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Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
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His songs will long outlive him.
It was Seeger who changed an old spiritual from ?We Will Overcome? to ?We Shall Overcome? and sang it for Martin Luther King Jr. It was Seeger who wrote ?Turn, Turn, Turn? and ?Where Have All the Flowers Gone.? His manual on playing the five-string banjo still sells by the thousands nearly half a century after he wrote it.
Seeger and the Weavers sold 4 million records before McCarthyism and the blacklist smothered their celebrity. Seeger retreated into a series of subcultures, devoting himself to causes, using his music to promote his politics. Or was it the other way around?
He has picketed the White House far more often than he has been inside it. In 1970 he wrote a charming number called ?Teacher Uncle Ho,? about Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese revolutionary Seeger called ?one of my all-time heroes.?
He educated all the people
He demonstrated to the world:
If a man will stand for his own land,
He?s got the strength of ten.
A generation later, Seeger is wary of the American penchant for co-opting its renegades. The great American fame machine shears off the hard edges and turns even the coarsest of rebels into mainstream fodder. Tom Paine, John Brown, Norman Thomas, King - no matter how radical their thoughts, how seditious their slogans, history bulldozed them into the center.
?There?s an ancient Arab proverb,? says Seeger, one of the last of the great aphorists. ?When the king puts the poet on the payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet.?
This is nothing new. At the height of the Weavers? success, their manager wouldn?t let the quartet sing ?If I Had a Hammer? by Seeger and Lee Hays. It was too political.
And as much as Seeger wishes he could stay ornery to the end, he is, to his everlasting credit, a sweet man who long ago recognized that music, left to its own designs, seeks to soften edges.
He made his political reputation by standing up to power, by singing of the individual, the resister. But his music was always inclusive (sometimes infuriatingly so, to concertgoers who paid to hear Seeger and not the cheery, but painfully off-key, couple in Row S).
There was never anything Seeger liked better than singing with a hall full of union members. Song as salve, inspiration to rebellion, political gunpowder. And song as a connection to some mystical folk, to ?the people,? almost in the German sense of Volk.
That?s what lured the young Seeger, what made him turn from his past and devote himself to this kind of music. The tuxedo Seeger inherited from his father is a Brooks Brothers model, and despite the ?ain?ts? and dropped g?s at the end of his words, Seeger comes from a privileged clan of pacifist intellectuals.
He prepped at a boarding school in Connecticut, went to Harvard and then - pivoting away from the classical music on which his parents had raised him, rejecting the classical education they had in mind for him - he dropped out of college, hitchhiked across the country and discovered America?s folk music. He visited country fiddlers and blues shouters. He met people who knew nothing of his parents? world of universities and chamber music.
His journey from patrician intellectual to popularizer of America?s traditional songs - black and white, North and South - was a rebellion. But rebellion was a longstanding family tradition. In a house where the adults argued the merits of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound at the dinner table, Pete was reading socialist books at 11. He had a boy?s passion for Lincoln Steffens?s autobiography.
When Pete was still a toddler, his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist, was sacked from the University of California at Berkeley faculty after he denounced World War I as an imperialist adventure. Pete?s parents packed the three kids into a Model T Ford and a trailer and started out across America to bring ?good? music to the simple folk.
?It was a complete disaster financially,? Seeger says. ?My poor mother with her violinist fingers, having to wash diapers in an iron kettle night after night. It didn?t work.? One night the elder Seegers took their classical concert to a farmer?s house, and after a sonata or two the farmer took out his fiddle and showed the Seegers a thing or two about country song.
?My father said he finally realized that these people had a lot of good music of their own,? and the Seegers returned to the big city.
Pete teeters on the hind legs of a kitchen chair and strokes his beard, the last bit of red remaining on a face hardened by weather and time. He never retreated, but neither did he spurn the mainstream. Seeger suggests the following as the lesson of his life: ?You don?t have to keep your mouth shut, and you can still work with the Establishment.?
It?s easier to say that when you?re 75 and looking out over the Hudson, shining an apple and getting ready for a trip to the White House. In 1961, when Seeger was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to tell the Committee on Un-American Activities about his friends and associates in radical organizations, the defendant took pride in confrontation.
?Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over 300 years ago,? Seeger testified. ?Others more recently were abolitionists in New England in the 1840s and ?50s, and I believe that in choosing my present course, I do no dishonor to either them or the people who may follow me.?
And then Seeger asked the judge for permission to sing ?Wasn?t That a Time,? a song of fathers who bled at Valley Forge and brave men who died at Gettysburg. The judge said no, and sentenced Seeger to a year in prison. An appeals court reversed the conviction.
Forty years later, Seeger sticks to his politics - with a but or two. ?I apologize for once believing Stalin was just a hard driver, not a supremely cruel dictator. I ask people to broaden their definition of socialism. Our ancestors were all socialists: You killed a deer and maybe you got the best cut, but you wouldn?t let it rot, you shared it. Similarly, I tell socialists, every society has a post office and none of them is efficient. No post office anywhere invented Federal Express.?
The book on Seeger is that he is a radical. But like so many radicals before him, Seeger seeks to conserve the past in a way that most conservatives would find familiar. He clings to an America that savored its plain folk, a country that took pride in its simplicity: ?Three times, I?ve written to Reader?s Digest asking why they discontinued that great feature they had, `The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met,? wonderful stories about rank-and-file people. They never respond.?
Pete Seeger celebrates the individual in a way he says would ?shock poor old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said politics begins with millions of people.? Seeger quotes William James, who once wrote in a letter: ?I am for all those tiny molecular forces that creep from individual to individual ... {forces that} if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man?s pride.? Those words are painted on the side of Seeger?s barn.
He still sings, still appears up and down the Hudson at river festivals and political and environmental fund-raisers. He and Arlo Guthrie did two nights at Carnegie Hall last week, and next week he?s got a concert in Pennsylvania.
But Seeger is, above all, a storyteller, a reminder that America still has an oral tradition, even if it is being crushed into silence by television. ?The purpose of life is to live, not to watch other people living,? Seeger says, reaching into his bottomless supply of folk wisdom.
?Judge the musicality of a nation not by the number of virtuosos it produces, but by the music everyone knows,? he says. Apply that test to America today, and even an old communist turns longingly toward the past, toward what has been lost.
?People say, Don?t you ever give up, Pete? Well, I give up every night about 9 o?clock, I say the hell with it, and go to sleep.?
He still varies the songs in his concert repertoire, and lately he?s been singing ?Satisfied Mind.?
How many times have you heard someone say
If I had his money, I?d do things my way.
But little they know that it?s so hard to find
One rich man in a hundred with a satisfied mind.
?There?s a million things I wish I?d done,? Seeger says, ?books I wish I?d read, places to go. But I?ve got a satisfied mind. And I even laugh.?
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