Pete Seeger, the American troubadour and balladeer of the common man, will be 90 years young this weekend. Seeger is the grand old man of American folk music. Though he has lived a long, full life, he possesses a kind of ageless magic that enables his to appeal to audiences aged from three to 93. And much of American traditional and popular music has been profoundly influenced by his songs and their message of solidarity with the poor and oppressed.
Seeger is America's Homer. He travelled from town to town through the heartland for decades telling the nation's story. At times he sang of the America that was. At times he dreamed what America could be. He was never happy with the status quo and always envisioned a country that realised the American dream of equality and justice for rich and poor alike.
The list of Seeger's songs is the envy of any songwriter who ever put pen to paper: We Shall Overcome, Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season), Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Wimoweh, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Abiyoyo, Bells of Rhymney, Bring 'Em Home, Guantanamera and Oh Had I a Golden Thread. You would have to go all the way back in American popular music, to Stephen Foster, to find his like.
Even more importantly, the songwriter served an instrumental role in popularising the music of others, especially Woody Guthrie, Malvina Reynolds and Leadbelly. Would This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer, Goodnight Irene, Union Maid, Barbara Allen, Well May the World Go, The Water is Wide, Little Boxes, God Bless the Grass, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and a score of others (many of them sung with his fellow Weavers) be half as well known had it not been for the power of Seeger's voice getting his audiences up and singing?
As Seeger turns 90, we Americans can honestly say that we are far the better country for his having shared these years with us. There is hardly a living American who has not hummed one of his tunes. He was at the forefront of seemingly every major fight for civil rights and peace going back well over half a century.
He cheered the unemployed during the Depression, roused a nation to the fight against fascism during the second world war, warned of the evils of McCarthyism (along with his personal suffering through the blacklist), stirred us to embrace the civil rights movement, protested the Vietnam war and inspired the environmental movement in the 1970s through his work for the sloop Clearwater. Most of these movements would have been far less ambitious without the energy and musical force Seeger brought to them.
My own family bears witness to his multi-generational impact. My family's roots go back to the 1920s in the Hudson River Valley, which Seeger also called home for most of his life. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, my father took me to my first Pete Seeger concert at a local high school auditorium. His songs opened a world to me outside my little suburban enclave. I would not have known about the struggles of African-Americans or the battles of workers for the right to organise or the evils of war were it not for him.
With his advancing age, new generations hear and are charmed by him. In my family, we're now onto a third generation which is discovering the wonder that is Pete. We've played his children's songs for our kids since they were babies. But it wasn't until this year, when their uncle bought them a historic recording of a 1963 Town Hall children's concert (another musical format he pioneered), that they truly "got" what Seeger was about.
Now, it seems every time we get into the car I hear three young voices clamouring in the back seat for Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal and Shenandoah. This gives me so much pleasure considering the popular musical dreck for which they might be clamouring.
In the summer of 1968, I shared a week on Seeger's sloop Clearwater – which spearheaded the first effort to restore an American river, the Hudson – with Mark Klempner. We went our separate ways after that remarkable experience, and Mark became a Los Angeles session musician and later a chronicler of Holocaust Righteous Gentiles in his book, The Heart Has Reasons. We were brought together once again, and as so many people are, by Pete and something I wrote about him in my blog.
Mark provides this vivid memory of his first personal encounter with Pete on the sloop:
Pete had been involved with [Clearwater] from the beginning and was known to show up [at the moorage] on occasion. That's what I was hoping for when we docked one day at a little town not far from where Seeger lives. Sure enough, I climbed up the narrow stairs from below deck and there he was, banjo in hand.
We took a group of townspeople out for a sail, and Pete picked up his banjo and began singing Hudson River songs. I grabbed a guitar and just like that, we were playing together. After a while he took a break, and I asked him if I could try his banjo. The request and its fulfilment took only a moment: he handed me the instrument, his long, straight arm extending at the elbow.
I realise now that this was classic Pete Seeger: he would rather have trusted an irreplaceable possession to an irrepressible teenager than to keep it out of reach, safe from any mishaps as well as … I scampered away like a squirrel with a nut. I knew where I wanted to go: up to the crow's nest. Pete was immediately engaged in conversation. I don't know if he noticed me scaling the rope ladder with his banjo strapped around my back!
So there I was, high in the basket of the crow's nest with the late afternoon sun shining golden on the water. I heard the creak of the wooden mast and felt the gentle rock of the ship as I watched the Catskill Mountains off in the distance.
Examining the banjo, I saw the words that stretched all around the sounding board in a circle: THIS INSTRUMENT SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER. Crisp notes rang out over the water as I plucked the responsive strings, my outer palm resting on the parchment sounding board, my inner elbow along the tarnished silver rim.
Perhaps the apotheosis of Seeger's career was sharing a stage with Bruce Springsteen in front of old Abe Lincoln's monumental statue during the Obama inauguration concert and singing the radical, unexpurgated verses of Woody's This Land is Your Land:
One bright sunny morning, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I saw my people,
As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if,
This land was made for you and me.
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,
Was a great big sign that said, "Private Property",
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking my freedom highway,
Nobody living can make me turn back,
This land was made for you and me.
His birthday will be celebrated suitably with a gala concert at Madison Square Garden headlined by Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vetter, Billy Bragg, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Steve Earle and a score of others.
Happy birthday, Pete. You've earned it.