Many of us--really, most of us, I imagine--who went to elementary school in the late 60s and early 70s sang songs collected by Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. To this day, I remember singing a cleaned up version of the Weavers On Top of Old Smokey with such gusto and joy and boyish bravado that I am still surprised I am currently not in my principals office spending a lifetime of detention. In 6th grade, we sang, We shall overcome, which elicited the only criticism of a chorus concert I ever heard from my father, I cant understand why that d*mn liberal music teacher of yours had to pick *that* song. And, when the boys were young, one of the first albums I bought for them was Pete Seegers Childrens Concert at Town Hall. I wanted them to listen and sing along with the songs of my youth. I found this youtube version of Pete Seeger on the Johnny Cash show. He sings Worried Man Blues in true Pete Seeger fashion, encouraging and even cajoling the audience to sing along with him. By the end of the song, everyone, including Johnny Cash, has joined him. (I am ashamed to say that my first real memory of this song was a version done by the Kingston Trio.) The performance begins with Pete Seeger playing a 100 year old fretless banjo and goes from there. It is difficult to articulate this, but I believe that Pete Seeger connected me to a history that was at once a piece of and not a piece of my history. As a Kansas boy growing up intermittently in the suburbs of Kansas City and a rural township outside Topeka, union songs seemed as far as shipyards in New England and, yet, as close as the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe that travelled through my back yard. youtube/watch?v=ADtAU43MM14
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 04:29:26 +0000
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