Posted by rflacks on: Wed 9th May, 2012

Pete Seeger turned 93 on May 3. Tomorrow on the radio we’ll do a birthday
celebration for Pete. We’ll feature some newly released material—including two  compilations of Pete concerts from the late
50s performing on college campuses at a time when he was totally blacklisted in
the mainstream media, as well as some other things  that Pete has contributed to the culture of
protest in the last year or so.
TUNE IN:
CULTURE OF PROTEST THURS 5/10 6-7 PM PDT KCSB 91.9FM WWW.KCSB.ORG

In honor of the occasion some other
things I’d like to share: Three videos. Pete’s new performance of Dylan’s ‘Forever
Young’ with his Rivertown kids chorus—from the big Amnesy International Dulan
compilation—a perfect birthday song, you;’ll agree. Next, Pete with Bruce
Springsteen and Tao Seeger at the Obama inaugural concert doing all the ‘radical’
verses of This Land. And at the very end of this post, 40,000 Norwegians singing Pete’s ‘Rainbow Race’ (in Norwegian)—a classic children’s song in Norway now—a song despised by the mass murderer Breitik who hates ‘multiculturalism’.  And  an article I wrote a couple of years ago—my effort to pay tribute to Pete and his transformative cultural/political project. ENJOY!!!

Pete Seeger’s Project

Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, providing the occasion for a huge
Madison Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular
musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the two years prior
to this event, Seeger had gotten more mainstream attention than he’d received
in his previous 70 years of performing. Bruce Springsteen recorded several CDs
called “The Seeger Sessions” and simultaneously went on an international tour
featuring material drawn from Seeger’s folksong repertory. There was a
documentary film bio, released on public TV and theatrically, called “Pete
Seeger: The Power of Song.” There’s an ongoing campaign to get him nominated
for the Nobel Peace Prize.

A long adulatory essay on Seeger appeared in The New Yorker and an
extended version with the same main title—“The Protest Singer”—is now out as
one of three recently published biographies. In addition to the book by Alec
Wilkinson, there is a biographical narrative by historian Allan M. Winkler, “To
Everything There Is a Season,” and a major updating of David King Dunaway’s
“official” biography, “How Can I Keep from Singing,” originally published in
1981.  

The attention Pete Seeger is now getting is certainly deserved, given
his influence on American music and the nature of his life story. Yet, one
feature of that story is that he is one of the least well-known famous persons
in America. I use protest music a lot in my teaching about social movements;
over the years, I’ve found that fewer than 5 percent of my students at UC Santa
Barbara can identify Seeger (and this is probably a higher proportion than one
would find in a sample of the wider public). Of course, the attention he’s
gotten in recent years has undoubtedly enabled many more to identify him, but
he remains paradoxically shadowy, given his importance.

Yet this paradox goes to the heart of what his life has been about.

One obvious reason for Seeger’s marginalization has been his lifelong
commitment to the left. His father, the noted composer and musicologist Charles
Seeger, was an important leader of the cultural front fostered by the Communist
Party during the 1930s. Charles Seeger helped form a composers’ collective
(whose membership included Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland and other young
radical musicians) seeking to create a new music for revolutionary workers, and
eventually working to preserve and reinvigorate folk and vernacular music as an
alternative to commodified mass culture. His son Pete grew up immersed in the
left, joined the Young Communist League during his brief time at Harvard, and
was a Communist Party member (according to his biographers) during most of the
1940s. Although he stopped being a formal member of the party in the late ’40s,
he was one of the star cultural figures of the communist-oriented left for many
years after that. Teenagers like me and my wife (who both had been “Red diaper”
babies) were proud that Pete Seeger was “ours”; there he was at benefits, and
hootenannies, summer camps and rallies that defined much of our cultural lives
during the ’50s when kids of our background felt pretty isolated from the
political and cultural mainstream. Seeger’s allegiances made him the prototype
of the blacklisted entertainer, and it was the blacklist which excluded him
from TV and blanked him out of the awareness of mainstream America.

But that exclusion was not a tragedy for Pete’s life project. On the
contrary, it compelled him to fulfill that project rather than succumb to
temptations to modify it that might have come from more conventional commercial success.

Alec Wilkinson’s portrait of Seeger defines him as the epitome of the
rugged individualist. We see him in very old age, living in a house he has
built on the banks of New York state’s Hudson River. He, his wife Toshi and
their small children moved there in the ’40s, and their lives for a time were
indeed rugged—without electricity and running water for a while, chopping wood,
growing food in a clearing in the forest. Of course, they added modern
amenities, but they remained close to the land. Near the end of the book, we
see Seeger and members of his clan collecting sap and making maple syrup.
Wilkinson appreciates the seeming contradiction that this man, long reviled as
a communist, has tried to live the American ideal of the self-made,
self-sufficient man.

But Seeger was, in fact, a Communist, and continues to describe himself
as a “communist with a small c.” His biographers suggest that when he was a
party member, he was sometimes at odds with party discipline. In the ’30s, many
CPers from comfortable backgrounds felt the need to demonstrate their
revolutionary bona fides by slavish conformity to party lines and party
demands. Seeger is described, by Dunaway, as restless with such demands,
avoiding boring meetings, alienated by abstract theorizing. Indeed, his
dedication to the promotion of folk music was not particularly appreciated by
party cultural commissars. But alongside these deviations, he has had to live
down the fact that the Almanac Singers, which he helped to found, began in the
aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact by recording a group of anti-war songs
condemning the start of conscription and FDR’s military buildup. As soon as the
Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler, the American Communist Party became a
leading advocate of war against the Nazis; the Almanacs put out an album
supporting the war effort, and their producer pulled the earlier “pacifist”
album from the market. It’s a tale often used to demonstrate that the CPUSA was
Stalin’s tool, and how its members were unable to think and act in principled
ways. There are some who still can’t forgive Seeger for this episode.

But Pete Seeger was raised by his father to live a principled life. You
can get a flavor of Charles Seeger’s moral perspective by looking at his list
of “The Purposes of Music” printed as an appendix to Wilkinson’s book. “Music,
as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends.
… ” These principles emphasize that music as group activity is more important
than individual accomplishment, that “musical culture” of a nation depends on
the people’s participation in it rather than on the virtuosity of a few, that
“vernacular” music is the foundation from which all other kinds of music
derive, that music should “aid in the welding of the people into more
independent, capable, and democratic action.” We can read in these lines the
foundation for Pete Seeger’s 70 years as an artist and political being. They
are a primary source for the life project he began to formulate and implement
when he was in his early 20s.

I use the word project instead of career because Seeger himself
resisted talking about his “career.” The word suggests that one is orienting
one’s life toward personal success, climbing a ladder of accomplishment and
fame. Seeger from the outset instead set out to channel his ambition toward
social and cultural change and, more than most politically minded performers,
to exorcise his strivings for personal recognition. The Almanacs in the early
’40s performed anonymously (and Seeger often used an assumed name in those
years), emulating various European artistic collectives of that time. A number
of politically committed young musicians were part of the Almanacs collective,
but Seeger was the most disciplined—focused on enabling the group to stay
together and achieve its shared purpose—which was to create new songs, rooted
in vernacular music with lyrics that might mobilize political action.

The Almanacs’ most lasting songs were those, like Woody Guthrie’s
“Union Maid,” that became anthems of the CIO organizing campaigns, or that
spurred anti-Nazi sentiment to support the war effort (“The Sinking of the
Reuben James”). Their performances were deliberately unpolished (Guthrie said
that they “rehearsed on stage”). In the entertainment world, there was
something new and attractively fresh about such public spontaneity, and about
the fusion of folk music and contemporary urban topics. The middle-class
Almanacs, especially Seeger, undoubtedly thought that their unprofessional
style (they wore blue jeans or overalls) would help them forge connections to
the working-class audiences they hoped to reach. That assumption has often been
mocked; workers were much more likely to want the polished performances of
Tommy Dorsey, Bing Crosby or the Andrew Sisters. But this criticism misses the
deeper aims of Seeger’s project. It was not popularity or acceptance that he
was trying to gain, but the making of space for a popular music that would be
created not for the commercial market but for sustaining the “democratic
action” envisioned by his father. 

The Almanacs’ collective didn’t last long, in part because several
members, including Seeger and Guthrie, entered military service. While in
uniform, Seeger continued his project—recording songs of the Spanish Civil War
and a number of other topical songs (accompanied by other emerging folksingers
such as Burl Ives, Josh White and Sonny Terry). He served in the Philippines as
an entertainer for wounded GIs, learning quite a bit about how music can work to
build collective morale. By war’s end, he was certain that making politically
relevant music was his life’s work.

After the war, Seeger’s energies turned in a surprising
direction—toward organizational entrepreneurship rather than merely performing.
He sparked the formation of a national network of left-wing music makers
(artists, songwriters, presenters, etc), People’s Artists (later called
People’s Songs), to serve as a booking agency, a publisher of song-filled
newsletters and books, and a support framework for advancing a popular music
relevant to political action. In the immediate postwar period, leftists hoped
that the dynamism of the ’30s labor movement would continue and that the social
democratic logic of the New Deal would be followed by the post-FDR government.
Seeger imagined that his people’s music network would be wedded to the unions
and leftward social movements, but a profound split in the union movement and
the left on the “communist” issue, in the context of the new Cold War, dashed
such optimism. The People’s Songs project provided a soundtrack for the
third-party Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, but the utter failure of that
candidacy and the increasing tempo of the Red Scare thoroughly marginalized the
network Seeger had worked so hard to build.

Still, Seeger’s penchant for organizational entrepreneurship was an
important dimension of his work that deserves more attention than any of these
biographies provide. He has continued to be an organizer since those postwar
years. Major successes: the song magazines Sing Out! and Broadside, which
published and publicized the politically conscious new songwriting of the ’60s;
the Newport Folk Festivals in the late ’50s and ’60s, which brought together a
new generation of troubadours with a vast array of traditional performers; a
book (first edition mimeographed), “How to play the 5 string banjo,” which
taught tens of thousands to play this largely forgotten instrument; the
formation of the Freedom Singers by SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee],which toured to raise awareness and money for the Southern struggle (with Toshi as their agent); the Clearwater Sloop, which involved the construction of a large sailing vessel that sparked the movement to clean up the Hudson River and became the center of an ongoing environmental education program. None of these efforts were single-handedly created by Seeger, of course. Indeed, his
biographers suggest that he was not exactly a detail person. Toshi Seeger,
Pete’s spouse of 67 years, early took on many of the managerial tasks his work
required (while managing their household of three children in their log cabin).
But he seems always to have had the ability to make the impossible seem
plausible and thereby inspire and goad others to help fulfill various of his
organizational visions. It’s a rare thing for an artist to be so preoccupied
with the mundane tasks of concrete institution building. But he saw, from the
start, that artistic efforts per se would not be enough to fulfill the overall
project; cultural change is inextricably bound up with social organization.

Seeger’s passion for building alternative institutions was rooted in
the cultural left’s longstanding ambivalence about the mainstream culture
industry. Those like Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax who in the ’30s wanted to
create a popular music rooted in American folk traditions thought that by so
doing they would foster alternatives to a mass culture dominated by commercial
media. Woody Guthrie frequently expressed disdain for commercial music, and his
legend, dramatized in the fictionalized bio film “Bound for Glory,” celebrated
his deliberate refusal to accept radio network contracts and nightclub dates.
The Almanacs and the postwar People’s Artists thought they could create a
noncorporate, social-movement-based apparatus to reach popular audiences, and
those hopes were in some ways fulfilled (by a plethora of record labels,
community radio stations and the like). On the other hand, the Almanacs, from
the beginning, were not averse to commercial opportunity; they and Guthrie did
land spots on network radio and in nightclubs. Yet each time such breakthroughs
happened, press uproars about their commie politics soon followed, and such
bookings declined.

Seeger’s most promising mainstream venture was the effort by the
Almanacs’ successor group, the Weavers, to work commercial venues. The quartet
was born out of the People’s Artists/Henry Wallace cultural left, but was
discovered and signed by Gordon Jenkins of Decca Records (one of the largest
record labels of the ’40s and ’50s). Jenkins produced a series of Weavers hits
(several of these among the biggest-selling singles of the era), and the group
was booked into many of the leading clubs and concert venues. The Weavers
themselves were uncomfortable with their handlers’ demands that they steer
clear of the causes and organizations they had been accustomed to working for,
but it wasn’t long before right-wing entrepreneurs of the emerging Red hunt
went after them, largely based on Seeger’s long association with “communist”
politics. Some two years after they had burst on the scene, the Weavers’
big-time commercial-recording and live-performance career was over.

Seeger may have been disappointed that the Weavers’ successful
popularization of folk music was so quickly aborted, but, with Toshi Seeger’s
managerial efforts, he quickly embarked on a perpetual tour of America’s
college campuses, summer camps and auditoriums, where he honed a solo
performance style and repertory that defined who he was as a musician, and in
the process brought into being a ragtag army of young fans. He was reviving for
urban audiences not only the musical roots of the country but the ancient role
of the troubadour, bringing the news through song.

Seeger’s commitment to his project was embodied in a particular
performance style. The key for him was not the display of his own talent and
skill, or to thrill or entice an audience. It was instead to bring songs to
people so that they could make them their own. Every Seeger performance was
centered on group singing. Simply getting a mass audience to join in requires
skill, but he aimed further—to teach new songs, and to foster singing in
harmony. He particularly relished teaching South African songs, in their
original language, that involved two or three competing melodic lines (most
famously “Wimoweh”).

Seeger has not to my knowledge laid out a full-fledged theory to
explain his emphasis on mass singing. Such a theory, however, is implicit in
his performances: There is an empowering effect in the very sound of a singing
assembly; there is a persuasive effect that can come when audience members sing
lyrics expressing a political perspective or commitment; there is a sense of
mutual validation when people in a crowd sing together in an attitude of
resistance. And once you sing a song there is a good chance that you will be
able to reproduce it by and for yourself. By working as a song leader and
teacher, Pete Seeger was achieving his father’s wish for a mode of musical
performance that had an ability to “aid in the welding of the people into more
independent, capable, and democratic action.”

The blacklisting of Pete Seeger by network TV lasted at least 15 years.
Still, his cultural impact steadily increased during that time. The Weavers
reunited in a historic Carnegie Hall Christmas season concert in 1955 and
thereby defied the blacklist; the recording of this event on the upstart
Vanguard label hit the charts, and the group continued to tour and record for
several more years (although Seeger separated from it). Seeger drew ever larger
concert crowds, including many of the young who heard him first at summer camps
or on college campuses. He made, in that period, dozens of albums for Folkways.

Meanwhile, a pop-centered folk song revival became commercially huge.
Weavers imitators, led by the Kingston Trio and later Peter, Paul and Mary,
sold millions of records. Seeger and the Weavers had shown that folk music
could sell, but the resulting commodification inevitably cheapened, denatured
and contradicted Seeger’s project. His support of the Newport Folk Festivals
helped provide alternative, more authentic access to rooted music and
performers. By the early ’60s, a musical rebellion against pop folk was in the
works as a band of young troubadours, consciously following in Woody and Pete’s
footsteps, started singing. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Odetta and many
others performed in newly started folk clubs, recorded on upstart labels,
appeared at civil rights and ban-the-bomb rallies, and dominated the college
tours. Network TV shows featured many of these troubadours alongside the slick
bands—but because Seeger was deliberately excluded from these shows, many of
the young troubadours boycotted them (even though he personally encouraged some
of them to seize the opportunity to get exposure).

The folk music revival was a political as well as cultural phenomenon.
The festivals, concerts and clubs where folk fans congregated were among the
prime social spaces for shaping awareness and engagement with the Southern
civil rights movement and the new left. The early ’60s student activists saw
Dylan, Ochs, Baez et al. as “ours” (much as Red diaper babies in the early ’50s
claimed Seeger).

Pete Seeger’s belief in the power of song derived in large part from history—the
fact that a number of great social movements were fueled by music. There is a
tradition of labor song in America, dating from the 19th century, and a number
of songs from that tradition continue to this day to help define the identities
of labor organizers and raise spirits on the picket line. The Almanacs and
People’s Songs were experiments designed to make the U.S. labor movement of the
’30s and ’40s a singing movement—but the results were mixed. Seeger’s dream of
a singing mass movement was much more fully realized in the civil rights
struggle of the ’60s.

Music of course has been a central feature of African-American culture
from its very origins. In the early ’60s, as marchers gathered in churches to
prepare to challenge segregation with their very bodies, traditional songs and
song styles used in these churches were turned into hymns of solidarity and
shared risk-taking (with lyrics adapted for the occasion). Pete Seeger
contributed to the development of this freedom singing; it was he who had first
made “We Shall Overcome” known to civil rights activists in the 1950s, and his
concerts in the early ’60s taught the new freedom songs to mass audiences in
the North. Seeger encouraged Bernice Reagon to found the Freedom Singers
quartet, modeled on the Almanacs, and he and Toshi managed the group’s touring
across the country to raise support for SNCC. The music of the Southern
movement was an important factor in forging a moral identification with it
among Northern students—an identification that led to a flood of volunteers to
Southern organizing campaigns and manifold support efforts. In that period,
Seeger’s project was finding its fulfillment in his work on stage and as an
organizer. You can get a feel for that moment by listening to a recording of
his June 8, 1963, concert in Carnegie Hall, available on the Columbia label
under the title “We Shall Overcome.” My wife and I were there, and remember it
vividly as an experience in which those present were transformed from an
audience into a community of active participants in history.

A few weeks after that concert, Seeger and his family embarked on a
world tour, taking nearly a year of travel through Asia, Africa and Eastern and
Western Europe. In some of those places, he was able to reach the mass audience
denied him in the United States: singing on radio in India to an audience
nearly the size of the American population, according to Dunaway; teaching “We
Shall Overcome” to people across the planet (which helps account for the fact
that it soon became the universal freedom anthem).

If Seeger is often portrayed as a victim of blacklist and censorship,
it is clear that his long marginalization from the mainstream was necessary for
the fulfillment of his project. When he refused to discuss his political
allegiances before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 (basing
his noncooperation on his First Amendment rights rather than on the Fifth
Amendment right not to incriminate oneself), Seeger’s stance took courage: It
led the committee to charge him with 10 counts of contempt of Congress, each
punishable by a year in jail. Trial and appeal of these charges took some seven
years, and Seeger’s blacklisting was reinforced by the legal cloud he was under
during that period. In the end, a federal court of appeal overturned his
conviction. It was in many ways a costly time for the Seegers, yet as a result
he came, says Wilkinson, to “typify the principles of all the brave people he
sang about.” 

In our time, in a number of countries, troubadours have become icons of
resistance. Joe Hill, the Wobbly bard whose funeral after his execution for a
murder conviction was attended by thousands, was one of the sources for the
Almanacs. Woody Guthrie’s legendary stature in American culture derives in part
from Seeger’s efforts to make him known. And then, in the ’60s and ’70s, iconic
troubadours were born all over the place: Bob Marley in Jamaica, Victor Jara in
Chile, Vladimir Vysotsky in the Soviet Union, Wolf Biermann in East Germany,
Cui Jian in China, Miriam Makeba in South Africa. Some of these, like Jara,
explicitly used Seeger and Guthrie as models. All were able to achieve stature
and profound popular affection despite, and because of, persecution,
censorship, martyrdom.

The honors showered on Seeger in recent years include the Medal of
Freedom and the Kennedy Center Award. A cynic might say that in America,
political troublemakers are marginalized and suppressed, but when they are
safely old or dead they are canonized. That’s how we periodically persuade
ourselves that we really are a free country. But Seeger’s actual story as told
in these books is more complex and more instructive. Wilkinson’s essay stresses
Seeger as the epitome of America’s highest values: Beneath his one-time
Communist Party affiliations, he was always more like Thoreau—a thoroughly
principled individualist, determined to show that each of us could make his or
her own life. Winkler emphasizes Seeger’s historical importance in relation to
all of the major social movements of his time (the book includes a handy CD
compilation of Seeger performances). Dunaway’s updated biography is far more
detailed than the others, based on extensive interviews with Seeger and
associates and extensive use of his papers. Dunaway gives us a close-up understanding
of Seeger’s life choices in their political context. The book details the
number of occasions when he entertained serious doubts about his project or his
own capacities, doubts familiar to any political activist—the rising
frustration when periods of mass action ebb, the sense of obsolescence that
comes from personal aging and historical rupture.

We imagine Pete Seeger, at 90, feeling enormous personal fulfillment.
How rewarding to get to sing Woody Guthrie’s radical verses to “This Land Is Your
Land” at the inauguration concert for our first black president, side by side
with one of the biggest stars of popular music! But we can also hear him
saying: “Yes, but will the human race survive the 21st century? There’s a 50/50
chance. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Tags: Seeger videos, pete seeger

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