Holiday

July 1965

THE BALLAD OF PETE SEEGER

By Peter Lyon

"My life flows on in endless song. . . ." So begins the old hymn, and the line can stand as an epigraph to any account of Peter Seeger and his extraordinary career as a folk singer. The rest of the stanza might be his personal statement:

"Above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the real, though far off hymn,
That hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that rock I’m clinging.
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can 1 keep from singing?"

Certainly Peter Seeger cannot keep from singing. For twenty-five years, he has been singing for his supper and singing, as well, for his steadfast and often heretical beliefs. He has sung all over the U.S.A. and all around the world, in churches and saloons, in union halls and nightclubs, at summer camps and on college campuses, over radio and television; wherever two or three are ready to hear him, or twenty or thirty million.

Seeger is at his best when he sings of freedom. "Oh, Freedom!" He sings at the greatest possible pitch of intensity and when, full of a fierce joy, he calls out the word, his audience, wherever in the world, of whatever age or condition of servitude, responds in kind: "Freedom!" They sing it back to him in exultation; they are in tune with him, for the moment all the world is in tune, and the brotherhood of man seems more than a dream.

His way with an audience is legendary. In June, 1963, at the Public Garden in Boston, he attracted a crowd of nearly 30,000 to the Arts Festival, and officials, alarmed by the crush of the huge throng - many of whom, denied seats, were climbing trees and threatening to overturn fences - began apprehensively to consider whether they should summon a riot squad. But Seeger bounced up on the bare stage, hushed the crowd, and soon had them singing rounds, docile and happy and exalted. At the Royal Festival Hall in London, a year later, he needed only to lift his chin an inch or so and, with no other encouragement, a packed house picked up the refrain of his song.

Along his cheerful and indomitable way Seeger has taught two generations of young Americans to sing and to make their own music. The result has been a renascence of folk music in the course of which the number of amateur guitarists has shot up from 2,000,000 to 7,000,000 in a decade. And of the professional minstrels who have come along to entertain us, there is scarcely one who does not acknowledge his debt to Seeger. "Most of us," Joan Baez has said, "owe our careers to Pete." And Bob Dylan has spoken of "the saintliness of Pete Seeger."

Curiously, this celebrity as a kind of elder statesman of American folk music has obscured and even diminished Seeger’s stature. He is more than a singer, more than a source of inspiration for other singers. He is a virtuoso instrumentalist, a folklorist, a film maker, an archivist, a teacher, a promoter, a generous patron of folk singers from abroad, an anthologizer of folk songs and a gifted composer.

Indeed, if he had done nothing else in his forty-six years, his part in the popularization of just one song would assure him a modest immortality. The song is called We Shall Overcome, and characteristically, he and the three others who helped shape it have assigned their considerable royalties from its performances to the civil-rights movement.

In short, Peter Seeger is a remarkably influential figure in the world of American music. Nevertheless, he is barred from American commercial television (although he is most welcome on Canadian and British TV and on American educational TV). Nevertheless, he came as close as a wink to being jailed for his political convictions. Nevertheless, his concerts are still occasionally picketed by right-wing robots. His case is not less exasperating for having ample precedent.

A few weeks ago, Seeger invited me to accompany him during one of his weekly business excursions to New York City. The day began at P.S. 84, an elementary school, where he was to give an informal concert. In the auditorium when I got there at ten in the morning, a few minutes before his arrival, 500 small children - the the third, fourth, and fifth grades of the school - were squabbling and squirming in their seats, building up to a pint-sized bedlam. A tough audience, I reflected, and sullen, too, for they had just been severely scolded by the assistant principal. A music teacher attempted, with indifferent success, to get them to sing "America, the Beautiful."

The Seeger walked down the aisle. He was wearing a fuzzy sweater, a shirt of firehouse red, rough worsted trousers and heavy, thick-soled shoes, and he was carrying a five-string banjo and a twelve-string guitar. While the assistant principal was introducing him, he stood stiff and awkward and self-conscious, looking like a gaudy scarecrow. But when he unlimbered his banjo and gave the children a warm, inclusive smile, something magical happened in the room. He sang, "Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou . . ."

At the second line, fifty voices were singing with his. At the third, a hundred had joined in, and scandalized teachers were shushing all over the hall. To no avail: Seeger and the children understood each other perfectly. Within seconds, all five hundred children were happily singing with him. If they had ever cared, the children had forgotten that some of them are colored pink, some brown, some black, forgotten that some are poor and some well-to-do, forgotten that some speak Spanish more naturally than English.

Seeger and the children sang together for more than an hour, a time of pure enchantment. This routine miracle achieved, Seeger walked back up the aisle, submitted to an interview by three small, shrewd reporters for the school newspaper, signed several autographs, rescued his instruments from a group of eager experimenters and made his way to the street.

"Can I," he asked his wife, Toshi, "have some breakfast now?" A faulty clock, it seemed, had condemned him to perform a concert without so much as a cup of coffee to sustain him.

We had breakfast together in a midtown restaurant. At close range, what you notice first about Seeger is his shock of light auburn hair, his bright blue eyes and the glow of his physical vigor. If you look at his shoulders, arms and hands, you might imagine that he was a laborer or a mechanic, used to hard work; but Sherlock Holmes, perceiving how the fingernails of Seeger’s left hand are cut short while those of his right are shaped sharp, tough and long, would at once make the correct deduction.

When I asked him about his first public appearance, he sat up straight and wriggled in his chair. "Oh, my," he said, "that was quite a night. It was at a folk-song evening on the stage of a Broadway theater just a few blocks from here, right after the regular audience had gone. It was a midnight benefit to raise money for the California migratory workers, in the fall of 1939, and when I think who was there I - "

"It was in March, 1940," said his wife. Toshi has a positive manner and a daunting grasp of detail. Pete stared at her. "Are you sure?" She nodded. "Just the other day," she said, "I ran across a program of that benefit - one of those throwaways that we’ve never thrown away."

Pete shook his head in wonder. "Anyway," he said, "there was Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson and Burl Ives and Josh White and Alan and Bess Lomax and the Golden Gate Quartet." The names are like a rolling of drums and a skirling of pipes to those who admire American folk music.

"I was a real bust," Pete said. "The lights bothered me. and so did all those people sitting out front. My fingers froze up on me. But Lord, Lord! The others! Josh sang "John Henry," and Burl sang "Jimmy Crack Corn," a song Alan Lomax had taught him, and Leadbelly sang "De Gray Goose," dancing and capering all over the stage and aiming his twelve-string guitar at the sky like a shotgun, and Woody just ambled out, kind of offhand and casual, the way he always was, and he really got to that audience with his Dust Bowl ballads.

"That was the night I first met Woody," Pete went on. "A little short fellow with a Western hat and boots, in blue jeans, and needing a shave, spinning out stories and singing songs that he’d made up. Well, I just naturally wanted to learn more about him. We got to know each other, and I do believe he was a big piece of my education."

Up to that point, Pete’s education had been all that a cultivated family could provide. His father, Charles Seeger, is a musicologist and educator now on the faculty of U.C.L.A.; his mother once taught violin at the Juilliard School of Music; Alan Seeger, the poet who wrote I Have a Rendezvous With Death, was his uncle; and back over eight or ten generations in this country his forebears were educators, physicians, lawyers and clergymen. Pete attended a New England preparatory school, spent two years at Harvard, studied painting for a year, and for a few months worked with Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, cataloguing and editing and selecting for publication by record companies the best of the folk music that has been recorded by scholars.

This kind of education leaves gaps, and Guthrie was the man to fill them.

"He said to me, ‘Pete, you ought to see what a big country America is.' I said, 'How do you do it, if you don’t have any money to travel?' 'Well,' said Woody, 'you can use the rule of thumb. Or, if you can’t get a hitch, you can jump a freight train.' Woody took me under his wing. We went out as far as the panhandle of Texas together, and then I kept going by myself." Pete stirred his tea, thinking. "I learned so many things from Woody that I can hardly count them," he said. "The way he could identify with the ordinary man and woman, speak their language without using the fancy words; his fearlessness, his readiness to dive into any situation no matter what it was, and just try it out."

Pete has his own knack for making friends with all kinds of people, his own good manners.

"That summer," he continued, "I hitched my way as far north as the copper mines of Butte and as far south as the steel mills of Birmingham, and along the way I made a wonderful discovery. I learned that as long as I could play the banjo I would never starve."

Pete drank the last of his tea, and we headed for the office of his concert manager, Harold Leventhal. On our way we talked about the Almanacs, a group of folk singers Pete helped to assemble early in 1941, and the Weavers, a group he helped to form in 1949.

The Almanacs enjoyed a modest vogue, singing on network radio and recording what are now called topical songs - that is, political comments, sometimes funny, sometimes angry, set either to well-known folk tunes or to melodies akin to folk tunes. Someone even had the demented notion of booking them into the Rainbow Room, the nobby nightclub atop a skyscraper in Rockefeller Center. A less congenial ambiance could scarcely have been imagined. Woody Guthrie, who had joined the group, sang: "Well this Rainbow Room’s a funny place ta play; It’s a long ways from here to th’ U.S.A.," and before long the Almanacs were back in the U.S.A., housed in the loft of an old Greenwich Village building where, until wartime duties scattered them, they conducted weekly entertainments called Hootenannies for an enthusiastic and steadily growing audience.

Vocally, the Weavers were an unusual quartet - three baritones and an alto - but America liked their sound. Their recording of "Goodnight, Irene," one of Leadbelly’s songs, sold more than 1,000,000 copies. By 1950, for the first time, folk music had worked its way high up the magic list of Variety’s Top Forty. In one way the success came just a little late. "Six months earlier," Pete said wryly, "and Leadbelly would have been around to enjoy it." The king of the twelve-string guitar died in December, 1949.

Toshi and Pete ushered me into Leventhal’s office, a complex warren of small cubicles, and on to a corner room. Pete began to look over some letters that were awaiting his signature. By signing them, he would quit his claim to royalties on a number of songs that would then be left to sink or swim in the public domain.

"Folk music is a process," he said, the letters in his hand. "The old is continually being made new. A note is sharped or flatted, or slurred. or held. A word is changed, or maybe a chorus jumps out of one line of a verse. All of a sudden, a centuries-old ballad is a satire on the news of the week. There’s a real combination of joy and pain. I think of Bessie Smith singing those deep, dark blues, or of that hard tone that Woody used to sing in. Yes, they say, we’ve been through some tough times, but you can’t keep us down, and when we sing it’s a celebration of the hard times. There’s laughter, but it’s a fierce laughter. You take the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, down in Alabama. He makes you laugh, but his joke has, a bite to it. It’s not a frivolous giggle. It’s like the jokes soldiers make when they’re marching to the front."

He sat down at a desk and picked up a pen. "Two things play hob with the folk process," he said. "The copyright and the cult of originality. Some people will change a song, not to improve it but just to get a copyright on it." He signed the letters, one after another. "Originality, or maybe I should say novelty, has come to be so prized that people no longer care whether a thing is any good or not, so long as it's new. We're too restless, always looking for something new, sick of the same old sunrise, the same old kiss, the same old song. We need to be fashionable, up-to-date. We need to be In."

Toshi pointed significantly at her wrist watch.

"Oh, Lord," Pete said. "I’ll be late." He ducked his head apologetically, picked up his coat and was gone.

"He’s late for his Russian lesson," Toshi explained. "Last year, when we were in the Soviet Union, Pete didn’t like not being able to talk to his audience. He had to use printed signs. We’re going again, this time to Siberia, and Pete wants to be able to get them to sing with him - you know - with just a word or two."

Harold Leventhal, a short, chunky man in his forties, bustled in and sat down at the desk. He wore an air of preoccupation and carried an unlighted cigar. "A week ago," he said without preamble, "Pete was absolutely furious with me. He’d given a concert up in Rochester, and the people up there, instead of mailing me the check, they gave it to him. And he was furious - because he thought it was for too much money. That’s Pete Seeger.

"Pete has rules for his concerts: no guarantees, no deposits, no exorbitant fees, no high-priced seats. And, of course, no segregation of any kind. In ten years, never once has he asked me what his fee would be for a concert. Usually, of course, his fee is a big zero. Pete gives the greatest percentage of benefits of any single artist in the U.S.A. Like this morning, up at P.S. 84. Or the tour he did through the South on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - singing in Negro colleges and churches for no fee, just his expenses, and a donation to every place he went."

I looked at Toshi. Leventhal manages her husband’s business, but so does she. "We get along," she said. "I can remember, fifteen years ago, when we were building our house, how a bag of cement cost a dollar and twenty-five cents, and we had to buy them one bag at a time. It’s better that way. It gives you a sense of what things are worth. And it’s easier now. We don’t worry. Instead of a new car, we buy a thirty-nine-hundred-dollar Moviola, to help us make our own films."

"And," said Leventhal, "instead of building a swimming pool, Pete invites the McPeak Family, a group of Irish folk singers, to come over here for a tour of the country, as his guests. He prefers to spend his money this way. This is what he wants to do. But don’t worry about Pete," he said. "His concerts, his songbooks, his royalties as a composer, they add up. Did you hear
that Marlene Dietrich’s record of Pete’s song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," won a prize in Europe?

I had heard, from friends in the audience, that Miss Dietrich had drawn tears from many in the audience when she sang the song.

"Well," said Leventhal, mollified. "Pete has made nearly sixty albums, most for Folkways, but the last few for Columbia." He handed me a paperbound book entitled How to Play the Five-String Banjo, by Seeger.

"If you want to know about the growth of folk music in this country," Leventhal said, "that little book will tell you. It was first published in 1948, and it sold one hundred copies in three years. Then it got going. In 1962 it sold ten thousand, in 1963 it sold twenty thousand, and last year it sold fifty thousand copies. That little book has taught people everywhere how to make their own music. Did Pete tell you about the nuns out in Chicago? They bought this book, learned how to play the banjo, and now every week they hold what they call hootenunnies.”

"Not hootenunnies," said Toshi; "they’re called nunnenannies." Leventhal shrugged. I remarked that Seeger’s manual was not copyrighted.

"Of course not," Leventhal said. "Anybody may reprint. As Pete says, banjo-picking is a tradition. Nobody should own it."

Pete Seeger chose up sides long ago. He sings for the workingman, the poor people of the earth, the deprived and the dispossessed. He sings against war and against bigotry. His name was included in Red Channels, the bible of the blacklisters, and in due course the House Un-American Activities Committee, sniffing around for evidence of subversion in the entertainment business, slapped him with a subpoena. I asked Leventhal about these matters.

"Here," he said, handing me a fat book, "is the complete record of Pete’s testimony before the committee, his trial, his appeal and his final acquittal. And," he said, pulling open a drawer of a file cabinet, "here is all the material on the television blacklisting. Take your time."

Left alone, I read, with some distaste, the official account of Seeger’s difficulties with the Federal authorities. The chairman of the H.U.A.C. asked him about his political associations. "These questions are improper," Seeger replied. "I am not going to answer any questions as to my associations, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs . . . or any of these private matters. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this."

He did not seek the constitutional protection of the Fifth Amendment nor even, except by inference, the protection of the First. He simply characterized a few committee questions as "improper" and "immoral" and declined to answer them.

Seeger was cited for contempt of Congress, indicted, tried and, in 1961, convicted in a Federal District Court in New York City. Judge Thomas F. Murphy asked him if there was anything he would like to say before sentence was passed on him. Seeger recalled that, while a certain song ("Wasn't That A Time") had been frequently mentioned during the committee hearings, he had not been allowed to sing it. He went on:

SEEGER: The song is apropos to this trial and I wondered if I might have your permission to sing it here, before I close.

JUDGE MURPHY: You may not.

SEEGER: Well, perhaps you will hear it some other time. A good song can only do good, and I am proud of the songs I have sung.

Judge Murphy sentenced him to a year in prison, refused to grant him bail pending his appeal, and ordered that he be jailed at once. An hour later, the U.S. Court of Appeals set him free on bail; less than a year later, the same court unanimously reversed the conviction and dismissed the indictment.

From the subpoena to acquittal, in 1962, measured seven years, but any who thought that acquittal would be sufficient were reckoning without the pilgarlics of television.

Folk music having become, by 1963, a force to be reckoned with by those who deal in commercial entertainment, a television program was confected, dubbed Hootenanny and sold to the American Broadcasting Company. Various folk singers were invited to appear. When it became apparent that Pete Seeger would not be invited, most of the best known of these announced that they wanted no part of the show. Among them were Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and the Kingston Trio. At that time, the producer of the program, Richard Lewine, denied that Seeger had been blacklisted. It seemed that Seeger simply wasn’t qualified as a performer. "We need people who can hold an audience," he said.

I thanked Leventhal for having made his files available to me, and went for a walk to get a breath of fresh air.

That evening, I met Pete at actor-singer Theodore Bikel’s Manhattan apartment, at a meeting of the board of directors of the Newport Folk Foundation, of which Pete is a founding member.

The foundation administers the affairs of the annual Newport Folk Festival, which this July will produce the third in its series of folk-music celebrations. Each summer, the festival brings to one stage all the richness and variety of American folk music - ethnic, bluegrass, country and Western, rhythm and blues, gospel, sacred harp, commercial, sophisticated, whatever - and as much from abroad, as well, as the budget can afford. Artistically, the first two festivals were smash successes. Financially, they were even more gratifying: the net profit for two years approximated $180,000, and a pleasant chore confronting the directors is how best to invest this delectable sum of money on behalf of American folk song. (They make recording equipment available to ethnologists, assist in the publication of folk songs, underwrite festivals of folk music in Georgia, South Carolina, California and elsewhere, and sponsor concerts in Philadelphia, New York and Boston during the winter months.)

Before their meeting began, I spoke with George Wein, the young man who has been producing jazz and folk festivals at Newport for several years, and with his wife Joyce, who acts as a secretary to the board of directors. I was curious to know how the folk festivals had got started.

"Our plan was worked out in Seeger’s house, in 1962," Wein said. "There were a lot of things wrong with earlier festivals, back in 1959 and 1960, and I had some ideas about how to fix them. So I called Pete."

"Why Pete?" I asked.

"He knows all the folk singers," Wein said, "and they all respect him."

"Pete gives the whole folk field a conscience and an attitude and a dignity," said Joyce Wein, "and all the youngsters follow his lead. There are things they wouldn’t think of doing, because of Pete. And there are things they naturally do, because of Pete."

"We agreed that the singers themselves would run the festival," said Wein, "and that everybody would work for the union minimum, rather than for their usual fee. My God, the way it has worked out! You get fifteen thousand people singing together, the way they did last summer - young and old, black and white - the unity involved, it’s just beautiful. Beautiful? The word was invented to describe that night last summer."

After the meeting I talked with Alan Lomax, another member of the Folk Foundation board. "Pete plans," said Lomax. "He’s predictive. He guesses ahead in five-and ten-year chunks. He has an uncanny sense of what kind of songs America will be singing."

Lomax has been a professional folklorist all his adult life; few people know the field of folk music better.

"Go back to that night twenty-five years ago," Lomax said, "when Pete first met Woody Guthrie. You can date the renascence of American folk song from that night. Pete knew it was his kind of music, and he began working to make it everybody’s kind of music. What he cares about is getting everybody to sing. He believes in it with an unswerving fervor and nothing is going to divert him - not the threats of politicians nor the temptations of big money. It’s a pure, genuine fervor, the kind that saves the souls.

"I’d like to know what Pete thinks right now, what he’s planning for, what he believes we’ll be singing five years from now."

When I told Pete what Lomax had said, he shook his head and laughed. "I’ve been wrong so often," he said. "What I hope will happen is that more and more different kinds of music will be able to exist, free of the tyranny of the hit parade - Spanish-American music from the Southwest, Cajun music from Louisiana, Puerto Rican music from New York, Pennsylvania Dutch music, Basque music from Idaho, ukelele music from Hawaii, Portuguese music from Provincetown - all the wonderful music of our land. Lord! We have so much! If only we could all sing it!

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