MON., APRIL 20, 2009
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A Users' Guide to Pete Seeger
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.
Such preservationists arouse suspicions in some parts — their efforts suggest that music is a scarce, endangered resource, rather than one we can hear being continually renewed around us. Sure enough, such folkie-phobes will note that American Favorite Ballads begins with a vigorous "John Henry," that defiantly fatalist tale of a man who outworks a steam drill that remains the ultimate exemplar of folk Luddism. And indeed, no song was too familiar for Seeger to set to wax. "The Blue-Tail Fly" (better known as "Jimmy Crack Corn"), "Skip to My Lou," "Yankee Doodle," "My Darlin' Clementine" — you half expect him to follow up "On Top of Old Smokey" with "On Top of Spaghetti."
But those tunes would never have become so familiar — they'd have never become grammar-school music class standards — without Seeger's intervention. And don't be so sure you really know these songs — damn if I knew that "Blow the Man Down" had actual verses. No one else provided so great a store of what this package's annotator, the great Smithsonian music curator Jeff Place, calls "resources" for the folk revival.
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. This is particularly true of his Irish ballads (including the stout and pugnacious "No Irish Need Apply," with a nice sideswipe at the reactionary Chicago Tribune). And his nimble banjo more than does its job too.
Equally rousing are "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" and "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which you may not recall as the site "where they hung the jerk/ Who invented work." Both remind us that slacking is a time-honored American tradition, while expressing a bit of class-consciousness that belies how constrictive Seeger's left politics could be. A lingering grudge over the U.S.-U.K. stance on the Spanish Civil War (plus some advice from the CPUSA) led his Almanac Singers to cut an anti-war album in 1941.
And yet, there was Pete at the Obama pre-inaugural, standing alongside Bruce Springsteen, at the Lincoln Memorial, singing Woody's "This Land Is Your Land." A one-time party-line Communist, the man dissed just a few years prior as "Stalin's songbird" by Cato Institute stooge David Boaz, now serenading the President — the very tableau might freeze the very hearts of those wingnut bloggers convinced of Obama's socialist pedigree.
Made me think, that scene did. Bruce typically evoked the spirit of Woody Guthrie in the '80s and '90s, as he maintained his own longstanding, self-imposed distance from partisan politics. Yet once he made his first presidential endorsement in 2004, Springsteen probably not coincidentally, cut a tribute album for Pete and followed it up with a celebratory tour. The American folk tradition is cherished by Dylan acolytes like Greil Marcus for its unexpectedly prickly, arty weirdness. All valuable qualities, true. Yet 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.
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.
Such preservationists arouse suspicions in some parts — their efforts suggest that music is a scarce, endangered resource, rather than one we can hear being continually renewed around us. Sure enough, such folkie-phobes will note that American Favorite Ballads begins with a vigorous "John Henry," that defiantly fatalist tale of a man who outworks a steam drill that remains the ultimate exemplar of folk Luddism. And indeed, no song was too familiar for Seeger to set to wax. "The Blue-Tail Fly" (better known as "Jimmy Crack Corn"), "Skip to My Lou," "Yankee Doodle," "My Darlin' Clementine" — you half expect him to follow up "On Top of Old Smokey" with "On Top of Spaghetti."
But those tunes would never have become so familiar — they'd have never become grammar-school music class standards — without Seeger's intervention. And don't be so sure you really know these songs — damn if I knew that "Blow the Man Down" had actual verses. No one else provided so great a store of what this package's annotator, the great Smithsonian music curator Jeff Place, calls "resources" for the folk revival.
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. This is particularly true of his Irish ballads (including the stout and pugnacious "No Irish Need Apply," with a nice sideswipe at the reactionary Chicago Tribune). And his nimble banjo more than does its job too.
Equally rousing are "Hallelujah I'm a Bum" and "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," which you may not recall as the site "where they hung the jerk/ Who invented work." Both remind us that slacking is a time-honored American tradition, while expressing a bit of class-consciousness that belies how constrictive Seeger's left politics could be. A lingering grudge over the U.S.-U.K. stance on the Spanish Civil War (plus some advice from the CPUSA) led his Almanac Singers to cut an anti-war album in 1941.
And yet, there was Pete at the Obama pre-inaugural, standing alongside Bruce Springsteen, at the Lincoln Memorial, singing Woody's "This Land Is Your Land." A one-time party-line Communist, the man dissed just a few years prior as "Stalin's songbird" by Cato Institute stooge David Boaz, now serenading the President — the very tableau might freeze the very hearts of those wingnut bloggers convinced of Obama's socialist pedigree.
Made me think, that scene did. Bruce typically evoked the spirit of Woody Guthrie in the '80s and '90s, as he maintained his own longstanding, self-imposed distance from partisan politics. Yet once he made his first presidential endorsement in 2004, Springsteen probably not coincidentally, cut a tribute album for Pete and followed it up with a celebratory tour. The American folk tradition is cherished by Dylan acolytes like Greil Marcus for its unexpectedly prickly, arty weirdness. All valuable qualities, true. Yet 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.
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