REMEMBERING PETE SEEGER ‑ Part 2 \Music Notes, by Wally Brooker In 1955, when Pete Seeger took his stand against McCarthyism, refusing to name names, and pleading the First Amendment at congressional hearings, he was blacklisted from concert halls and broadcast media. Ironically, his very persecutors were the ones who set him on the path to becoming the torchbearer of the popular front legacy to a younger generation seeking to move beyond Cold War repression and cultural conformism. Pete had always been dedicated to a grassroots concept of culture. To the grassroots he returned, performing at summer camps, union halls (that were still open to him) and college campuses, where he found students and younger faculty receptive to his message. Backing him was a small but stalwart network of progressive folk music institutions, like Sing Out! magazine (which he had co‑founded in 1950), and Folkways Records, founded in 1948 by friend and supporter Moses Asch. During these years Seeger recorded many albums of American folk music and songs of struggle ‑ sometimes as many as five per year. The heavy vinyl records in thick cardboard sleeves were produced in small quantities, becoming treasured items as interest in folk music picked up in the late fifties. Pete added teaching to his repertoire, and soon his instruction book How to Play the 5‑String Banjo could be found wherever young folk musicians and aficionados gathered. The blacklisting of progressive entertainers by the House Committee on Un‑American Activities began in 1947, lasting well into the sixties. It was still going strong when Pete was subpoenaed, but in retrospect, the beginning of the turnaround might have been in December 1955, when The Weavers came out of their enforced retirement for a triumphal sold‑out concert at Carnegie Hall. Their album The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, and subsequent recordings, exerted a powerful influence on the folk music explosion of the sixties. While the band carried on until 1964, Pete left the group in 1958 because of a disagreement ‑ the others had decided to record a cigarette commercial! As a solo artist, Seeger recorded frequently, toured, wrote a regular column for Sing Out!, helped out a new folk magazine called Broadside (which featured young songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs), and composed memorable songs including Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and Turn, Turn, Turn. He played a key role in adapting and popularizing We Shall Overcome, the African‑American spiritual that was embraced as the anthem of the civil rights movement. He also adapted a Cuban song called Guantanamera, based on a poem by José Marti, and sang it in solidarity with the Cuban revolution during the missile crisis of October 1962. Petes version was adapted by The Sandpipers and became a hit. In 1959 Pete and Toshi helped to found the Newport Folk Festival, which became a national showcase for roots‑oriented music, featuring young artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, African‑American artists like Odetta, Muddy Waters, and Mississippi John Hurt, and activist musicians like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees Freedom Singers. While Pete may be remembered by some veterans of the sixties as the older guy who pulled the plug on Bob Dylan when the singer went electric at Newport in 1965, in the end most of this cohort came to respect and even love him. It is testimony to his ultimate openness to musical styles and forms, that Seeger would later attract the company of progressive (and loud) rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello. As the political climate evolved, more opportunities to challenge the blacklist presented themselves. In 1965‑66 Seeger hosted Rainbow Quest, a local New York City TV show that featured him talking and jamming with guests like Buffy Sainte‑Marie, Johnny Cash, June Carter, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Malvina Reynolds. In 1968 he made a national TV breakthrough when he appeared on the popular CBS show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and sang his powerful anti‑war song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. After the sixties, the main cause in Pete Seegers life undoubtedly became the environment. Influenced by Rachel Carsons important 1962 book Silent Spring, he and Toshi decided to undertake a daunting task: cleaning up the PCB‑polluted Hudson River, which ran by their home in upstate New York. In 1966 the two co‑founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and its related musical offshoot The Great Hudson River Revival (a.k.a. The Clearwater Festival). In 1969 the foundations dream, The Clearwater, a replica of a 19th century sloop, began to sail the river. Pete, Toshi, and other activists combined popular education with music, and invited community participation. Their cleanup campaigns played a key role in the passage of the Clean Water Act (1972) and the eventual clampdown by the EPA on Hudson River polluters. Despite his turn to the environment, Pete never strayed far from working class struggles, the womens movement, the rights of migrant workers, and the fight against racism. He also continued to speak out against war and imperialism. Pete braved public condemnation by travelling to North Vietnam in 1972, while the American war on that country still raged. Shortly after the 1973 U.S.‑backed coup that overthrew the Popular Unity government in Chile, he joined Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs at a New York benefit concert for Chilean refugees. In 1983 he attended the Nueva Cancion song festival in Nicaragua, while the Reagan Administration was fomenting terrorist attacks against the countrys Sandinista revolution. The list could go on and on. In his last years, as tributes poured in, Pete Seeger was recognized by sectors of the establishment. In January 2009 he was invited to sing with Bruce Springsteen at President Obamas inauguration. At Petes suggestion, they sang Woody Guthries anthem This Land is Your Land. They made sure to sing the two verses that are usually left out ‑ the ones that take a dig at private property and speak of lines of hard‑hit people standing outside relief offices. In October 2011 Pete could be seen, hands gripping his walker, at the head of a procession from his just‑completed Symphony Hall concert, down thirty Manhattan blocks to Occupy New Yorks Columbus Circle encampment. There, accompanied by grandson Tao, and Arlo Guthrie, he led a new generation in a singalong of We Shall Overcome. After his death on January 27th, much of the mainstream media was lavish in its praise. President Obama called him Americas tuning fork and hailed him for defending workers rights, civil rights, world peace and the environment. Although the obituaries often mentioned his early membership in the CPUSA, what was missing was any examination of the underlying philosophy that formed the basis of his remarkably consistent world‑view. However, a few left‑wing publications suggested that it might have something to do with his essential communism. Seeger himself, in several interviews declared that he was still a communist (as in small‑c). A tribute on the CPUSAs website declared that Pete Seeger never wavered from his communist beliefs even after leaving the Communist Party, and in fact remained a friend of the party and reader and supporter of Peoples World until his death. (Pete Seeger and American Communism, Peoples World, Feb. 13, 2014). Similarly, in a January 29th tribute, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara wrote: Its not that Pete Seeger did a lot of good despite his longtime ties to the Communist Party; he did a lot of good because he was a communist. Now thats something to talk about. For a good documentary on Seegers life, check out Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (PBS, 2007). (The above article is from the April 1-15, 2014, issue of Peoples Voice, Canadas leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to Peoples Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:09:17 +0000