Pete Seeger, American Favorite Ballads, Vols. 1-5
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.
