Pete Seeger

Peter Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, in New York City into a family steeped in music and scholarship. His father, Charles Seeger, was a musicologist who taught at the University of California and later helped shape the emerging field of ethnomusicology, while his mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a concert violinist trained at the Paris Conservatory ^[1]. After his parents divorced, his father married the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, whose transcriptions of American folk songs became landmark publications. Half siblings Mike and Peggy Seeger would also build careers in folk music ^[2].

As a teenager at Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, Seeger took up the ukulele and read widely about rural American life. A trip with his father to the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1936 introduced him to the five string banjo, the instrument that defined his sound for the rest of his life ^[1]. He entered Harvard College on a scholarship in 1936 intending to study journalism and sociology, but his grades slipped, his scholarship lapsed, and he left in 1938 without a degree ^[3].

After leaving Harvard, Seeger drifted through odd jobs in New York before finding work in 1939 as an assistant to the folklorist Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Cataloging field recordings gave him a working education in the American vernacular repertoire, and Lomax introduced him to performers such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie ^[2].

In 1940 Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a benefit concert for migrant farm workers, and the two traveled together across the country, trading songs and performing for union audiences. The following year Seeger joined Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell in the Almanac Singers, a loose ensemble that wrote and performed topical songs for labor unions and left wing causes ^[3]. The group recorded albums of union anthems and, briefly, songs opposing American entry into the Second World War, a position it reversed after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Seeger was drafted into the United States Army in 1942 and served in the Pacific, where he was assigned to entertain troops in the Saipan area. In 1943, while in uniform, he married Toshi Aline Ohta, who became his manager, producer, and closest collaborator for the next seventy years ^[1]. After the war he helped found People's Songs, an organization that published topical music and connected performers with union halls and political campaigns; it collapsed after the failed 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, which Seeger had supported ^[3].

Commercial success arrived in 1948 when Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman formed The Weavers. Their polished arrangements of folk material reached an enormous audience: the group's 1950 recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene" topped the American charts and sold in the millions, paired with the Israeli song "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena" ^[4]. For a brief period The Weavers were among the most popular acts in the country, proof that folk repertoire could compete with mainstream pop.

The Weavers' run ended abruptly. Seeger had joined the Communist Party in the early 1940s and drifted away from it around 1950, but in the anticommunist climate of the era his past affiliations made him a target. The 1950 publication Red Channels named him, radio stations dropped the group's records, bookings evaporated, and The Weavers disbanded in 1952, reuniting only for occasional concerts later in the decade ^[3].

In August 1955 Seeger was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Rather than invoke the Fifth Amendment's protection against self incrimination, he refused to answer questions about his associations on First Amendment grounds, telling the committee that his political beliefs and affiliations were no proper business of a government inquiry. He offered instead to sing for the members, an offer they declined ^[4]. Indicted for contempt of Congress, he was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to ten concurrent one year terms, but an appeals court dismissed the indictment in 1962 ^[1].

Blacklisted from network television and major venues for years, Seeger pieced together a living by touring college campuses, summer camps, and small halls, and by recording prolifically for the independent Folkways label. Historians of the folk revival credit this itinerant teaching circuit with seeding the 1960s boom: a generation of young players first heard the banjo and the traditional repertoire at a Seeger concert ^[2]. He also wrote an instruction manual, How to Play the 5-String Banjo, which he had first self published in 1948 and which remained the standard beginner's text for decades ^[5].

Any account of Pete Seeger achievements begins with the songs. He wrote or co-wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer" (with Lee Hays), and "Turn! Turn! Turn!," which set verses from Ecclesiastes to music and became a number one hit for The Byrds in 1965 ^[4]. He adapted and popularized "Wimoweh" from the South African recording "Mbube," and he was central to the transformation of an old gospel hymn into "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the civil rights movement; Seeger, who helped alter the wording and spread the song, always insisted the credit belonged to the movement itself, and royalties were directed to a fund supporting Black cultural work in the South ^[3].

Seeger's recorded output was vast. Between his Folkways albums, Weavers sessions, children's records, and instructional discs, he released well over one hundred albums across his career ^[2]. He co-founded the magazine Sing Out! in 1950, helped organize the Newport Folk Festival beginning in 1959, and hosted the television program Rainbow Quest in the mid 1960s when networks still kept him at arm's length ^[5].

Recognition came late but in volume. Seeger received a Grammy for best traditional folk album in 1997 for Pete, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1994 along with a Kennedy Center Honor the same year ^[4]. In 1994 the Library of Congress, where he had once catalogued field recordings for fifteen dollars a week, honored him with its Living Legend designation years later, closing a circle that had opened in 1939 ^[1].

Seeger's marriage to Toshi Ohta lasted from 1943 until her death in July 2013, days short of their seventieth anniversary. Toshi managed his bookings, produced films and festivals, and shielded him from the practical demands of a career he often treated as a calling rather than a business; Seeger repeatedly said in interviews that nothing he accomplished would have been possible without her ^[1]. The couple raised three children, Danny, Mika, and Tinya.

In 1949 the Seegers bought land on a wooded hillside above the Hudson River at Beacon, New York, where they built a log cabin largely with their own hands and lived for the rest of their lives. The homestead, at first without electricity or running water, reflected Seeger's lifelong preference for plain living, wood chopping, and self sufficiency ^[2].

The location shaped his later activism. Watching pollution degrade the Hudson, Seeger and friends launched a plan in 1966 to build a replica nineteenth century sailing sloop that would carry the river's story to the public. The Clearwater, launched in 1969, became the flagship of an environmental organization that ran education programs for schoolchildren and pressed for enforcement of clean water laws; the effort is widely credited with helping drive the cleanup of the Hudson over the following decades ^[6].

Seeger never retired in any conventional sense. Through the 1970s and 1980s he toured frequently with Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son, and remained a fixture at benefit concerts for environmental, antiwar, and labor causes. His voice thinned with age, and he responded by turning concerts into communal sings, lining out verses so that thousands of audience members carried the melody for him ^[4].

His catalogue found new audiences in the new century. Bruce Springsteen's 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions revisited songs associated with him and brought his repertoire to arena crowds worldwide ^[4]. In January 2009, at eighty nine, Seeger stood with Springsteen and his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger at the Lincoln Memorial and led the crowd at Barack Obama's inaugural concert in Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," restoring the song's often omitted verses about private property and relief lines ^[6].

Honors continued to accumulate: a second Grammy in 2009 for At 89 and a third in 2011 for a children's recording, along with tribute concerts marking his ninetieth birthday at Madison Square Garden. Seeger kept chopping wood at Beacon into his nineties and appeared at an Occupy Wall Street march in 2011, walking with two canes. He died in Manhattan on January 27, 2014, at ninety four, after a short hospitalization ^[1].

Seeger's influence runs through nearly every strand of American popular music that touches the folk tradition. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and later generations of songwriters worked in a musical space he helped clear, and the sing along protest anthem as a form owes more to him than to any other single figure ^[2]. Musicians as varied as Springsteen and the banjoist Bela Fleck have cited his instruction book and recordings as points of entry to the instrument ^[5].

His civic legacy is equally concrete. The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization continues its river education programs, and the annual Clearwater Festival he and Toshi founded remains one of the oldest environmental music gatherings in the United States ^[6]. His 1955 stand before Congress is taught in histories of the blacklist era as a rare example of a witness resting on the First Amendment rather than the Fifth, at real personal cost ^[3].

Among the most cited Pete Seeger facts is his own summary of his method: he wanted, he often said, to put songs on people's lips, not just in their ears. Obituaries in 2014 described him as the conscience of American folk music, and any Pete Seeger biography must reckon with that double identity, part musician and part organizer, that made him both beloved and, for long stretches, officially unwelcome in his own country ^[1].