrieved January 26 2018 Pete Seeger Discography Discogs com May 3 1919 Retrieved November 20 2012 Discography for Pete Seeger on Folkways Folkways si edu Archived from the original on April 24 2009 Retrieved November 20 2012 References editDunaway David K How Can I Keep from Singing The Ballad of Pete Seeger McGraw Hill 1981 DaCapo 1990 Revised Edition New York Villard Trade Paperback 2008 ISBN 0 07 018150 0 ISBN 0 07 018151 9 ISBN 0 306 80399 2 ISBN 0 345 50608 1 Audio Version Dunaway David K Pete Seeger How Can I Keep From Singing three one hour radio documentaries Public Radio International 2008 Dunaway David K The Pete Seeger Discography Scarecrow Press Lanham MD Rowman and Littlefield 2010 Forbes Linda C Pete Seeger on Environmental Advocacy Organizing and Education in the Hudson River Valley An Interview with the Folk Music Legend Author and Storyteller Political and Environmental Activist and Grassroots Organizer Organization amp Environment 17 No 4 2004 pp 513 522 Gardner Elysa Seeger A Power in music politics USA Today February 27 2008 p 8D Seeger Pete How to Play the Five String Banjo New York People s Songs 1948 3rd edition New York Music Sales Corporation 1969 ISBN 0 8256 0024 3 Tick Judith Ruth Crawford Seeger A Composer s Search for American Music Oxford University Press 1997 Wilkinson Alec The Protest Singer Pete Seeger and American folk music The New Yorker April 17 2006 pp 44 53 Wilkinson Alec The Protest Singer An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger New York Knopf 2009 Winkler Allan M 2009 To everything there is a season Pete Seeger and the power of song Oxford Oxfordshire Oxford University Press Zollo Paul January 7 2005 Pete Seeger Reflects on His Legendary Songs GRAMMY Magazine Archived from the original on November 24 2005 Further reading editBriggs John Pete Seeger The People s Singer Atombank Books 2015 ISBN 0990516075 The Music Man profile and interview In Something to Say Thoughts on Art and Politics in America text by Richard Klin photos by Lily Prince Leapfrog Press 2011 Reich Susanna Stand Up and Sing Pete Seeger Folk Music and the Path to Justice Bloomsbury 2017 ISBN 978 0802738127 Renehan Edward Pete Seeger vs the Un Americans A Tale of the Blacklist New Street Communications LLC 2014 ISBN 978 0615998138 Seeger Pete Edited by Rob and Sam Rosenthal Pete Seeger In His Own Words Paradigm Publishers 2012 ISBN 1612052185 ISBN 978 1612052182 Seeger Pete Edited by Ronald D Cohen and James Capaldi The Pete Seeger Reader Oxford University Press 2014 ISBN 9780199862016 Seeger Pete Edited by Jo Metcalf Schwartz The Incompleat Folksinger New York Simon and Schuster 1972 ISBN 0 671 20954 X excerpts Also reprinted in a Bison Book edition Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1992 ISBN 0 8032 9216 3 External links editPete Seeger at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote David Dunaway Seeger biographer and original site creator Pete Seeger How Can I Keep From Singing peteseeger org Archived from the original on January 28 2014 Retrieved September 29 2008 Jim Capaldi original site creator Pete Seeger Appreciation Page peteseeger net Archived from the original on December 20 2012 Matthews Scott August 6 2008 John Cohen in Eastern Kentucky Documentary Expression and the Image of Roscoe Halcomb During the Folk Revival Southern Spaces Pareles Jon January 28 2014 Obituary Pete Seeger Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music Dies at 94 The New York Times Peter Seeger b 3 May 1919 d 27 January 2014 Full Tree rodovid Retrieved September 28 2016 Pete Seeger s FBI File Reveals How the Folk Legend First Became a Target of the Feds Mother Jones 2015 Pete Seeger Interview at NAMM Oral History Collection Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Pete Seeger amp oldid 1193719741, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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