PETE SEEGER, 1919 – 2014: THE CULTURAL
WARRIOR IN RETROSPECT
Obituary by John Pietaro
Photo: Pete Seeger performing with the Ray Korona Band (John Pietaro, percussion, left), Martin Luther King Jr Labor Center, NYC, Nov 1999
As a child growing up in the later 1960s, aware of
the tumult in the streets as well as the reactionary responses to this at home
in blue-collar Brooklyn, the voice of Pete Seeger mysteriously rang through. I
don’t quite know how or why, but I cannot recall a time when Pete’s warm vibrato-heavy
split-tenor wasn’t there. He was still a victim of the Blacklist at that time
and didn’t get back on television until ’68, but I seemed to know this voice
from my earliest memory. There wasn’t any interest in folk songs in my parents’
home, where the sounds of Sinatra and easy listening WPAT radio was as much
music as one could expect to hear. And no, my Republican father, hurling loud pejoratives
to the TV whenever long-haired young protesters were seen on Eyewitness News,
wouldn’t have frequented radical bookstores to pick up any Seeger records. And
surely no, the family never attended a rally. But somehow this sound was
implanted and I always associated Pete’s voice with a gentleness that was visceral.
As I grew my own musical journey took me—for the most part—in a different
direction, but the topical folk music stayed in my heart and my politics moved boldly
Leftward. The issues ingrained in protest song brought it all back for me even
as I delved deeper and deeper into radical jazz and new music. The relevance in
Pete’s songs and the causes he championed stood out profoundly. As a
percussionist and cultural activist (and sometime banjo player), bridging
revolutionary struggle to the arts, I had the opportunity to share the stage
with Pete a number of times. Surely the first stands out as a moment of great pride,
November of 1999, playing drums with the Ray Korona Band as it accompanied Pete
for a NYC concert presentation he dubbed ‘Music in the History of Struggle’,
the occasion of his 80th birthday. Later, my association grew
further when, from 2005 through 2010, I lived in Beacon NY where Pete has lived
nearby since the late 1940s. I came to see some of his intensity close-up and
also some of his rarely discussed temper and hard-core traditionalism; he
offered little patience to this non-traditionalist who included improvisation
and daring arrangements of the older topical songs! Though it’s hard to think
back to being chewed out by this larger-than-life figure, Pete’s mission was on
over-drive even while he was in his 90s. The music he modeled for us all was in
his every fiber…
Pete was so much to so many: an ideal, a vision, an
expectation. Transference of our own hopes, most certainly. The product of a Communist
composer father and a concert violinist mother, Pete Seeger was introduced to
the 5-string banjo as a teenager during the 1930s and came to bring it to
international prominence. He introduced its application as a fiercely American
instrument, one derived from African origins and developed by the sweat and
blood of the oppressed. In his wake, the banjo – or at least his banjo – became a symbol of the power
of song and an icon of more than one "folk revival".
During the depth of the Great Depression, Seeger
took to collecting folk songs with his father, Charles Lewis Seeger, a member
of the Composers Collective of New York who sought the dissolution of the
Modernist, experimental music collective once he became convinced of the
revolutionary potential of traditional song. In the 1930s, Daily Worker arts columnist Mike Gold wrote of the need for “a
Communist Joe Hill”, to offer musical organizing on the front lines: a few
years later Woody Guthrie came to prominence in the political left. Guthrie, a
firestorm of creative energy and radical philosophy was introduced, in 1940, to
a young Pete Seeger by folk archivist Alan Lomax and the two became
inseparable. Once Woody had taken up Pete’s offer to join him in the Almanac
Singers, they wrote and performed music together and Seeger, through musical
and political osmosis, rapidly morphed into a new kind of cultural force.
Early on Pete
developed a strong kinship with the political left and quickly became a
first-call performing artist for May Day parades in New York City and radical
labor unions around the country. Seeger became a prominent part of progressive
cultural organizations, anti-fascist collectives and American Labor Party
rallies throughout the 1940s and into the ‘50s, even as the specter of HUAC
haunted his musical groups, the Almanacs and then the Weavers, as well as his
organization, People’s Songs. By 1961, he too would be subpoenaed by the House
Un-American Activities Committee which riddled him with questions not only
about his “patriotism” but that of many he’d been associated with. To his
credit, Seeger refused to name names, but he did offer to sing for the HUAC
inquisitors. They refused his offer and called it contempt of Congress.
A victim of
the same tenacious Blacklist that had torn apart Hollywood and the CIO in the
post-war period, Pete sang for college students and children, when no one else
cared to listen ... or, rather, when no one else could hear. And when he could
not sing for them, he sang for the trees and forest life about him. Seeger was
hell-bent on allowing music to touch deep, whether as a weapon or as a healing
force. Uniquely, he almost always achieved both in tandem.
While it is
true that Pete became a beloved figure with the passage of time--one given
Kennedy Center honors by the 1990s and celebrated at Madison Square Garden a
few years ago--his radical heart remained integral to his spirit. Performing
for President Obama’s inaugural celebration, Pete sang Woody’s anthem, “This
Land is Your Land” along with Bruce Springsteen and happily led the crowd on
some of Guthrie’s lesser-known, revolutionary verses including the one about
that damned symbol of the high wall tagged “Private Property”. In his lifetime,
Pete stood onstage with Paul Robeson during "The Peekskill Riot" and
marched with Dr. King through the bloodiest of Civil Rights battles. He was a
loud opponent of the Vietnam War and a prime voice of the environmental
movement. In more recent years, Seeger could be found, during the entire
sickening debacle of the Bush administration as an active part of protest
actions, and stood most every week at a peace vigil in New York’s Hudson
Valley, through broiling heat and frozen winds.
Pete's songs
are truly the story of 'the folk', and so they tell the people's story. Long
before Howard Zinn wrote his 'A People's History of the United States', Pete
Seeger sang it. He stood as the very model of the cultural worker. Taking the
distant advice of Joe Hill, he recognized long ago that more can be said in one
topical song than in a hundred pamphlets. But, even in silence, Pete's
philosophy can be understood by anyone who recalls what he long ago adorned on
his banjo head: 'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender'.
The cultural warrior shall not be forgotten for his
voice remains in us all…
