Pete Seeger

All Music Guide:

Pete Seeger had broad influence on the development of contemporary folk music in a career that stretched from before World War II to after the turn of the 21st century. He could claim major responsibility for the folk music revival of the late '50s and early ‘60s; he wrote a handful of songs, including "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," and "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)," that became major hits; he single-handedly popularized the five-string banjo and literally taught a generation to play it, as well as other musical instruments through a series of instructional books and records; he played thousands of concerts in every conceivable venue, at which he demonstrated an unparalleled ability to get his audiences singing with him; and he recorded dozens of albums.

Seeger's career was marked by controversy. From the start, he aspired to use folk music to promote his left-wing political views, and in times of national turmoil that brought him into direct confrontation with the U.S. government, corporate interests, and people who did not share his beliefs. These conflicts shaped his career. At times, his exposure through the mass media was extremely limited, and he was even threatened with imprisonment. That he accepted such challenges was a measure of his commitment to his ideals, which completely superseded any interest in being a conventional entertainer. Indeed, he scorned the trappings of mainstream popular success; his goals were to inspire and instruct, not merely to entertain. So, it might be most accurate to say of Pete Seeger that he devoted his life to such causes as building unions, ending wars, supporting the rights of the oppressed, and saving the environment, and that his means of expressing that devotion took the form of singing and playing on the banjo and the guitar old songs that had been revised to address those causes.

He was born Peter R. Seeger in New York City on May 3, 1919, to the musicologist Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., and the violinist Constance de Clyver (Edson) Seeger. Naturally, he was encouraged to learn music by his parents, who gave him a violin and a ukulele when he was eight. He preferred the ukulele, and he eschewed formal music lessons. In the summer of 1936, his father took him to the Ninth Annual Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, NC, where he discovered the five-string banjo. That fall, he began attending Harvard. He dropped out before the end of his sophomore year and moved to New York to try to become a journalist, but only found employment singing and playing the banjo. In 1939, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

On March 3, 1940, Seeger was among the performers at a benefit for California migratory workers held in New York. There he met Woody Guthrie. By May, Seeger and Guthrie had hit the road for a visit to Guthrie's home in Oklahoma. They performed together along the way. Back in New York late in the year, he met Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, and they formed the politically oriented group the Almanac Singers. They recorded a series of albums, but disbanded in 1942 as their members entered military service in World War II. Seeger was inducted into the army in July 1942 and served until December 1945, then returned to performing, now as a solo artist. In late 1948, he and Hays discussed putting together a new folk group. They were joined by Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman in a quartet named the Weavers. In January 1949, Seeger (music) and Hays (lyrics) wrote "The Hammer Song" (aka "If I Had a Hammer"), a stirring anthem that the Weavers began to perform at political events and eventually recorded for the tiny Charter Records label. Having achieved little recognition in a year of existence, the Weavers considered disbanding at the end of 1949, but instead, Seeger got them a booking at the Village Vanguard, and as they continued to appear there over a period of months, they finally began to get notice. Meanwhile, Seeger had sold some recordings he had made in Los Angeles in 1947 to Folkways Records, resulting in the release in 1950 of his first formal solo album, Darling Corey. But he gained much greater exposure from his work with the Weavers, who were signed to Decca Records and began recording in May. Their first Decca single combined an Israeli folk song, "Tzena Tzena Tzena," with Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene." "Tzena Tzena Tzena" peaked at number two, and "Goodnight Irene" hit number one for the first of 13 consecutive weeks on August 19, 1950. The Weavers followed with seven more chart hits through the spring of 1952, among them Guthrie's "So Long (It's Been Good to Know Yuh)," "On Top of Old Smoky," "Kisses Sweeter than Wine," and "Wimoweh." Due to their left-wing leanings, however, they were caught up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the early '50s and forced to disband by early 1953. They managed to re-form in late 1955, and Seeger performed and recorded with them through 1958. Meanwhile, he had had his own problems with red-baiting. He was called to testify by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives on August 18, 1955. After refusing to answer the committee's questions, he was cited for ten counts of contempt of Congress in 1956 and indicted in 1957.

After the breakup of the Weavers in 1953, Seeger went back to solo work, performing in any venue that would have him, including schools and summer camps. He began recording extensively for Folkways, turning out children's records; albums of traditional folk songs; albums of original songs; albums of topical songs; instructional records on how to play musical instruments; and live recordings. By the end of 1960, a full-scale folk music revival was underway, fostered by Seeger and the Weavers, who had inspired such popular acts as the Kingston Trio. John Hammond, a record executive at Columbia Records, was determined to build Columbia's standing in the folk market. He took the bold step of signing Seeger to his first major-label recording contract since the Weavers had been on Decca. It was a highly unusual action. Not only was Seeger still under indictment, with a trial coming up shortly, but Columbia also had to contend with Folkways, which had a backlog of Seeger recordings. Columbia agreed not only that Folkways could release Seeger tracks from its vault, but that if he recorded material Columbia did not care to release, he was "free to take it to a smaller label." It was a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and, in effect, Seeger was never an "exclusive" Columbia recording artist; he went right on recording for Folkways.

On April 4, 1961, Seeger was found guilty of contempt of Congress and sentenced to ten concurrent one-year terms in prison. He immediately appealed, and he was acquitted on May 18, 1962. On April 30, 1961, he performed at the Village Gate, where Hammond recorded his debut Columbia album as a live disc entitled Story Songs. It was released August 14 1961. Seeger's second Columbia album, The Bitter and the Sweet (November 12, 1962), was also a live album. Included on it was the philosophical "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)." Three years later, the song was released in a folk-rock arrangement by the Byrds and became a number-one hit. Seeger's third Columbia LP, Children's Concert at Town Hall (April 21, 1963) was another live disc. In early 1962, he scored an unexpected hit as a songwriter when the Kingston Trio's cover of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" became a Top 40 hit. (Johnny Rivers also scored a Top 40 hit when he revived it in 1965.) Also, in the summer of 1962, Peter, Paul & Mary released as a single their re-harmonized version of the 1949 Seeger/Hays anthem "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)." It became a Top Ten hit. A year later, Latin pop singer Trini Lopez revived it, and his version made the Top Five.

Seeger made a historic appearance at Carnegie Hall in June 1963. His concert produced his fourth consecutive Columbia live album, We Shall Overcome. In addition to the title song, which he contributed to and helped popularize, he also sang "Guantanamera," his adaptation of a poem by the Cuban poet José Marti. Three years later, the song was recorded by the Sandpipers and became a Top Ten hit. And the show featured Seeger's performance of the satiric song "Little Boxes," written by Malvina Reynolds. Released as a single, it became Seeger's only chart entry as a performer in early 1964.

Seeger and his family left the U.S. for a round-the-world trip on August 18, 1963. Gone for ten months, they traveled through 24 countries. In his absence, the folk music revival arguably peaked and went into decline. The We Shall Overcome LP was released on October 14, 1963, and became his first chart hit as a solo artist, reaching the Top 50 in Billboard. Milking the success of We Shall Overcome, Columbia held off on releasing another Seeger album for 13 months; his fifth live album for the label, I Can See a New Day, finally appeared on November 16, 1964. Folkways, meanwhile, in addition to releasing its own Seeger albums, also licensed material to other labels, resulting in the appearance of Folk Songs by Pete Seeger on Capitol Records in 1964 and several LPs, starting with Pete Seeger on Campus, on the joint venture Verve/Folkways Records in 1965-1966. Columbia raised no objections to these actions, perhaps because it was losing interest in the singer. After the release of yet another live album, Strangers and Cousins in June 1965, the label allowed its contract with Seeger to lapse, only to re-sign him shortly afterward at Hammond's insistence.

With the Vietnam War heating up, the civil rights struggle becoming more radical, and folk music giving way to folk-rock, Seeger seems to have become increasingly frustrated in 1965. As his first Columbia studio LP, God Bless the Grass, released on January 17, 1966, would show, he was becoming more interested in the nascent environmental movement, particularly in cleaning up the polluted Hudson River that ran by his home. Soon, he would conceive the idea of building a sloop like the ones that had plied the river at the turn of the century as a means of promoting ecology. His next Columbia album, Dangerous Songs!?, recorded in February 1966 and released later in the year, contained traditional topical songs. In the fall, he began recording Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs, featuring some folk-rock arrangements. It became known for the political allegory of its title song, which told the story of an army unit on patrol near the Mississippi River in the '40s being led into a quagmire by a misguided commanding officer: "The big fool says to push on," Seeger sang. Of course, the song was really about President Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. Columbia released the LP on July 17, 1967. On September 10, the folk-comedy duo the Smothers Brothers broke the blacklist that had kept Seeger off of network television for 17 years by having him as a guest on their CBS variety show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It had been intended that he sing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," but the network censors deleted the song from his appearance. When this was revealed, it gave the song even greater exposure. The network finally relented, and Seeger returned to the show to sing the song in February 1968.

Seeger recorded and released a new live album for Columbia, Pete Seeger Now, in 1968. On it, he continued to criticize the Vietnam War. By 1969, he was focusing on the building of the Hudson River sloop, to be called the Clearwater. He did some recording for Columbia in March to fill up an album of stray tracks called Young vs. Old, released August 6. Having been built in Maine, the Clearwater was launched on June 27, 1969, and Seeger and his crew sailed it down the New England coast and into the Hudson River, giving concerts along the way. In 1970, Seeger accepted an invitation from director Otto Preminger to write and perform a song in the feature film Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The song was "Old Devil Time," which Seeger also used on his next and last Columbia album, Rainbow Race, released on June 23, 1971.

Seeger was less active for a period in 1972-1974 because of medical problems. He returned to action in 1974, appearing with the Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick on the children's television series Sesame Street, which led to the release of a children's LP, Pete Seeger and Brother Kirk Visit Sesame Street. In December, Folkways released his first new solo studio album in three-and-a-half years, Banks of Marble and Other Songs. He went out on the first of a series of tours with Arlo Guthrie, leading to the release of a double-LP live album, Together Again, on Warner Bros. Records in 1975, and it spent a few weeks in the charts. Signed to Warner Bros. as a solo artist, Seeger recorded a final major-label studio album, Circles and Seasons, and it was released in 1979. On January 11, 1980, he persuaded Folkways to record a full-length show he performed at Sanders Theatre on the campus of Harvard in Cambridge, MA, as what he called a "demonstration concert" to show his techniques in song-leading. The album, Singalong, was released initially as a two-LP boxed set.

Seeger recorded infrequently in the '80s and ‘90s. But he accepted an offer from his friend Paul Winter to make an album for Winter's Living Music label, resulting in the release of Pete on April 16, 1996. It won him his first Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. Appleseed Records assembled the Seeger tribute albums Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (March 17, 1998) and If I Had a Song: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 2 (October 9, 2001), both various-artists collections. The label's third tribute album, Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 3 (September 23, 2003), was credited to Pete Seeger and Friends and featured an entire disc of Seeger's own recordings. In 2008, he made one more solo album for Appleseed, Pete Seeger at 89. Released on September 30, it won the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. Seeger's 90th birthday on May 3, 2009, was celebrated with an all-star concert at Madison Square Garden at which he performed with many of the artists he had influenced over the years.

Wikipedia:

Peter "Pete" Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most 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, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.

As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "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 & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964, and The Seekers in 1966. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American 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 states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".

Family and personal life [edit]

Seeger was born in French Hospital, Midtown Manhattan. His Yankee-Protestant family, which Seeger called "enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition", traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a physician from Wurtemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America in revolutionary times and married into an old New England family in the 1780s. His namesake, Pete's father, Harvard-trained composer and musicologist Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., established the first musicology curriculum in the U.S. at the University of California 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 Edson, raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.

In 1912 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. Charles and Constance moved back east, making Charles' parents' estate in Patterson, New York, northeast 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 home-made trailer, on a quixotic mission to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South. On their return, Constance taught violin and Charles 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. 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 and Yale University.

Charles and Constance Seeger divorced when Pete Seeger was seven, and in 1932 Charles married his composition student and assistant, Ruth Crawford Seeger, now considered by many one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century. 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 to eight of Sandburg's poems. 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. Pete's uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted poet ("I Have a Rendezvous with Death"), had been one of the first American soldiers to be killed in the First World War. 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, was married for many years to 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 (herself a talented singer who died young); Barbara Seeger joined her siblings in recording folks songs for children.

In 1943, Pete married Toshi-Aline Ōta, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. Their first child, Peter Ōta Seeger, was born in 1944 and died at six months while Pete was deployed overseas. Pete never saw him. They went on to have three more children: Daniel (an accomplished photographer and filmmaker); Mika (a potter and muralist); and Tinya Seeger (a potter) – and grandchildren Tao (a musician); Cassie Seeger (an artist); Kitama Cahill-Jackson (a filmmaker); Moraya (graduate student married to NFL player Chris DeGeare); Penny; and Isabelle. Tao is a folk musician in his own right, singing and playing guitar, banjo and harmonica with the Mammals. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the PBS documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Seeger lives in Beacon, New York. He remains very engaged politically and maintains an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley Region of New York, especially in the nearby City of 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.

Musical career [edit]

Early work [edit]

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. He attended first and second grades in Nyack, New York, where his mother lived, before entering boarding school in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 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 prep school in Avon, Connecticut where 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. 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 make 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."

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. 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; as well as 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. 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. He dreamed of a career in journalism and also took courses in art. 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". 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.

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 (1938–53). 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 of 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, which made news when it performed in March 1941 at a command performance at the White House organized by Eleanor Roosevelt called "An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers," before an audience that included the Secretaries of War, Treasury, and the Navy, among other notables. 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.

In 1949 Pete Seeger worked as the Vocal Instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York.

Group recordings [edit]

As a self-described "split tenor" (between an alto and a tenor), 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, racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, Baldwin "Butch" 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 a 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann about a workers' strike (which contained the lines, "We'll stand it no more, come what may!"). 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 the place of Seeger). 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 even on occasion performed in tuxedos (unlike the Almanacs, who had dressed informally) and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues. Because of this, the somewhat hokey string orchestra and chorus arrangements on their hit records with Decca Records, and, no doubt also because of their considerable, if temporary, financial success, the Weavers incurred criticism from some progressives for supposedly compromising their political integrity. It was a tricky dilemma, but Seeger and the other Weavers felt that the imperative of getting their music and their message out to the widest possible audience amply justified these measures. The Weavers' string of major hits began with "On Top of Old Smokey" and an arrangement of Lead Belly's signature waltz, "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950 and was covered by many other pop singers. On the flip side of "Irene" was the Israeli song "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena." Other Weaver 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), the South African Zulu song, "Wimoweh" (about "the lion," warrior chief Shaka Zulu), to name a few.

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]

In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many 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, 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." 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.

Introduction of the "Steel Pan" to U.S. Audiences [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, steel drum or "Ping-Pong" as it was sometimes called. The two searched out a local panyard and proceeded to film the construction, tuning and playing of the then new, national instrument of Trinidad-Tobago.

Recent work [edit]

2000-2009 [edit]

American Folklife Center Symposium and Concert) (2007) [edit]

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., where Pete Seeger had been employed by the Archive of American Folk Song 67 years earlier.

Studio Album "At 89," David Letterman Appearance (2008) [edit]

In September 2008, Appleseed Recordings released At 89, Seeger's first studio album in 12 years.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".

Obama Inaugural Celebration (2009) [edit]

On January 18, 2009, Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen, grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, 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. 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.

NYC Earth Day Celebration (2009) [edit]

On April 18, 2009, Pete Seeger performed in front of a small group of Earth Day celebrants at Teachers College in New York City. Among the songs he performed were "This Land is Your Land", "Take it From Dr. King", and "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain".

90th Birthday Celebration (2009) [edit]

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), ranging from Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Eric Weissberg, Ani DiFranco and Roger McGuinn to Joan Baez, Richie Havens, 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 US government. Consistent with Seeger's long-time advocacy for environmental concerns, the proceeds from the event benefited the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, 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.

Monterey Jazz Festival Appearance (2009) [edit]

On September 19, 2009 Pete Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival, particularly notable because the Festival does not normally feature folk artists.

2010 and thereafter [edit]

"God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" (2010) [edit]

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.

Participation in Occupy Wall Street (2011) [edit]

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. 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. Pete Seeger performed with his grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, David Amram, and other celebrated musicians. The event, promoted under the name #OccupyTheCircle, was LiveStreamed, and dubbed by some as "The Pete Seeger March".

Cover of "Forever Young" For Bob Dylan Tribute Album (2012) [edit]

He contributed a spoken version of Forever Young to the 2012 album Chimes of Freedom: Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International.

Tribute to Pete Seeger at Norwegian Anti-Fascist Rally (2012) [edit]

On April 26, 2012, tens of thousands of Norwegians gathered in a show of unity at a rally in Oslo to sing Pete Seeger's song "My Rainbow Race" which a mass murderer had ridiculed as an example of "Marxist" brainwashing. The gunman was on trial for killing 77 people on July 22, 2011, insisting that his victims, who included 69 children, were traitors. The song, which Seeger wrote in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam, has long been a popular children's song in Norway. Its lyrics include the lines: "Some want to take the easy way / Poisons, bombs! They think we need 'em. / Don't they know you can't kill all the unbelievers. / There's no shortcut to freedom." Folksinger Lillebjørn Nilsen, author of the Norwegian version, led a crowd of over 40,000 in singing in both Norwegian and English. "I grew up with this song and have sung it to my child," said Lill Hjønnevåg, one of the organizers of the demonstration." Another organizer, blogger Bagnhild Holmås, said that although song might be Utopian, "the message is far from cheesy. [The killer] thinks we're brainwashed anyway, but it's important to show our distance. . . ." Culture ministers from Sweden, Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Iceland joined in the singing. From the U.S. Pete Seeger voiced his support of the event.

Biography: "Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words" (2012) [edit]

On July 18, 2012, Pete Seeger appeared at Bryant Park in New York City to sign copies of his new (2012) biography, "Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words," written with Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal. He also spoke about his life and career.

On August 6, 2012, Pete Seeger appeared on the Colbert Report to speak with Stephen Colbert about his new book, "Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words," and also to perform "Quite Early Morning" on the banjo.

Video of "God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" (2012) [edit]

On Election Day, November 6, 2012, Pete Seeger released the music video and single of God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You (Sloop Mix) produced live on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater by Richard Barone and Matthew Billy.

Carnegie Hall Concert with Arlo Guthrie and Family (2012) [edit]

On November 24, 2012, Pete Seeger performed with Arlo Guthrie and the Guthrie family in a concert at Carnegie Hall.

Beacon Theater Benefit Concert in support of Leonard Peltier (2012) [edit]

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 Theater in New York City.

"Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems" Spoken Word/Music Album (2013) [edit]

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. The launch of the audiobook was held at the Dia:Beacon on April 11, 2013 to a 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. 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."

Activism [edit]

1930s and 1940s [edit]

In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its popularity and influence. In 1942 he became a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) itself. He eventually "drifted away" (his words) from the Party in the late 1940s and 1950s.

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 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), the Talking Union, and an album each of sea chanteys 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 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 to Loyalist Spain (which Roosevelt later called a mistake), 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 US 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, the poison being folk music, and the ease with which it could be spread.

At that point, the U.S. had not yet entered the war but was energetically re-arming. African Americans were barred from working in defense plants, a situation that greatly angered both African Americans and white progressives. Black union leaders A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and A. J. Muste began planning a huge march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in war industries and to urge desegregation of the armed forces. The march, which many regard as the first manifestation of the Civil Rights Movement, was canceled after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (The Fair Employment Act) of June 25, 1941, barring discrimination in hiring by companies holding federal contracts for defense work. This Presidential act defused black anger considerably, although the US army still refused to desegregate, declining to participate in what it called "social engineering."

Roosevelt's order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union. The Communist Party now immediately directed its members to get behind the draft, and it also 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. 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, have 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). and was shown to the Almanac's employers in order to keep them off the air. Coincidentally, defamatory reviews and gossip items appeared in New York newspapers whenever they performed in public, and ultimately the Almanacs had to disband.

Seeger served in the US Army in the Pacific. He was trained as an airplane mechanic, but was reassigned to entertain the American troops with music. Later, when people asked him what he did in the war, he always answered "I strummed my banjo." 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" 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, in the red-baiting frenzy that followed, he was excoriated (as Roosevelt had not been) for accepting the help in his campaign of Communists and fellow travelers such as Seeger and singer Paul Robeson.

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 refugees from Nazi 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), "Der Internationalen Brigaden" ("Song Of The International Brigades"), and "Los cuatro generales" ("The Four Generals," known in English as "The Four Insurgent Generals").

1950s and early 1960s [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. With the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, however, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Communism. In his PBS biography, Seeger said he "drifted away" from the CPUSA beginning in 1949 but remained friends with some who did not leave it, though he argued with them about it.

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 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." Seeger's refusal to testify 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 10 years in jail (to be served simultaneously), but in May 1962 an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

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. In February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of their predecessors.

Vietnam War era [edit]

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, 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"

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. 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, after wide publicity it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers' Brothers show in the following January.

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

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

Environmentalism [edit]

Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, which he co-founded in 1966. This organization has worked since then to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and worked to clean it. As part of that effort, the sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969 with its inaugural sail down from Maine to South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, and thence to the Hudson River. Amongst the inaugural crew was Don McLean, who co-edited the book Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew, with sketches by Thomas B. Allen for which Seeger wrote the foreword. Seeger and McLean sang "Shenandoah" on the 1974 Clearwater album. The sloop regularly sails the river with volunteer and professional crew members, primarily conducting environmental education programs for school groups. The Great Hudson River Revival (aka Clearwater Festival) is an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Hudson at Croton Point Park. This festival grew out of early fundraising concerts arranged by Seeger and friends to raise money to pay for Clearwater's construction.

Seeger wrote and performed "That Lonesome Valley" about the then-polluted Hudson River in 1969, and his band members also wrote and performed songs commemorating the Clearwater.

The 106-foot-long sailboat, Clearwater, was built to conduct science-based environmental education aboard the sailing ship. Clearwater has education programs with many colleges and institutions, including SUNY New Paltz, and Pace University. The sail ship has become recognized for its role in the environmental movement. The Clearwater Festival brings Hudson Valley residents together to enjoy music, their cultural heritage, and support a cause.

Solo career and the folk song revival [edit]

To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger had 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", adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and "The Bells of Rhymney" by the Welsh poet Idris Davies (1957), gained wide currency. Seeger also was closely associated with the 1960s 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's March on Washington in August of that year, in which Seeger and other folk singers participated, brought the Civil Rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" to wide audiences. A version of this song, submitted by Zilphia Horton of Highlander, had been published in Seeger's People's Songs Bulletin as early as in 1947.

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's, who was known to carry it around.)

Pete Seeger toured Australia in 1963. His single "Little Boxes", written by Malvina Reynolds, was number one in the nation's Top 40s. That tour sparked a folk boom throughout the country at a time when post Kennedy assassination popular musical tastes competed between folk, the surfing craze and the British rock boom which gave the world The Beatles, The Rolling Stones among others. Folk clubs sprung up all over the nation, folk performers were accepted in established venues and Australian performers singing Australian folk songs many of their own composing, emerged in concert and festivals, on television and on recordings and overseas performers were encouraged to tour Australia. In 1993 the Australian singer/playwright Maurie Mulheron assembled a musical biography of Seeger's, and friends', work in a stage production One Word ... WE!. It enjoyed a long and sold-out season at the New Theatre in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was reprised in 2000 and most recently at the Tom Mann Theatre, a Trade Union-owned and operated theatre in Surry Hills, also in inner Sydney, on June 12, 13 and 14, 2009. 2009, and the company has also taken the show on tour to folk festivals at Maleny and Woodford in Queensland, and Port Fairy in Victoria. Mulheron was its Musical Director and it was directed by Frank Barnes.

A DVD of Seeger's 1963 Melbourne Town Hall concert has been released by The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is an historical document in black and white and is well worth owning. The Sydney-based instrumental and vocal ensemble Loosely Woven based at Humph Hall on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, showcased Seeger's work and times in one of its 2009 seasons, to celebrate the Pete Seeger ninetieth birthday. Loosely Woven's Artistic Director Wayne Richmond and his new wife Gial, attended the 2011 Clearwater Festival and met Pete Seeger..

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, Donovan, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, The Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, Malvina Reynolds, and Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine 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.

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

Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan [edit]

Pete Seeger was one of the earliest backers of Bob Dylan and was responsible for urging 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. 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 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. Seeger has been portrayed as a folk "purist" who was one of the main opponents to Dylan's "going electric". 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.

Repudiation of Stalin [edit]

In 1982 Seeger performed at a benefit concert for Poland's Solidarity resistance movement. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of communism in its Soviet form. 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." In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993 and 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.... 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.

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." In recent years, as the aging Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism, he also found himself attacked 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 USA and the USSR had entered the war.

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

Selected discography [edit]

Tribute albums [edit]

In 1998 Appleseed Records issued a double-CD tribute album: Where Have All the Flowers Gone: the Songs of Pete Seeger, which included readings by Studs Terkel and songs by Billy Bragg, Jackson Browne, Eliza Carthy, Judy Collins, Bruce Cockburn, Donovan, Ani DiFranco, Dick Gaughan, Nanci Griffith, Richie Havens, Indigo Girls, Roger McGuinn, Holly Near, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Bonnie Raitt, Martin Simpson, and Bruce Springsteen, among others.

In 2001, Appleseed release "If I Had a Song: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Vol. 2." In 2003, it issued the double-CD Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Volume 3, the final set in its trilogy of releases celebrating Seeger's music.

In April 2006 Bruce Springsteen released a collection of folk songs associated with Seeger's repertoire, titled, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (which contained no songs actually composed by Seeger). Springsteen and his band also toured to sellout crowds in a series of concerts based on those sessions. He had previously performed the Seeger staple, "We Shall Overcome", on Where Have All the Flowers Gone.

In the 1970s Harry Chapin released a song dedicated to Seeger called "Old Folkie".

Awards [edit]

Seeger has been the recipient of many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including :

Quotes [edit]

From Seeger [edit]

From others [edit]

Jim Musselman (founder of Appleseed Recordings), longtime friend and record producer for Pete Seeger:

Raffi on his concert video "Raffi on Broadway" during the introduction of May There Always Be Sunshine:

"And this song is the one that I first heard Pete Seeger singing. And he tells me that it was written by a four-year-old boy in Russia. And it's just got four lines and it's been translated into a number of languages."