Folk singer Pete Seeger dies aged 94
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 - 08:13 AM
Pete
Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college
students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of
Americans to their folk music heritage, has died at the age of 94.
Seeger’s
grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his
sleep at around 9.30pm last night in the New York Presbyterian Hospital, where
he had been for six days. Family members were with him.
“He
was chopping wood 10 days ago,” Mr Cahill-Jackson recalled.
Seeger
– with his a lanky frame, banjo and full white beard – was a well-known figure
in folk music. He performed with Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched
with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s, leaning on two canes.
He
wrote or co-wrote If I Had A Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, Where Have All The
Flowers Gone and Kisses Sweeter Than Wine. He lent his voice against Hitler and
nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with
an affable air and his banjo strapped on.
Seeger
playing on the Johnny Cash show in 1970.
“Be
wary of great leaders,” he told the Associated Press two days after a 2011
Manhattan Occupy march. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”
With
The Weavers, a quartet put together in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a
national folk revival. The group – Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred
Hellerman – churned out hit recordings of Goodnight Irene, Tzena, Tzena and On
Top Of Old Smokey.
Seeger
also was credited with popularising We Shall Overcome, which he printed in his
publication People’s Song in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the
anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from “will” to
“shall”, which he said “opens up the mouth better”.
“Every
kid
who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to
Pete Seeger,” Arlo Guthrie once said.
Seeger’s
musical career was always tightly linked with his political activism, in which
he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the clean-up of his
beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and
later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
He
was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with
the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Repeatedly pressed by the
committee to reveal whether he had sung for Communists, Seeger responded
sharply: “I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication
that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have
known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or
I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.”
He
was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on
appeal.
Seeger
called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point
of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the music
he, Guthrie, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and others had created or preserved.
“The
most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college,
one after the other, usually small ones,” he told the Associated Press in 2006.
“And I showed the kids
there’s a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio.”
His
scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers
Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the
blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song Waist Deep In The Big
Muddy, and Seeger accused the network of censorship.
He
finally got to sing it five months later in a stirring return appearance,
although one station, in Detroit, cut the song’s last stanza: “Now every time I
read the papers/That old feelin’ comes on/We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy/And
the big fool says to push on.”
Seeger’s
output included dozens of albums and single records for adults and children.
He
also was the author or co-author of American Favourite Ballads, The Bells Of
Rhymney, How To Play The Five-String Banjo, Henscratches And Flyspecks, The
Incompleat Folksinger, The Foolish Frog And Abiyoyo, Carry It On, Everybody
Says Freedom and Where Have All The Flowers Gone.
He
appeared in the films To Hear My Banjo Play in 1946 andTell Me That You Love
Me, Junie Moon in 1970. A reunion concert of the original Weavers in 1980 was
filmed as a documentary titledWasn’t That A Time.
By
the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with
a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honours.
Official
Washington sang along – the audience must sing, was the rule at a Seeger
concert – when it lionised him at the Kennedy Centre in 1994. President Bill
Clinton hailed him as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he
saw them”.
Seeger
was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence.
Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honored him with We Shall Overcome: The
Seeger Sessions, a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger. While
pleased with the album, Seeger said he wished it was “more serious.”
A
2009 concert at Madison Square Garden to mark Seeger’s 90th birthday featured
Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Emmylou Harris among the
performers.
Seeger
was a 2014 Grammy Awards nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which was
won by Stephen Colbert.
Seeger’s
sometimes ambivalent relationship with rock was most famously on display when
Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
Witnesses
said Seeger became furious backstage as the amped-up band played, though just
how furious is debated. Seeger dismissed the legendary tale that he looked for
an axe to cut Dylan’s sound cable, and said his objection was not to the type
of music but only that the guitar mix was so loud you couldn’t hear Dylan’s
words.
Seeger
maintained his reedy 6ft 2in frame into old age, though he wore a hearing aid
and conceded that his voice was pretty much shot. He relied on his audiences to
make up for his diminished voice, feeding his listeners the lines and letting
them sing out.
“I
can’t sing much,” he said. “I used to sing high and low. Now I have a growl
somewhere in between.”
Nonetheless,
in 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album for Pete.
Seeger
was born in New York City on May 3 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to
religious dissenters of colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin
and taught; his father, Charles, a musicologist, was a consultant to the
Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression. His
uncle Alan Seeger, the poet, wrote I Have A Rendezvous With Death.
Pete
Seeger said he fell in love with folk music when he was 16, at a music festival
in North Carolina in 1935. His half-brother, Mike Seeger, and half-sister,
Peggy Seeger, also became noted performers.
He
learned the five-string banjo, an instrument he rescued from obscurity and played
the rest of his life in a long-necked version of his own design. On the skin of
Seeger’s banjo was the phrase, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to
surrender” – a nod to his old pal Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with “This
machine kills fascists.”
Dropping
out of Harvard in 1938 after two years as a disillusioned sociology major, he
hit the road, picking up folk tunes as he hitchhiked or hopped freights.
“The
sociology professor said ’Don’t think that you can change the world. The only
thing you can do is study it’,” Seeger said in October 2011.
In
1940, with Guthrie and others, he was part of the Almanac Singers and performed
benefits for disaster relief and other causes.
He
and Guthrie also toured migrant camps and union halls. He sang on overseas
radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information early in the Second World
War. In the Army, he spent three and a half years in Special Services,
entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific, and made corporal.
Pete
and Toshi Seeger were married July 20 1943. The couple built their cabin in
Beacon after the Second World War and stayed on the high spot of land by the
Hudson River for the rest of their lives together. The couple raised three children.
Toshi Seeger died in July aged 91.
The
Hudson River was a particular concern of Seeger. He took the sloop Clearwater,
built by volunteers in 1969, up and down the Hudson, singing to raise money to
clean the water and fight polluters.
He
also offered his voice in opposition to racism and the death penalty. He got
himself jailed for five days for blocking traffic in Albany in 1988 in support
of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose claim of having been raped by white
men was later discredited. He continued to take part in peace protests during
the war in Iraq, and he continued to lend his name to causes.
“Can’t
prove a damn thing, but I look upon myself as old grandpa,” Seeger told the AP
in 2008 when asked to reflect on his legacy. “There’s not dozens of people now
doing what I try to do, not hundreds, but literally thousands...The idea of
using music to try to get the world together is now all over the place.”
