BRUCE ON PETE SEEGER “When Pete was on the blacklist in the early ‘60s, his old friend, the legendary music man John Hammond, came to the rescue and signed him to a Columbia Records contract. In the early ‘70s, the same John Hammond signed an unknown kid from New Jersey to a Columbia record contract. When John died in 1987, both Pete and I were asked to play at his funeral and that was the first time I laid eyes on Pete. “I had missed most of the Hootenanny folk revival and really didn’t have that clear an idea of what Pete actually did. Well, Pete gets up at the memorial, his beautiful voice long since shot, and strums his powerful fingers over his 12-string guitar, ringing out a simple chord, which all by itself sounded simply stirring. He then described the origins of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and proceeded to talk the audience through the song until every person at that gathering was singing loud and strong. “Loud, strong, committed and always in search of America – all of it – with a heart of gold and a spine of steel – that was Pete. We got to know each other in the years that followed, and I wound up being so deeply affected by his music that I released an album called ‘The Seeger Sessions,’ inspired entirely by Pete’s artistry. “One of my favorite memories is of flying down to D.C. with Pete to perform together at President Obama’s inauguration concert. With the great statue of Abe Lincoln behind him and a broad and massive cross section of America at its most hopeful in front of him, he led us all in singing ‘This Land is Your Land.’ As Pete liked to say, he would only sing it with ‘all the verses,’ the last several of which are the most radical and are usually left out. And, as I’ve said before, that, too, was Pete. He always sang ‘all of the verses.’
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 05:18:26 +0000
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