The New Pete Seeger Stamp
(Script for a Radio Show on Pete Seeger WBAA,
Purdue University “Rainbow,” June 4, 2006)
Harry Targ
Pete Seeger is a world-renowned folksinger and
political activist who was born in Patterson, New York on May 3, 1919, to
musicologist Charles Seeger and classical musician Constance Seeger. He was
exposed to the music of the rural south on tours with his parents. Seeger began
to play the banjo as a teenager. After two-years of study at Harvard, Seeger
began a lifetime career studying and singing the folk music of people from all
over the world.
During his early years of exposure to and adaptation
of what he regarded as people's music, Seeger was influenced by musicians
who created an enduring genre of musical culture that would flower and
grow in post-war America. These included Woody Guthrie, Huddie Leadbetter
(Leadbelly), Lee Hayes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Aunt Molly
Jackson, and the folk archivist Alan Lomax. Before embracing a career as a
solo performer, Seeger organized and played with the Almanac Singers,
before and during World War II and the Weavers from 1948 until the 1960s. In later
years, Seeger would perform with many folk artists and activists,
including the Freedom Singers, civil rights activists, and Woody's son,
Arlo Guthrie. Over the years Seeger has written hundreds of songs and
performed them at over a thousand concerts.
After recording popular songs such as "On Top of
Old Smoky" and "Good Night Irene", he and the Weavers were
blacklisted in the 1950s for their leftwing connections. Seeger was called
to testify before the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC) in 1955 and cited for contempt of Congress when he refused to
answer their questions, on first amendment grounds, about his political
beliefs. Seven years later, a Federal Court of Appeals reversed the
conviction and one-year sentence on a technicality.
For much of the 1960s Seeger was prohibited from
performing on network television. In January,1968, after much
conflict between the CBS network and comedians Tommy and Dick Smothers,
Seeger was allowed to sing his anti-Vietnam war song, "Waist Deep in
the Big Muddy" before a nationwide audience. With passion, Seeger
chanted: "We are waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool says to
push on."
While Seeger's music and politics has reflected
virtually every progressive cause from the late 1930s until the present,
his work was influenced by the variety of social movements current during
different historical periods. In the late 1930s, as Seeger was learning his
craft and experiencing rural life, he and Woody Guthrie performed songs
about the working class and trade union organizing. Many performances were
in solidarity with efforts to organize factory workers into the Congress
of industrial Organizations (CIO).
Seeger and his friends sang songs about
anti-imperialism as well: for the democratic forces fighting fascism in Spain
and opposing war in Europe. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and
World War II ensued, he and the rest of the folk left began singing songs in
support of a popular front against fascism. After the war, and for another 25
years, Seeger composed and sang songs opposing the cold war, nuclear war and
later the Vietnam war.
After visiting the South in the early sixties, he put
his talent behind the southern freedom movement. He helped transform an old
spiritual into the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall
Overcome" and brought the Freedom Singers, young civil rights activists from
the south to folk concert audiences in the north in 1963. He exhorted his
audiences to join the struggle for civil rights and he particularly
applauded young people who, he said, had taken the lead in fighting for civil
rights.
Creator: Adger Cowans | Credit: Getty
Images
As sixties movements diversified, Seeger's music did
as well. He began to sing songs about women's rights, 1'I'm Gonna
Be An Engineer," and the environment, "Sailing Down This
Golden River."
Seeger has written extensively over the years, for
example in the folk magazine Sing Out, and in books about folk
music and has been interviewed from time to time in magazines.
However, his political philosophy is best reflected in
his music. Shaped by the Marxist lens and popular front politics
characteristic of the era when he began performing, four key
concepts inform his music.
Leading a huge crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, with
Bruce Springsteen, before the inauguration of President Obama.
First, his songs reflect historical context, the
material conditions of peoples' lives, and the contradictory character of
the lives of his subjects.
Second, much of his work revolves around class, race,
and, more recently, gender. The folk genre, as it evolved, celebrated the lives
of workers and down-and-out men and women who struggle in the face of economic
and political adversity. Seeger took the admonition of his comrade Woody
Guthrie seriously when Woody wrote that he hates songs that put people down and
make them feel that they are no good.
Third, Seeger's music since the onset of the Cold War
in the late 1940s has been informed by opposition to war and U.S.
imperialism (although his lyrics might not use the word). "Where Have
All the Flowers Gone?'' is one of many songs performed by Seeger that
articulates the belief that war is futile and destructive of the human
community. During the most recent phase of his career, his songs have
conceptualized how a materialistic economy has made war on the
environment.
Finally, much of Seeger's work offers an alternative
vision of society that emphasizes simplicity, harmony between people and
between people and nature, equality, and freedom from class exploitation,
racism, and sexism. While his work sometimes emphasizes how economic
and political systems and dogmatic ideologies threaten the human condition,
he also sings about a better tomorrow; "It's Darkest Before the
Dawn," and of course, Woody Guthrie's anthem, "This Land is Your
Land."
In sum, looking at the corpus of folk music in the
twentieth century, particularly a folk music that links culture and
politics, Pete Seeger perhaps is the most seminal artist/activist.
He popularized rural southern music, working class music, the artistry of
Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and was the link in the chain between these
figures and Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan of the 1960s.
