Pete Seeger By Jefrey D. Breshears

Transcription

1 Pete Seeger By Jefrey D. Breshears Pete Seeger ( ) was the acknowledged dean of American folk/protest singers from the 1950s into the early 200s, and although none of his own recordings ever became hit records, he certainly was one of the most significant and influential recording artists of his time. Speaking in reference to her folksinging colleagues, Joan Baez once remarked that most of us owe our careers to Pete. This was quite tribute a man who was, admittedly, a mediocre banjo player, had a hard carrying a tune, and whose voice, according to one Time magazine writer, sounds as if a cornhusk were stuck in his throat. Seeger s long and eventful career highlighted many of the significant developments in modern folk music. He was instrumental in organizing the two most successful and influential folksinging groups prior to the sixties, the Almanac Singers and the Weavers; for years he was a regular contributor to Sing Out! magazine and helped found Broadside, a magazine of folk protest music; he was a leader in the formation of the Newport Folk Festivals; and probably more than anyone else, he was responsible for keeping alive the Depression-era radical protest song tradition through the Cold War years of the late 1940s and 50s. As one of the most controversial entertainers in American history, he was a symbolic figure, both admired and despised by passionate ideologues representing diametrical worldviews. Through it all, though, it was his music that prevailed, and several of his compositions, including Black and White, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, If I Had a Hammer, Turn! Turn! Turn! and The Bells of Rhymney, became modern folk and folk/rock classics and hit songs for other recording artists with a more contemporary sound. Seeger s worldview was shaped from an early age by the political and musical passions of his parents, and as such he was among the first generation of American red-diaper babies. His father, Dr. Charles Seeger, was a Harvard-trained composer and musicologist who established the first musicology curriculum in the U.S. at the University of California in In 1918 he was forced to resign due to his pacifist views on American involvement in World War I and his refusal to be inducted into the army. (Interestingly, his brother, Alan Seeger, was a poet whose poem, I Have a Rendezvous With Death, was widely published after he became one of the first American soldiers to be killed in the war.) Later, Charles moved the family to Greenwich Village where he taught part-time at the leftwing New School for Social Research. A Marxist true-believer and a member of the American Communist Party s Composer s Collective, Charles wrote columns for many years for the Daily Worker. Nonetheless, he held several administrative positions during the FDR administration, most notably in the WPA s Federal Music Project, and after World War II he taught ethnomusicology at the University of California and Yale University. Seeger s mother, Constance Seeger, was a violin virtuoso who once taught at the Julliard School of Music. More practical and less ideological than her husband, Constance encouraged young Pete to pursue an interest in fine (i.e., classical) music, and was disappointed when, as a teen, he gravitated toward common, unsophisticated folk music. Constance and Charles Seeger divorced in Charles remarried in 1932, and two of his four subsequent children, Peggy Seeger and Mike Seeger, became notable folksingers in their own right. Charles Seeger imbued young Pete with a left-wing proletarian conscience, and by the time he was 13 Pete already had a subscription to New Masses, the Communist literary magazine. Four years later he joined the Young Communist League, and in 1942 he became a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He resigned from the party in 1949 but retained many of his former friendships and associations in the party. remained ambivalent and 1

2 Pete Seeger 2 equivocal regarding Communism and the Soviet Union for most of the rest of his life. Even in the wake of revelations concerning Stalin s atrocities and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, about all that Seeger could admit was that Stalin had been a hard-driver a comment analogous to conceding that Hitler had a bit of a personality disorder. Despite his parents political pretensions, Pete received a first-rate bourgeois education in elite boarding schools, and in 1936 he enrolled at Harvard to study sociology and prepare for a career in journalism. Two years later, bored and frustrated with his studies, he dropped out to discover the real America for himself, and eventually wound up working with musicologist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song. Through Lomax he met and performed with folk music luminaries such as Burl Ives, Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Huddie Ledbetter ( Leadbelly ). In 1940, at a Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant farm workers, Seeger first met Woody Guthrie, with whom he later traveled the backroads of America as a vagabond troubadour. (Initially, the spontaneous and free-spirited Woody found the Puritanical Seeger to be strangely enigmatic for a Communist folksinger: That guy Seeger, he told a friend, I can t make him out. He doesn t look at girls, he doesn t drink, he doesn t smoke. The fellow s weird! ). The following year Seeger was invited to perform along with other folkies at a White House concert organized by Eleanor Roosevelt. Late in 1940 Seeger organized his first group, the Almanac Singers, along with Lee Hays, Millard Lampell and Pete Hawes. Later, various and sundry others drifted in-and-out of the group s ever-changing lineup including Woody Guthrie, Josh White, Bess Lomax, Sis Cunningham, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Based on the notion that folk music was America s true music (i.e., the music of The People, as defined by the American Communist Party) and the popular left-wing slogan, Music is a weapon of the class struggle, the group attracted considerable attention for its radical political propagandizing. Seeger, however, performed under a pseudonym, Pete Bowers, presumably to protect his father s position in the federal government. In the spring of 1941 the Almanac Singers recorded Songs for John Doe, which advocated neutrality and criticized FDR for instituting the draft. In response, the Harvard professor Carl Joachim Friedrich attacked the group in an Atlantic Monthly magazine article entitled, Poison In Our System. According to Friedrich, These recordings are distributed under the innocuous appeal: Sing out for peace. Yet they are strictly subversive and illegal. Others took note, as well, including J. Edgar Hoover s FBI. However, when Hitler's Wermacht invaded Mother Russia later that summer, the Almanac Singers changed their tune. In keeping with the Communist Party line, they immediately clamored for American intervention in the war to defeat Fascist imperialism. The group s record company, Keynote, recalled Songs for John Doe from retail outlets, deleted it from the catalogue, and destroyed any remaining inventory. Meanwhile, their subsequent album, Dear Mr. President (1942), featuring one of Woody Guthrie s finest compositions, The Sinking of the Reuben James, was as patriotic and militaristic as anything cranked out by Tin Pan Alley or the Hollywood music industry during the war years. The Almanac Singers popularity soared until the New York Post blew their cover by revealing their isolationistic past and pro-communist sympathies. It was a devastating blow, and as word spread throughout the entertainment business the group became veritable untouchables. Concerts and promotions were cancelled, and with no prospects in sight the group dissolved and scattered. Guthrie and fellow-folksinger Cisco Houston joined the Merchant Marine to avoid serving in the army, and in June of 42 Seeger was drafted. He balked at volunteering for combat duty for fear, as he later wrote his wife, of getting my head shot off, and he used his father s contacts in Washington to get into the Army s Special Services branch, where he entertained the troops in the Pacific theater. After his discharge from the service Seeger founded People s Songs, Inc., a consortium of radical songwriters and activist performers who specialized in union organizing and promoted a left-wing socio/political. In 1948 he campaigned ardently for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, and the following year he formed a new folk group, the Weavers, with Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman and Lee Hays. The Weavers were intentionally more commercial and less political than the old Almanac Singers, and over the next three years they had hit songs with Good Night, Irene, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Tzena, Tzena, On Top of Old Smokey, and Woody Guthrie s Dusty old Dust ( So Long, It s Been Good to Know You ). But it was at this point that history repeated itself: the Weavers were soaring high with the prospects of their own television program when, like the Almanacs several years earlier, they got caught in an anti-

3 Pete Seeger 3 Communist dragnet that effectively short-circuited their career. Seeger was cited in Red Channels: Communist Influences on Radio and Television, the publication that sabotaged the careers of many in the entertainment business, and the Weavers were (unofficially) blacklisted and banned from network TV. The great irony, of course, was that the Weavers were merely a commercial singing group, essentially apolitical, and Seeger already had quit the Communist Party to concentrate solely on his music career. Seeger left the Weavers in the mid-50's when the other members wanted to record a commercial jingle for a cigarette company, but he continued recording songs for Moses Asch s Folkways Records, the only company at the time that would touch him. Over the next few years he performed regularly at various leftwing events, and he developed an extensive concert network on the college circuit, building a base of support that would crest in the early 60s. In 1955 Seeger was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to answer charges of Communist involvements, but unlike hundreds of previous witnesses who had pled the Fifth Amendment and were summarily excused, Seeger challenged the legitimacy of the Committee itself. Asserting his rights under the First Amendment, he refused to name those with whom he had associated in the past, and responding to questions concerning whether he had performed at Communist Party gatherings, he directly challenged the authority of his interrogators: 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... I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature, and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours... that I am any less an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir. Seeger was indicted on ten counts of contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison on each count, to be served concurrently, but an Appeals Court later overturned the conviction. His stand against HUAC notwithstanding, Seeger s reluctance to deal honestly and directly with his past continued to damage his credibility. He steadfastly refused to apply the same standards of justice to Communist regimes that he used to criticize non-communist governments. Whether intellectually dishonest, a witless captive of his own ideology, or just remarkably naive, the man could hardly bring himself to criticize the Soviet Union for anything although, as mentioned previously, he once admitted to a friend that Stalin had in fact been a hard driver. One can only imagine the comfort and relief this comment must have brought to the millions of victims who had suffered under Stalin s brutal tyranny. In the late 50s Seeger busied himself recording albums of traditional folk songs and children s songs for Folkways, and contributed columns on a regular basis to Irwin Silber's Sing Out! magazine. Then in 1959 he helped organize the first Newport Folk Festival, and two years later he was instrumental in the founding of Broadside, a music periodical devoted to folk protest songs. By this point in his career, with Woody Guthrie incapacitated with Huntingdon's disease, Seeger was the acknowledged elder statesman in the folk music boom of the early 60s, a Pied Piper with a political agenda who envisioned radicalizing a critical mass of the Baby Boom generation for a socialist revolution. Always the ardent activist, Seeger took the leadership in organizing other musicians for civil rights causes. (His wife, Toshi Ohta Seeger, was half- Japanese, which undoubtedly sharpened his racial sensitivities.) He was present at the outset of the modern civil rights movement in 1956 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and in his June 1963 concert at Carnegie Hall he helped popularize the civil rights anthem, We Shall Overcome. Two months later, he was one of the featured performers at the March on Washington concert and rally. The following year he led a caravan of musicians through rural Mississippi during the Freedom Summer campaign, and in the wake of the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner he wrote a moving tribute to them entitled Those Three Are on My Mind. In 1965 he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King, and in 1966 he recorded God Bless the Grass, the first record album dedicated to environmentalism. Throughout the mid-to-late 60s he often organized the musicians brigades in numerous anti-war demonstrations, and at the Vietnam Moratorium March in Washington, D.C. in November of 69 he led half-a-million protesters in singing John Lennon s anti-war anthem, Give Peace a Chance. However, when it came to mainstream entertainment venues such as television, Seeger remained persona non grata. When ABC premiered its popular Hootenanny show in 1962, he was the only folksinger blacklisted, a slight which further enhanced his standing and credibility among his peers. Not until five years later did he finally make it into America's living rooms via TV when the Smothers Brothers invited him to sing on their prime time CBS program. Even at that, it took months before the network

4 Pete Seeger 4 executives and program sponsors finally consented to air Seeger singing his anti-war diatribe, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," a transparent critique of LBJ's Vietnam policy. But in reality Seeger never really had the kind of charisma to make it via a commercial medium like TV, and he was rarely seen on the tube again once the Smothers Brothers broke the 15-year ban. Throughout the 1960s Seeger waged a futile campaign to safeguard the purity and authenticity of folk music from the corrupting influences of capitalistic commercial exploitation. Other, younger artists were responsive initially, but by mid-decade most had sold out to commercial rock n roll and the forces of the marketplace, or else had turned introspective and left politicized protest music behind. The preeminent case-inpoint was Bob Dylan. Early on, Seeger had enthusiastically promoted Dylan s career, but by the time Dylan recorded his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), the young phenom had grown disillusioned with politicized protest music. According to the standard account of the story, Dylan infuriated Seeger and other traditionalists at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he brought along a rock band to accompany him on stage. As the music blared, ol Pete shook with uncontrollable rage as he witnessed this abomination of desecration, to the point that he had to be restrained from pulling the plug on the sound system. Afterwards, he called Dylan s performance some of the most destructive music this side of hell. Seeger had always contended that the greatest danger [to true revolution] is the Greenwich Village type, the bohemian, and now he was outraged that apolitical, countercultural hedonists were perverting his sacred folk music art form. As it was, only Seeger, Joan Baez and a few other relics continued on in what was quickly becoming a passe musical genre, and over time they too integrated elements of electrified rock into their musical arrangements. To his credit, Seeger generally practiced what he preached. He lived a relatively simple lifestyle in his hand-made log home on the banks of the Hudson River; he fastidiously avoided the trappings of show-biz glamour, playing the same simple, earthy and unadorned music he first learned from Guthrie and others back in the thirties; and he continued campaigning tirelessly (and often free gratis) for causes he believed in, often insisting that his concert ticket prices be kept at a minimum. Throughout the 1950s and 60s he recorded more than 40 albums for Folkways, Vanguard and Columbia Records. None were best-sellers, but several of his Columbia albums in particular introduced dozens of new topical songs into the mainstream of commercial folk music. Most notable among his recordings was the aforementioned We Shall Overcome, an album of social justice and civil rights anthems recorded during a Carnegie Hall concert in June of Though his popularity and influence faded badly by the late 60s, Seeger remained an interesting, articulate and engaging personality (if somewhat naive and self-righteous) and a gifted entertainer with a unique knack for audience rapport. Even among those younger proteges who had departed from the true path, Seeger remained a respected father-figure. The most common complaint about ol Pete was that he could never quite carry a tune. Some of Seeger s admirers argue that he mellowed somewhat with age, but the evidence is not particularly convincing. They point to the fact that in 1982 he performed at a benefit concert for Poland s anti-communist (but nonetheless pro-socialist) Solidarity labor movement, and that in later years he disavowed violent revolution in favor of incremental change. But there is no question that he remained to the end a radical leftist. In a 1995 interview he admitted, I still call myself a communist, arguing that the Soviet Union perverted Communism just as churches pervert Christianity. This is, of course, the line that most all contemporary Communist apologists continue to propagate in their efforts to push their radical P.C. agenda. Furthermore, in his autobiography, Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997), although Seeger confessed, [T]oday I ll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a hard driver and not a supremely cruel misleader he immediately felt compelled to follow with an historical litany of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Christians, white Southerners, and white Americans in general. In September 2008 Seeger made his last appearance on American TV on the Late Show with David Letterman. Predictably, he supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign, and in January 2009 he joined Bruce Springsteen and others in singing Woody Guthrie s This Land Is Your Land at Obama s inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. Two years later, in light of the fact that Obama was largely failing in his efforts to usher in a socialist utopia, Seeger joined a solidarity march in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest demonstrations. He remained actively engaged in radical left-wing causes until his death in January of Like most political leftists, Seeger s view toward religion and Christianity in particular was typically cynical. For most of his life he was a professing atheist, but beginning in the 1980s he began associating with

5 Pete Seeger 5 the Unitarian/Universalist Church. In his waning years he tended to express himself in New Age and pantheistic terms, redefining God according to his own preferences. In a 2013 interview posted on Beliefnet, he commented... 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. One can only imagine the rude awakening Seeger experienced when he finally met the real God in person. The Essential Pete Seeger A Selected Discography The Almanac Singers (Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, Millard Lampell, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, Josh White, Peter Hawes, Pete Seeger) Songs For John Doe (1941) The Strange Death of John Doe The Ballad of October 16 C for Conscription Washington Breakdown Liza Jane Plow Under Billy Boy Talking Union and Other Union Songs (1941) Get Thee Behind Me The Union Maid All I Want Talking Union The Union Train Which Side Are You On? We Shall Not Be Moved Roll the Union On Casey Jones Miner's Lifeguard Solidarity Forever You've Got To Go Down and Join the Union Hold the Fort The Soil and the Sea (1941) Hard, Ain't It Hard The Dodger Song I Ride an Old Paint House of the Rising Sun Dear Mr. President (1942)* Dear Mr. President Round and Round Hitler's Grave Deliver the Goods Beltline Girl Reuben James Side By Side The Union Boys (Tom Glazer, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Josh White) Songs For Victory (1943) Hold the Fort We Shall Not Be Moved UAW-CIO Hold On Dollar Bill Jim Crow The Weavers (Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman) Folk Songs of America and Other Lands (1951) Tzena, Tzena We Wish You a Merry Christmas (1952) The Weavers At Carnegie Hall (1957) Kisses Sweeter Than Wine Rock Island Line Wimoweh Goodnight, Irene The Weavers On Tour (1958) The Weavers At Home (1958) Best of the Weavers (1959) Rock Island Line Kisses Sweeter Than Wine So Long, It's Been Good To Know Yuh Goodnight, Irene On Top of Old Smoky The Weavers: Reunion At Carnegie Hall (1963) The Weavers Songbag (1967) Pete Seeger Songs For Political Action (1946) Voting Union Get Out the Vote Dollar Bill Oh, What Congress Done To Me Four PAC Nursery Rhymes DDT Fare Ye Well, Bad Congressman No, No, No Discrimination Oh, Voter Roll the Union On (1947) This Old World Roll the Union On I'm Looking For a Home Love Songs For Friends and Foes (1956) Study War No More (Down By the Riverside) The Hammer Song Black and White Sing Out! Hootenanny (1959) All I Want Is Union Talking Un-American Blues In Contempt I've Got a Right Jefferson and Liberty Pie In the Sky

6 Pete Seeger 6 Popular Wobbly John Henry The Bitter and the Sweet (1963) Where Have All the Flowers Gone Andorra We Shall Overcome (1963) Mrs. McGrath What Did You Learn in School Today? Who Killed Norma Jean? Who Killed Davey Moore? A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall Keep Your Eyes on the Prize If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus I Ain't Scared of Your Jail Oh Freedom! From Way Up Here Newport Broadside (1963) Ye Playboys and Playgirls (with Bob Dylan) Little Boxes and Other Broadsides (1963) The Thresher Who Killed Norma Jean? A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall Blowin' In the Wind Lou Marsh The Willing Conscript Paths of Victory Ol' Jim Crow If You Want To Go To Freedom Broadsides (1964) The Dove The Flowers of Peace Mack the Bomb From Way Up Here Tomorrow's Children Get Up and Go The New York J-D Blues To My Old Brown Earth Broadside Ballads, Vol. 2 (1965) The Willing Conscript Who Killed Davey Moore? I Ain't A-Scared of Your Jail What Did You Learn In School Today? A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall The Thresher Business Song of the Punch Press Operator Ballad of Lou Marsh I Can See a New Day (1965) Healing River The Bells of Rhymney How Can I Keep From Singing Mrs. McGrath I Can See a New Day I Come and Stand at Every Door Strangers and Cousins (1965) If I Had a Hammer Masters of War Peat Bog Soldiers Talking Atom Blues God Bless the Grass (1966) The Power and the Glory 70 Miles The Faucets Are Dripping Cement Octopus God Bless the Grass The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood I Have a Rabbit / The People Are Scratching My Dirty Stream From Way Up Here My Land Is a Good Land Dangerous Songs!? (1966) King Henry The Pill Draft-Dodger Rag Mao Tse-Tung Walking Down Death Row Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (1967) Down by the Riverside Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream My Name Is Liza Kalvelage The Sinking of the Reuben James Waist Deep in the Big Muddy Those Three Are On My Mind Pete Seeger's Greatest Hits (1967) Talking Union Which Side Are You On? Where Have All the Flowers Gone? The Bells of Rhymney Songs of Struggle and Protest (1968) Aimee McPherson I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister Joe Hill Bourgeois Blues Talking Union The D-Day Dodgers Hymn To Nations What a Friend We Have in Congress

7 Pete Seeger 7 Pete Seeger: Now! (1968) Talking Ben Tre The Torn Flag Everybody's Got a Right To Live The Cities Are Burning Young Vs. Old (1971) Ballad of the Fort Hood Three Bring Them Home Poisoning the Students' Minds Both Sides Now Rainbow Race (1973) My Rainbow Race The Clearwater Hobo's Lullaby Last Train To Nuremberg The World of Pete Seeger (1974) Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Who Killed Davey Moore? A Hard Rain's Agonna Fall The Bells of Rhymney Masters of War If I Had a Hammer Both Sides Now Last Train to Nuremburg The Sinking of the Reuben James Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream Hobo's Lullaby My Rainbow Race Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie Together in Concert (1975) Declaration of Independence Joe Hill Guantanamera Well May the World Go Deportee Clearwater Classics (1990) If I Had a Hammer Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Hobo's Lullaby Down By the Riverside Copyright 2005, 2014 by Jefrey D. Breshears. All rights reserved.