RIP...The man that taught us that not all teachings in school are the truth... A Short Guide To The Extraordinary Life Of Pete Seeger BY ALYSSA ROSENBERG ON JANUARY 28, 2014 AT 12:19 PM In a 2006 New Yorker profile of Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, who earlier that year had released an album rooted in Seeger’s repertoire, told Alec Wilkinson what he’d discovered when he began exploring Seeger’s career in depth. “I heard a hundred voices in those old folk songs, and stories from across the span of American history—parlor music, church music, tavern music, street and gutter music,” Springsteen said of Seeger, who died yesterday at 94. “I felt the connection almost intuitively, and that certain things needed to be carried on; I wanted to continue doing things that Pete had passed down and put his hand on. He had a real sense of the musician as historical entity—of being a link in the thread of people who sing in others’ voices and carry the tradition forward— and of the songwriter, in the daily history of the place he lived, that songs were tools, and, without sounding too pretentious, righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness.” That’s a daunting mission statement, but it’s a fitting description of Seeger’s enormous, and enormously American life, as well as a perfect diagnosis of some of the challenges of assessing his work. Seeger was born into a lineage that stretched back to the American Revolution, when Karl Ludwig Seeger, a doctor from the Kingdom of Württemberg, moved to the United States, and to a family whose contributions to American culture and public life would have been impressive even if Seeger hadn’t grown up to add to them. His father helped establish both musicology and ethnomusicology in American universities. Seeger’s stepmother worked with Carl Sandberg on The American Soundbag. His uncle Alan joined the French Foreign Legion and was killed at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. And Seeger would marry a woman who came from an equally illuminating intellectual background. Toshi Aline Ohta’s father, Takashi Ohta, had been exiled from Japan in place of his father, who had received a sentence of banishment for translating Marxist writing into Japanese. Ohta met Toshi’s mother, Virginia Harper Berry, while she was traveling abroad, and Toshi was born in Munich in 1922. The catalogue of the work they did together is almost impossible to fathom, and trying to summarize it is ridiculous. After Seeger dropped out of Harvard, he met the folklorist Alan Lomax, who helped Seeger get work at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, a job which furthered his education in American folk music, while also putting him in a position, at a very young age, where he was helping to determine what would constitute that genre’s canon. He traveled with Woody Guthrie, with whom Seeger helped to found the Almanac Singers in 1940. Their anti-conscription album Songs For John Doe, which suggested that World War II was being fought at least in part in service of corporate interests, would be denounced as subversive, and many copies of it destroyed. Despite the skepticism of the album, Seeger later served in World War II, where the talents that had brought him criticism were repurposed to entertain troops in the Pacific Theater. The Almanac Singers’ Talking Union would fare better both in the moment–it was reissued in 1955–and in historical memory. youtu.be/1y2SIIeqy34
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 03:20:55 +0000
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