LIVING LEGEND: PETE SEEGERTomorrow evening in New York, an all-star cast of more than 40 performers will convene at a sold-out Madison Square Garden to honour the American legend Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday. GEORGE KIMBALL, who is related to Seeger, remembers standing with the once-blacklisted singer at a massive anti-Vietnam War rally 40 years ago
THERE IS NO accounting for Americans' taste in popular music, which can be as baffling today as it was 60 years ago when the Weavers' recording of Irene Goodnightshot to the top of the Hit Parade, displacing Nat King Cole's Mona Lisaas the Number One song.
Written by Leadbelly (Huddle Ledbetter), who had died the previous year, Irenesold more than two million copies and topped the Billboard charts, which tabulated over-the-counter record sales and radio airplay. In an unprecedented development, the flip side of the folk group's first single, an Israeli hora called Tzena! Tzena!,reached Number Two.
The Weavers – Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman – had formed in 1948, and when within a year, they were dividing up $100 a week to play New York's Village Vanguard, they had been regarded as successful by folk standards. Now they were the rage. Their 1951 rendition of On Top of Old Smokeyresulted in a second trip to the Billboard top spot. They were booked into the Strand Theatre on Broadway at $2,260 (€1,744) a week. At the conclusion of the six-month engagement at the Strand, manager Harold Leventhal had arranged a 30-city tour where they would play to packed houses.
Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight),the Weavers' adaptation of a South African hunting song, had just begun to climb the charts when J Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, provided newspapers with the information that Seeger and Hays had been members of the Communist Party and were under investigation for "sedition". In the midst of the McCarthy-era witch-hunts the revelation was nothing short of devastating. A pamphlet naming both was circulated throughout the entertainment industry. The Weavers were banished from the public eye.
Officially blacklisted, their music was banned from television and radio airwaves. Literally overnight, Seeger and his bandmates were rendered personae non grataeat every theatre and music venue in the country.
MORE THAN HALF a century later, his banjo draped around his neck, Seeger was the featured performer at a January 18th outdoor concert on the Washington Mall celebrating the impending inauguration of Barack Obama. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and with an audience that extended as far as the eye could see, Pete, accompanied by his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, led the throng in a joyful rendition of Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.
A smiling Obama, who two days later would be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, at first clapped his hands in time, and then enthusiastically joined in. It occurred to me that at a massive rally against the Vietnam War some 40 years earlier Pete and I had stood together in virtually the same spot. As he and 100,000 protesting demonstrators sang John Lennon's Give Peace a Chancethat day, just across Pennsylvania Avenue one of Obama's predecessors had barricaded himself in the White House behind a cordon of heavily-armed police and National Guardsmen. At one point Pete stopped singing long enough to shout, "Are you listening, Nixon?"
Tomorrow evening in New York, an all-star cast of more than 40 performers, ranging from Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie and Tommy Sands to Springsteen, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Kris Kristofferson and Ladysmith Black Mambazo will convene at a sold-out Madison Square Garden to honour the American legend on his 90th birthday.
Tickets for the gala event (which will benefit Seeger’s Clearwater Foundation) were snapped up the day they went on sale.
And a grassroots initiative proposing that Seeger be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize has collected nearly 30,000 signatures and seems to acquire additional momentum with each passing day.
“There aren’t too many genuine heroes in this world,” says folk-singer Tom Chapin. “But Pete is one of them.”
Beyond his influence as a performer and leftist icon, Seeger's musical legacy is so pervasive that many of his compositions are widely assumed to be traditional material in the public domain. His anti-war classic Where Have all the Flowers Gone, inspired by a passage in Mikhail Sholokhov's 1934 novel And Quiet Flows the Don, has been recorded more than 100 times and translated into at least two dozen languages. If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),a Weavers-vintage song he wrote with Hays, became an anthem of the American civil rights and labour movements. Turn, Turn, Turn,biblical in origin (Seeger set to music lyrics the Book of Ecclesiastes attributes to King Solomon), reached Number One on the US pop charts in 1965 when it was recorded by The Byrds, and has since been covered by everyone from Joe Cocker and Dolly Parton to Springsteen and Chris de Burgh. With the passage of time, Guantanamera,Seeger's musical interpretation of a Jose Marti poem, became the de facto anthem of Cuba.
SEEGER WAS BORN in Manhattan in 1919, the son of the noted musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger. Both parents were on the faculty at the Julliard School of Music at the time. Pete attended private schools, and had joined the Young Communist League while enrolled at Harvard as a member of the Class of 1940 (John F Kennedy was a classmate). During his Harvard tenure he earned his keep by serving as the “houseboy” for several bachelor faculty members who shared a Back Bay townhouse – among them the poet Charles Olson, whom he would later introduce to Woody Guthrie.
By 1938 Seeger had abandoned his academic studies and gone to work at the Library of Congress, helping to assemble the Archive of American Folk Song. It was there that he met Guthrie, and immediately recognised a kindred spirit. Within months Woody had inducted the erstwhile Harvard student into the life of the itinerant hobo-musician – riding the rails, performing odd jobs, and singing for his supper as the pair worked their way across America.
In 1941, Seeger and Guthrie materialised in New York, where they founded the Almanac Singers, who performed topical and folk songs in support of unions, human rights, and religious organisations. The personnel were in constant flux and the line-up for a given concert might be whomever turned up that night (Woody, hardly a stickler for protocol, groused that “the Almanacs are the only group I know of that rehearses on stage”), but Seeger, Guthrie, and Lee Hays were the most constant members.
It was an era in which American leftists found themselves walking an uncomfortably delicate tightrope. Although the US had yet to enter the second World War, the essential evils of Naziism had become evident, but since the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the stance adopted by the American Communist Party had favoured pacifism and demanded American neutrality.
During this period Seeger and Hays were YCL members. Guthrie, although he wrote a column for The Daily Worker,was never a party member; the hierarchy considered him too unreliable and undisciplined to merit card-carrying membership. The FBI charged that the Almanac singers were hindering America's war build-up by "subverting recruitment".
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 brought an almost comically abrupt about-face. A pacifist one week, Guthrie’s guitar was decorated with a “This machine kills Fascists” label; the next – and when Seeger was drafted into the army – he enthusiastically donned a uniform.
Private Seeger was trained as an aircraft mechanic and dispatched to the Pacific Theatre, but once he got there the army decided he could be put to better use entertaining his fellow soldiers and he was assigned to Special Services. His later response to “What did you do in the war?” was “I strummed my banjo”.
AFTER HE WAS blacklisted, Seeger’s exile would ultimately endure for 17 years. (The Weavers, said Hays, “went on a Sabbatical that turned into a Mondical and a Tuesdical”.) The four went their separate ways, each attempting to eke out a living on his own. For Seeger the interlude quite literally became his “wilderness years”. He occupied much of his time during this exile at the log cabin he had built, by hand, on property he owned in Beacon, New York, in the Hudson Valley.
Like almost everything else Seeger does, the house-raising was a communal effort, with friends travelling up from the city to pitch in. (The labour was voluntary, but his wife Toshi, in addition to helping build the cabin, was kept busy feeding the visitors, some of whom would stay for weeks at a time.) The plans for the cabin, ironically, came from the US Government; Pete had unearthed them at the Library of Congress. The chimney of the fireplace still incorporates some significant souvenirs – large rocks that had crashed through the windows of the Seeger family station wagon when a mob attacked them at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill 60 years ago.
Although Seeger was banned from American television and radio airwaves until the late 1960s, the first crack in the logjam had come in 1956. Determined to reunite the Weavers for a once-off concert, Leventhal attempted to book New York’s Town Hall, where the group might reach their more natural constituency, but the management there skittishly declined. Taking a shot in the dark, he contacted Carnegie Hall.
“To Harold’s surprise the, response was, ‘Sure. Just show us the money’,” says Tom Paxton, to whom Leventhal had related the adventure.
Leventhal booked Carnegie Hall, and before the posters were even up the Weavers reunion had sold out (“they could have sold it out twice,” says Paxton), but it nearly imploded when the group’s members learned they would be expected to perform in formal dress. Ronnie Gilbert agreed to wear a gown, but the three men were adamant.
“At first they were all against it, but one by one the others grudgingly agreed – except Pete,” says Paxton. “Absolutely no way he was going to wear a tuxedo. Harold was afraid he was going to have to refund the ticket money, but then in a stroke of inspiration he found a picture of Paul Robeson wearing white tie and tails for a concert in Moscow. When Pete saw that he agreed to wear a tux. What the picture on the album cover taken that night doesn’t show is that he wore bright red socks.”(Garrison Keillor later recalled that “to see Pete Seeger step out of a limousine wearing a tuxedo was to see a man on his way to his own hanging.”)
The live recording of The Weavers at Carnegie Hall became a best-selling album, and remains in print to this day.
"For me it was an epiphany," says Paxton (who will be in Dublin as a guest performer at Liam Clancy's Wheels of Lifeconcert at the National Concert Hall May 26th and 27th). "I was still in college at Oklahoma, where I played in this little faux Kingston Trio group. I came by to visit a friend one day and he said, 'You've got to listen to this', and he dropped the phonograph needle on the first cut, the banjo introduction to Darlin' Corey. I was spellbound. I sat there and listened to the entire album, and by the time it ended I'd made up my mind that this was something I had to do.
“I’ve told Pete many times over the years that he’s to blame for everything that’s happened to me since,” says Paxton. “But for my entire career he’s been an example of how it should be done. He lives his life through his music, and through his humanity. Would that we all could live our lives the way he’s lived his.”
ALREADY BLACKLISTED, Seeger’s troubles multiplied in 1955 when he himself was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had long since repudiated his party allegiance, but unlike many other former communists who sought refuge in the US Constitution by invoking the Fifth Amendment (which protects against self-incrimination), Seeger defiantly based his stance on the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech.
The committee was unmoved. He was indicted and ultimately convicted of contempt of Congress charges, and in 1961 was sentenced to a year in prison. (A year later the charges were dismissed by an appellate court.)
Seeger’s public appearances were for many years limited to small coffee houses and pass-the-hat “house concerts” hosted by friends. Over time he was welcomed to play before more and more college audiences, spreading his gospel to an entirely new generation.
“I was back singing before kids in schools,” he once recalled. “In that respect the blacklist may have been a blessing in disguise.”
WHAT HAD BEGUN as a groundswell in the late 1950s had, half a dozen years later, become a full-fledged epidemic, one Dave Van Ronk would recall as the "Great Folk Scare". Even Madison Avenue had to sit up and take notice. In 1963, ABC introduced a weekly television programme called Hootenanny, devoted entirely to folk music. The blacklisted Seeger, although he had been largely responsible for the Great Folk Scare (and, ironically, for the term "hootenanny" itself) was not invited.
A half-dozen young Greenwich Village folk singers – Paxton, Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Patrick Sky, Eric Anderson, and John Phillips (later of the Mamas and Papas) – formed an ad hoc committee to plot a response. A meeting convened at the Village Gate to discuss a boycott of Hootenannyattracted upwards of 50 performers. To their surprise, Seeger himself showed up – and argued against the boycott, noting that despite the blacklist, the prospect of spreading the folk music gospel to a far greater audience outweighed any personal injustice.After an impassioned discussion, the group decided that they would boycott anyway.
None of the aforementioned save Phillips ever appeared on Hootenanny,nor did Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the New Lost City Ramblers, or Peter, Paul and Mary. In the face of their rejection, ABC programmers offered to circumvent the blacklist if Seeger would sign a loyalty oath. He declined. Whether it was the result of the folksingers' boycott or the arrival of the Beatles, Hootenannylasted less than two full seasons before it was cancelled by the network.
Paxton, fresh out of the army and playing McDougal Street “basket houses”, had never met Seeger until the 1963 boycott session at the Gate. As the meeting began to break up, he summoned his courage and approached Seeger, asking if he might sing him a song he’d just written.
"Pete never says no to a request like that," recalls Paxton. "I sang Ramblin' Boyfor him, and to my great joy, he not only liked it, but a few months later recorded it live at Carnegie Hall. But because he'd just learned the song he got the chorus slightly wrong, singing 'Fare thee well, my ramblin' boy', instead of 'Here's to you'.
“That,” says Paxton, “was no big deal to someone as thrilled as I was. Then Pete and his family took off on a year’s trip around the world, and when the album came out, complete with Pete’s mistake, I received a postcard from India, containing Pete’s signature drawing of a banjo and a message that said: ‘Dear Tom, Oops! Pete’.”
FOR A TIME in the early 1940s Seeger and Guthrie had shared communal living quarters with several other like-minded artists, including the actors Will Geer and Burl Ives. Ives, who had made his early reputation as a popular interpreter of folk songs, would shortly repudiate his leftist origins, and went on to name names – including Seeger's – at the 1952 HUAC hearings, thus preserving an acting career that would see him win an Academy Award (for The Big Country) and play Big Daddy (a role Tennessee Williams had specifically written for him) in both the Broadway and Hollywood versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.While his co-operation with HUAC brought him personal fortune, Ives was widely despised by his old circle of friends.
(Oscar Brand invited Ives to be a guest on his radio programme, and ran into Dave Van Ronk a few days later. When the crusty Van Ronk, a committed Trotskyite, complained angrily about the exposure for “that informer”, Brand replied, “Dave, on the left, we don’t have a blacklist”.)
Paxton was among the performers at a 1993 concert when the 92nd Street YMHA in New York commemorated its 40th anniversary as a showcase of folk music. “They’d invited everyone who’d ever performed there, and some of the descendants, like Josh White Jr and Paul Robeson Jr, of those who had died,” recalls Paxton. “They had me and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and they had a bunch of the old guys like Oscar and Theo Bikel and Pete – and Burl Ives. That seemed to be a recipe for disaster. Pete and Burl hadn’t been in the same room for almost 50 years. The capacity was 900, and the audience was made up of 900 old lefties who adored Pete Seeger and to whom Burl Ives’ name was mud. There was tension in the air throughout the evening, and the organisers deliberately kept Pete and Burl apart backstage.”
Ives would die within two years, and at 83 he was clearly on his last legs. Late in the programme he came onstage in a motorised wheelchair, and had a young lady accompanying him on guitar. The first few songs were met by a stony silence from the unforgiving audience. Then, out of the wings strolled Seeger.
"He walked out, his banjo around his neck, and without saying a word, bent over and planted a gentle kiss on the top of Burl Ives's head," recalls Paxton. "You could hear 900 people simultaneously gasp, and then collectively exhale as Pete picked up the chords to Blue Tail Flyand joined in. It may have been as dramatic a statement as I've ever seen, because at that moment what everyone realised was, 'Hey, if Pete Seeger can let this go, so can we. It was over'."
SEEGER WAS AT the forefront of both the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and performed, usually free of charge, at causes benefiting everything from summer camps for inner-city kids to Noraid. In the late 1960s he would also embrace another cause, an environmental crusade that would become his passion for the next 40 years.
Two centuries of industrial pollution and human neglect had turned the once-pristine Hudson River into a 300-mile-long sewer. Along with a few other activists, Pete enthusiastically involved himself in a campaign to clean up the river, with a hand-built replica of the Dutch sloops that sailed the Hudson in the 18th century as its centrepiece. Within a year they had raised the $150,000 (€115,742) required to build the Clearwater.
"At the time, it seemed a frivolous idea," Seeger recalled in a 1984 account of the venture. "The world was full of agony, Vietnam was heating up. Money was needed for all sorts of life-and-death matters, and there we were, building a sailboat." The Clearwaterwas launched in Maine in June of 1969. A month later on its maiden voyage it had reached the mouth of the Hudson at New York harbour, and tied up at the South Street Seaport.
“A lot of people said, ‘Oh, those hippies will have some fun, and a year from now that boat will either be sunk or sold’,” Seeger told an interviewer years later. Forty years on nearly half a million people have sailed on the vessel, and the project has raised millions for the river clean-up, the beneficiary of tomorrow’s birthday party at the Garden.You still wouldn’t want to drink from the Hudson, but conditions have improved dramatically, and even his long-time detractors and political enemies will tell you that Pete Seeger has done more than any other single person to effect that change.
By Seeger’s own estimate, “I’ve got about 10 per cent of my voice left”, and while he probably overstates the case, in recent years he has increasingly relied on his grandson for vocal support. (Watch a tape of the Obama inauguration concert and you’ll notice that Tao does more of the singing than either Seeger or Springsteen.)
The eldest of Pete and Toshi’s six grandchildren, Tao (the name is an acronym of his grandmother’s birth name, Toshi-Aline Ohta) is the son of their daughter Mika and Puerto Rican filmmaker Emilio Rodriguez-Garcia and spent his boyhood in Nicaragua, where his parents had moved after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. He now performs regularly with Seeger, on his own as a solo artist, as well as with his own group, The Mammals, and is producing tomorrow’s mammoth Madison Square Garden concert.
As Pete's touring partner, Tao inherits a role performed for several years by Guthrie's son, Arlo. Immersed in the folk world from an early age, Arlo tells of an early joint tour with Seeger, when at the end of his set at the Tonder Festival in Denmark he was brought back on stage for an encore and decided to throw a change of pace at the audience by singing his version of Can't Help Falling in Love With You.
“Then I remembered Pete was there, and I started to worry,” says Arlo. “I mean whole wars have been fought” over what is and is not proper to sing before a folk audience.
A few moments later his fears were put to rest when Seeger, much as he had the night he buried the hatchet with Burl Ives, strolled onstage with his banjo and joined in singing the Elvis Presley song. “And,” says Arlo, “the damnedest part of it was, he even knew the words!”
See also www.nobelprize4pete.org/