Remembering Pete Seeger During Labor History Month

 

Recalling Pete Seeger This Labor History Month

--Originally published in Allegro magazine, May 2024--

Pete Seeger spent the better part of his life performing topical songs and championing social justice. A tireless activist for the rights of the underdog, toward global peace, and for the sanctity of the environment, Pete was also a major proponent of folklore in all its forms. A constant presence within the labor movement, he wasn’t only a member of Local 802 but also a founder of AFM Local 1000 and any number of other organizations on behalf of working musicians.

As a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemberg, Pete wouldn’t have given credence to the concept of predestiny, but it seems about right that his would be a May birth (May 3, 1919). Another deciding factor for this month’s member profile is that 2024 marked the tenth anniversary of his passing.

The son of leftist musicologist Charles Lewis Seeger, founder of the decidedly radical Composers Collective of New York (with Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Marc Blitzstein, and Conlon Nancarrow), and Constance de Clyver Seeger, concert violinist and Julliard faculty member, Pete almost singlehandedly resurrected, of all things, the 5-string banjo. Introducing its application as an American instrument of African origin, developed through the sweat and blood of the oppressed, in Seeger’s wake, the banjo – or at least his banjo – symbolized the power of song as an icon of more than one ‘folk revival’. His hand carved long-neck instrument bearing the slogan “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”, sang with pride over decades … even through Bob Dylan’s decision to go electric. For the many of us raised with the sound of his split-tenor vocals, Pete was larger than life.

During the Great Depression, the teenaged Pete Seeger took to collecting folk songs in the rural south with his father. The elder Seeger foresaw the need to replace the modernist, experimental track of American composers with one imbedded in traditional music after recognizing its revolutionary potential. American workers suffering economic disaster needed radical content, but within a music immediately accessible; he never looked back and clearly neither did Pete.

The 1930s were desperate years, utterly brutal for people already in the throes of poverty. Daily Worker columnist Mike Gold wrote of the need for “a communist Joe Hill” (referring to the IWW labor martyr) to offer musical organizing on the front lines: a few years later Woody Guthrie came to prominence on the political Left. Guthrie, a firestorm of creative energy and radical philosophy was introduced, in 1940, to Pete Seeger by folk archivist Alan Lomax. The two became inseparable. Once Woody had taken up Pete’s offer to join his group 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 within the West Village’s brimming radicalism and quickly became a first call for rallies, May Day parades, and militant unions here and across the country.

He joined forces with progressive cultural organizations, anti-fascist collectives and was featured at American Labor Party actions throughout the 1940s and into the ‘50s, even as the specter of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) haunted his musical groups, the Almanac Singers, then the Weavers, as well as his organization, People’s Songs. Later, he would be subpoenaed by the “House Un-Americans” when, riddled with accusations questioning his patriotism and the many he’d associated with, Seeger refused to name names, but offered instead to sing for the HUAC inquisitors. They refused his overture 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 a healing force. Uniquely, he achieved both in tandem.

Seeger’s recordings with the Almanac Singers easily demonstrate the revolutionary fervor of the mean Depression years, as well as the fight against the fascism. Toward the latter, the Almanacs’ 1942 recording “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave”, composed by Seeger, Hays and playwright Millard Lampell, was a rousing vehicle against Hitler and Mussolini which remains a firestorm of radicalism. The original trio by then had expanded to include Guthrie, and accordionist Agnes “Sis” Cunningham (later the founder of Broadside magazine, with some financial help from Pete and his wife Toshi). Similarly, the group’s labor songs album of the year prior featured the debut recording of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid”, a stalwart of the movement bearing a percussively structured chorus:

Oh, you can’t scare me/I’m stickin’ to the union/stickin’ to the union/ stickin’ to the union/

Oh, you can’t scare me/I’m stickin’ to the union/till the day I die

The Almanac Singers campaigned for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace in the election of 1948, a seminal year in which the political right-wing gained major footing in Congress and began the dissolution of many of President Roosevelt’s liberal reforms. The witch hunt by right-wing activists against workers in government, education, social work, and the arts immediately overturned whole professions and ultimately ruined lives. The Almanac Singers were among the casualties of McCarthy’s Senate investigations as well as HUAC’s show trials. But only months later, Seeger, along with Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, banded together for an outdoor performance in Peekskill NY where the guest of honor was Paul Robeson. A Klan-inflected police department stood idle as fascistic stone-throwing civilians turned the gathering into a violent, racist, anti-Semitic, red-baiting riot.

Moved by the need for a new progressive folk music ensemble, the four remained together and as the Weavers initially scored major hits with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene”, and classics “The Midnight Special”, “The Rock Island Line”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, South African traditional song “Wimoweh” (later known as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”), Woody’s “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh”, Hebrew work song “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena”, and an assortment of others. Signed to Decca Records, the Weavers were renowned---right up to the point of FBI investigations and a vicious hatchet job by the right-wing press. Seeger and Hays were called to testify under the hot HUAC lights, and while the group carried on for some time, by ’53 it lost the major label deal, and became subject to the blacklist and a barrage of flag-waving protestors.

In the later 1950s, Pete began performing his “peoples songs” in liberal colleges and left-wing summer camps across the country, and theatres around the world, but was blacklisted from major performances, let alone lofty recording sessions or television appearances, at home. The Hollywood blacklist was finally severed with the 1960 film Spartacus’s win at the Academy Awards, but not so for radical folkies; the inclusion of Seeger performing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers television show in 1968, only achieved by the Brothers’ threats to walk out if the singer was not aired, finally did it.

In a prodigious career, some of his noted compositions including “Turn, Turn, Turn”, a number one for the Byrds in ‘65, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer”, co-written with Lee Hays (a smash for both Peter, Paul and Mary, and Trini Lopez), and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” remain immortal. Pete was also one of the authors of civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome”, a song born of the gospel tradition and fully developed in protest demonstrations.

While Pete became a beloved figure with the passage of time and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994, he never ceased outspoken participation at rallies, bridging the 1940s and 2000s with demonstrations for civil rights, the labor movement, the environment, women, immigrants and free speech, and against fascism, imperialism, war, and nuclear weaponry.

Even in his final years, most Saturday afternoons Pete stood at a busy crossroads not far from Poughkeepsie, waving a large peace flag and leading a small group in song. This writer came to know Pete to some degree over years, most pridefully performing as part of his back-up band for a 1999 concert entitled Music in the History of Struggle at Local 1199’s midtown auditorium. And then between 2005 and ’10, when my wife Laurie Towers (also an 802 member) and I resided in Beacon, the opportunity to join Pete at the peace vigil was an immediate draw and we did so many times. Further, we shared the stage with him on other occasions in area venues, not the least of which was the inaugural Dissident Arts Festival.

Pete Seeger was the embodiment of the cultural worker, dedicating his music and tireless activism to the peoples’ and the planet’s cause. 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 of an art of empowerment rings eternal.