Pete Seeger
by Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., June 5, 2001) - From Pete Seeger's vantage point, folk music will always persist as long as there are people writing songs for the love of it and not just for the money.

"There are literally thousands of people making up songs now," said Seeger, 82, in a recent phone interview from his Hudson Valley home. "Some are purely local. They know others might not sing them, but they don't write them because they want to publish them and get rich."

While Seeger himself never set out to be a pop songwriter, he has amassed an impressive catalog of copyrighted material, songs that seem to have always been around but in fact were written or adapted by Seeger.

Seeger performs with his grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, the Jay Ungar and Molly Mason Family Band, and the Mammals at the Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barrington on Tuesday, June 12, at 7:30, in a concert presented by Club Helsinki. For tickets and information call 528-3394.

Songs like "We Shall Overcome," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "If I Had a Hammer" didn't just spring up out of the ozone. They were written or co-written by Pete Seeger. And through his recordings and performances, songs like Malvina Reynolds's "Little Boxes" and Jose Marti's "Guantanamera" were given new leases on life.

Nearly entire careers were built on Seeger songs. Roger McGuinn first arranged Seeger's "Bells of Rhymney" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" for Judy Collins, before plugging in and turning them into rock hits with his group The Byrds. Peter, Paul and Mary's rise to fame was powered by their hit versions of "If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." All these artists and dozens of others paid tribute to Seeger's influence as a performer, songwriter and recording artist on a two-CD set, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger," released in 1998 by Appleseed Recordings. The set included versions of Seeger songs by folk royalty such as Odetta, the Weavers, Holly Near, Richie Havens and Tom Paxton alongside such contemporary performers as Bruce Springsteen, Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg and Jackson Browne, a testimony to Seeger's deep, broad and enduring influence.

But don't expect Seeger to tell you what he thought of the tribute album. As it turns out, he doesn't listen to recordings of his own songs - or anyone's songs, for that matter.

"All my life I've never listened to records," he said. "I had to hear them occasionally, because in school and college other people were listening to them. And my siblings liked to listen to popular music. But the only time I ever listened to records was as part of a job at the Library of Congress listening to country, blues and gospel records. It was interesting, but I don't listen to them for pleasure."

A few years ago, hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean had a huge hit with "Guantanamera." Certainly Seeger heard that version, which was all over the TV and radio, in stores and blasting out of people's cars? "I never heard it," said Seeger.

The son of a musicologist and a violin teacher, Seeger began playing banjo, ukulele and guitar in his teens. He spent two unhappy years at Harvard University, where his plan was to become a journalist, before he left and headed for New York in 1938. He landed a job with the Archives of American Folk Music, where he worked for famed folklorist Alan Lomax.

It was in that capacity that he first met Woody Guthrie in 1940. Guthrie and Seeger soon formed the politically-oriented Almanac Singers, a loose affiliation of folksingers including Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis Cunningham, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, among others. The group recorded labor songs and pacifist tunes. Along the way, Seeger also helped found organizations like People's Songs and People's Artists and Sing Out! Magazine, the bible of the folk revival, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and for which Seeger still writes.

In the late 1940s, Seeger formed the Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. Among the tunes the group made famous were "On Top of Old Smokey," Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" and the South African folk song, "Wimoweh," which was later made into a pop hit as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," much to Seeger's chagrin.

In the 1950s, Seeger and the Weavers ran afoul of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities, and they were blacklisted. Seeger was hauled in front of the committee in 1955, where his refusal to answer questions or invoke the Fifth Amendment eventually led to a contempt of Congress conviction and a 10-year prison sentence, which was thrown out in 1962 on a technicality.

During this period, Seeger continued to perform under the radar such as it were, for college and community groups that were able to evade the restrictions placed on the establishment entertainment venues.

Seeger admits that it was a scary time. "I guess one is always aware that there is dangers, and there were people convinced that McCarthy was going to be the next dictator of this country," said Seeger. "But I felt that America was not Germany, and I'm quite proud that I was right about that."

In the early 1960s, there was a second folk revival in which Seeger played a key role. He was on the front lines of the civil rights movement, for which his version of "We Shall Overcome" became the unofficial anthem. He was signed by Columbia Records at the time, and he became a leading figure at the annual Newport Folk Festival as a performer and a promoter of new talent.

One of those new talents was Bob Dylan, and a story has often been told about how Seeger vehemently objected when Dylan took the stage at Newport with an electric blues-rock band in 1965. As legend has it, Seeger tried to get the power to the stage shut off, even at one point taking an axe to the power lines.

Seeger was happy to correct the record once and for all. "No one ever believes me about this," he said. "I was absolutely furious because the sound was so bad. It was so distorted you couldn't understand the words. "I wanted to hear the words, so I ran over to the sound man and yelled at him to fix it so you can hear the words. He insisted that this is the way they wanted it. So I shouted to him, 'If I had an axe, I'd cut the cable." Thus is solved the mystery of how Seeger survived what would have been certain electrocution at Newport.

On a perhaps more serious note, Seeger isn't thrilled by what he hears at the Newport Folk Festival today.

"I think our mistake then was to underestimate the power of the establishment to distort words," he said. "Folk music got put in a neat little box and thrown away.

"My father was more sensible. He said to think of the folk process as something that has gone on through the ages. The folk process occurs in cooking, with cooks rearranging recipes. And lawyers rearrange old laws to fit new citizens. If you look at it this way, then the true importance of folk music is to let ordinary folks change things."

It's been a long time since the McCarthy era. Joseph McCarthy is long gone, and Pete Seeger is still here. Seeger was awarded the nation's highest artistic honors at the Kennedy Center in December 1994. In January 1996 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the spring of 1996 he was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal, given annually to a Harvard graduate who has made an important contribution to the arts. In 1997 he won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album.

But Seeger seems inured to all the recognition and acclaim. He tried his best to steer the conversation to his fellow performers Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, hosts of WAMC's "Dancing on the Air" program.

"Jay Ungar is a great composer, and there are eight other wonderful musicians on the program," said Seeger, who since 1969 has spent the lion's share of his energy on the campaign to clean up the Hudson River, with much of his activity centered on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on June 8, 2001. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2001. All rights reserved.]