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American Favorite Ballads, Vols. 1-5

by

Pete Seeger

 
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American Favorite Ballads, Vols. 1-5
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  • We Say...

    Review by Keith Harris

    Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie stand alongside each other, incontrovertibly, as the premier American folk musicians of the 20th century, and the differences between the two men's philosophies — aesthetic, political, personal — can be summed up in one word: Dylan. Woody was Bob's idol, and he bestowed upon posterity not just the hoarse yawp that (in the paradoxical way of all pop) signals authenticity perhaps most fiercely when it's a transparent affectation. He also bequeathed to rock and roll the notion of the folk singer as weathered lonesome prophet, a protean persona forever re-fabricating his past.

    Pete, by contrast, is often recalled as a benign peacenik, sainted for the generalized hippie-ish sentiments of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" or "Turn Turn Turn" or "If I Had a Hammer." Or maybe we grudgingly credit him for helping create the very idea of commercial folk music in the '50s with the Weavers, inspiring the collegiate acoustic strain that Dylan would sneer down — as well as the undying tradition of purist detractors crying "sell-out" at their successful peers.

    The Smithsonian Folkways re-release of American Favorite Ballads, timed to honor Pete's 90th birthday on May 3, avoids both of these familiar periods of Seeger's career. Instead, these five discs of material, recorded throughout the '50s and '60s, reflects the Seeger who helped Alan Lomax weed through his copious field research for the true essentials of American folk song, the conservationist forever as adamant about preventing American song-gems from slipping into obscurity as he was standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the '50s or he remains about cleaning up the Hudson river.

    As a recording artist, Seeger can seem a paradox. A champion of the communal sing-along, of folk song as an ongoing collaboration between performer and audience, it might seem to make little sense to isolate him in a studio, and even less sense to listen to him in the privacy of your own home, when you should be strumming and belting the old standards at some impromptu gathering of pals. This collection should disabuse us of this idea once and for all. Yes, Seeger is not a performer, set on creating a character a singer with his voice. Nor is he a vocalist, concerned with a musically innovative interpretation of a song. He's quite simply a singer, modest in his submission to the song itself, a song he clearly means us to sing along with, and his voice is warmly generic in its vitality, brash in its clarity of pronunciation, conveying an American vigor that needn't rely on twang to feel true.

    Seeger reminds us that folk songs should also be cherished for simpler reasons — their immediacy, their ordinariness, and, most of all, the fact that we know all the words.

  • They Say...

    Review by Steve Leggett, All Music Guide

    In his 60-some years as a public performer, Pete Seeger has left an indelible footprint on popular music. As a member of the Almanac Singers in the '40s and the Weavers a decade later, Seeger helped midwife the urban folk boom of the '60s. His comfortable voice and graceful banjo style give his many compositions and folk adaptations an easy and elegant dignity, and on the political front, well, he's been a kind of canary in the coal mine for decades, speaking (and singing) out on any number of vital issues. This wonderful five-disc set (each disc comes with its own booklet) shows Seeger at his calm, plainspoken best as he runs through the American folk songbook accompanied only by guitar or banjo. The discs were originally released by Moses Asch's Folkways Records as individual LPs between 1957 and 1962 (in all, Seeger recorded some 40 albums for Folkways between 1950 and 1964), and Smithsonian Folkways reshuffled and reissued them as stand-alone CDs in the digital era, but put together like this, they make a grand and sweeping survey of the songs America has been singing for a century or two, all filtered through Seeger's wise, politically aware perspective. It adds up to some six hours of music, history, and memories, a fine testament to Seeger, Asch, Folkways, and the grand music of the American people.

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