Pete Seeger 1919-2014

When I first heard of Pete Seeger, I was simply unaware of his sordid history with politics.

I was a teenager who went to youth group, and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” was in constant rotation in our worship circles.  This was in the early 80s, before there was a mass synthesis of what made the worship song playlist, and secular folk songs of the 60s occasionally trickled down into the repertoire.  IIHAH was nothing other than a song about “love between my brothers and my sisters” and there was nothing faulty about that.

Years later, on a whim, I had purchased a double-cassette of a Pete Seeger/Arlo Guthrie concert.  It became a favorite collection, as songs like “Sailing Up Sailing Down,” “Guantanamera,” and “Precious Friend” showed his remarkable tendency to get people to sing along with him, without them ever having heard the song before.  Again, I couldn’t care less about his politics, just the fact that he established community, right there on the spot, with just his trusted banjo and the gumption to actually needle us to sing along, between the musical phrases.

For me, this was the essence of Pete Seeger.  Even though he was oftentimes an isolationist, living off the grid in a wood cabin in upstate New York state, he was a communitarian at heart.  He saw that music could play a part to change the world.  Some of his battles he would lose (and rightly so, as he would later admit, once he saw the extent of the carnage left behind in Communism).  Some of his battles he would win (like his efforts to clean the Hudson River).  But he knew that nothing would spark a movement faster than a well-written song that was in the hearts of those who sang it.

To accomplish this, he had this skill that I liked to call “Seeger-izing.”  In the years before modern technology made overhead projection ubiquitous, he got a whole room to sing with him without having words displayed on the screen. Listen to his live recordings, especially “Precious Friend.”  He took a relatively obscure song, and by the end of it, everybody was singing it at the top of their lungs.  As Arlo stated, Pete “sings the song twice at the same time… he sings the song once, in front of the song, and once with everybody.  That’s hard.”

In the years before I became dependent upon overhead projection, I had learned this skill, purely from listening to his recordings.

I did find out about his politics much later in life.  I’ve seen the PBS specials, read the books, read constant blogs.  I know of his involvement with the Newport Folk Festival, and the notorious moment where he solidified Bob Dylan’s ascent into rock.  I’ve read about his fighting with The Tokens about “Wimoweh” which the latter group turned into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”  I’ve heard stories as to how his “Turn Turn Turn” (based on Ecclesiastes) turned people into reading the Bible.  I’ve read his writings, journal entries, and purchased his songbooks.

But the thing that stands out for me was that remarkable skill of getting everybody to sing. For him, singing was a political movement.

About eight years ago, my wife and I traveled more than two hours to catch him in concert with Arlo Guthrie.  He was in his late eighties, frail and gaunt, and yet he still packed a wallop as he played his banjo.  Then at one point, he took out an axe, wielded it over his head, and chopped wood on stage, all the while singing an a cappella spiritual.  It was a sight to see, this old, frail, hippie hitting a piece of wood with precise brute force and perfect musical timing.  It stands as one of the most incredible moments I’ve seen in concert.

Rest in peace, Pete Seeger.