Philadelphia Inquirer
May 12, 1989
STILL STRUMMING AT 70
By Amy Linn
Inquirer Staff Writer
Adhesive tape held his glasses together. He wore a sailor's cap, a faded blue flowered cotton shirt rolled up to his elbows,
brown corduroy pants, thick-soled hiking boots — a hearing aid. Thin wisps of gray hair nudged his shirt collar, and his
lanky frame towered over most who stood near him. In many ways, Pete Seeger was as constant as the North Star.
His appearance has never changed. Neither has his shyness.
On a January night at the Bala Theater this year, Seeger was stuck in his least favorite position — singled out for special
attention — but there wasn't much he could do about it. The Bala Cynwyd concert was partly in his honor.
Seeger and Toshi, his wife of 46 years, sat quietly in the audience while a stream of folk music luminaries took the stage to
tell stories about the Seegers' myriad contributions to the art. Folk singer Sis Cunningham and Seeger's personal manager,
Harold Leventhal, were among the others singled out for honors. Ronnie Gilbert, who sang with Seeger in the legendary group
the Weavers, narrated the show.
As the night drew to a finish, Pete Seeger was called onto the stage. Hundreds of loving faces turned toward him, honoring
his survival and the approach of his 70th birthday in May. For 50 of his years Pete Seeger had been wedding his songs to
history, and making history with his songs.
He played in Alabama barbershops in exchange for haircuts; he played on freight trains with the great Woody Guthrie; he
played at hootenannies with the singer Leadbelly, and on the street corners of New York. He played his "If I Had a Hammer"
before it was denounced as "commie propaganda". He co-wrote "We Shall Overcome" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and he
played them at peace marches, voter registration drives and backwater taverns. He tried to play before the House Un-American Activities Committee; it forbade it.
He was blacklisted for 15 years. And when the radio wouldn't play him, and theaters wouldn't have him, and concert halls
wouldn't book him, he played anyway.
On that January night, Seeger stared down into the darkness and smiled his thanks as bouquets of flowers were placed around
him. Then he tilted his head back, his long neck exposed in that characteristic Seeger pose, his chin aimed somewhere between
the ceiling and lower balcony.
"Irene, goodnight... Irene, goodnight," Seeger sang.
The crowd rose to its feet. They joined him with all their might. "Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, I'll see you in my dreams."
Pete Seeger, who turned 70 on May 3, is as capable as ever of getting a crowd to sing along. He swore he'd take his phone off
the hook as a birthday present to himself, but wound up leaving the thing connected. All day long it rang.
"I talked to Pete at the end of the day," said Ronnie Gilbert, speaking by phone from Berkeley, Calif. "He sounded a bit
exhausted from all the calls."
Exhausted is probably not the word that Seeger would have chosen. Yes, his voice has weakened. He gets hoarse if he sings
too long. But he still manages to keep the frantic schedule that's been his trademark since his youth.
Seeger performed last week at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Tomorrow he will appear at Brandywine High School
in Wilmington for a benefit in honor of a banjo player, Ola Belle Reed. On Wednesday, he'll hold a benefit for his own
beloved Clearwater, a 106-foot sloop he uses as a floating billboard in his campaign to clean up the Hudson River.
"I do manage to do quite a bit," said Seeger, "but at 9 p.m. I say to hell with it and go to bed."
Unfinished business haunts him, despite the fact that he has written seven books and contributed to more than 100 albums.
"My house," said Seeger, "is filled with unfinished projects."
Seeger's house is a hand-built log cabin on a pretty hillside in Beacon, N.Y., overlooking the Hudson. He and Toshi bought
the 30-acre lot in 1949, a time when neither ice-skating, yodeling, music nor chopping wood were diversion enough to
soothe him. He built the home by going to the New York Public Library and taking scrupulous notes on everything listed under
"log cabin."
The split-level home is a constant meeting place for the Seegers' friends, their three children, four grandchildren, fellow
politicos, conservationists and singers. Nearly every week is spent at benefit concerts (Seeger hates making a profit)
and get-togethers such as "The People's Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle."
The People's Network, in fact, drew Pete Seeger to Philadelphia in January for a series of workshops at Germantown Friends
School. Seeger devoted his time there to learning new African rhythms.
"My only worry is that everything changes so fast," he said, munching on apple during a workshop lunch break. The folksinging
community reveres Seeger and understands his deep need for privacy. In other words, it gives him room to breathe. In turn,
Seeger feels free to attend dozens of obscure music workshops and all-night jam sessions around the country, occasions
on which people can sing themselves into a swoon. Seeger emerges from these weekends on something akin runner's high.
"The danger is you might keep moving on to the next thing instead of doing one thing well," said Seeger. "Sometimes I think the beauty would be to sing just one song, over and over again. Seagulls
do it."
Seeger finds it difficult to describe the meaning behind all this — the compelling force that drives him in his folk music.
"Part of it is the word participation, I think," he said. "The modern world has a tendency to say, 'Just pay your money and let the experts do it for you.' Or, let the machines do it for you."
Nothing appeals to Seeger less. "My father used to tell me that one must not judge the musicality of a nation by the number of its virtuosos," Seeger said, "but by the number of people in the general population who are playing for themselves.
"Music has existed for several million years at least," Seeger said. "The need to hear it is deep in our chromosomes."
Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, into a family whose chromosomes fairly burst with music. His father, Charles, was an ethnomusicologist and composer who taught at the University of California-Berkeley. Seeger's mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a composer and classical violinist.
The Seeger home was ruled by excellence, high moral standards and a stiffness of posture that some would describe as patrician reserve. From ages 4 to 17, Pete attended boarding schools, where he alternately studied Lenin, sang in chapel and played the ukelele. By the time he was 13 he considered himself a Marxist.
A 1936 trip with his father to a folk song festival in North Carolina changed his life forever. Young Seeger took one look at a five-string banjo and fell in love. (He is credited with saving the instrument from extinction; Vega Instrument Co. named its top-of-the-line model after him. The more common banjo until Seeger's day was a four-string tenor.)
Seeger eventually went to Harvard aiming to be a journalist. But music and politics had their claws in him and he left school in 1938. Charles Seeger by that time had divorced remarried, and grown increasingly involved with a circle of folk music
friends, including Alan Lomax, the premier chronicler of American folk songs. It was Lomax who discovered Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter serving time for murder in a Louisiana prison.
Through Lomax, Pete Seeger was introduced not only to Leadbelly, writer of "Goodnight Irene," "Midnight Special" and hundreds of other songs — but to the legendary Guthrie, a young guy in cowboy boots.
Guthrie became Seeger's closest friend and inspiration, and the two set out to make music that mattered. So incessantly did Seeger play banjo in those days that "it was driving everybody mad," Bess Lomax, Alan's sister, once said.
Seeger and Guthrie traveled the country. They sang for striking oil workers, farmers and Dust Bowl refugees. They wrote songs immortalizing the nation, the working man, the vagaries of the human spirit. And by 1940, Seeger, Guthrie and friends formed the Almanac Singers. Leftist politics in those days involved union organizing and the Communist Party. The Almanac Singers favored both.
"I knew that it wasn't a quick way to get jobs — to sing for the Communist Party," Seeger said in a recent interview. "It was something that you do, because you think it's the right thing at the time. And in the long run, you realize the value in
doing what you think is right."
Not even a stint in the Army interrupted Seeger's music; he played banjo for troops in the Pacific. On his return, Seeger set out to enjoy married life — he had wedded Toshi on a weekend furlough — and a life of harmony."
In 1948, the Weavers were born: Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and a young woman with a silken voice, Ronnie Gilbert. Seeger would co-author a series of classics: "If I Had a Hammer," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and the anthem of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome." And the Weavers took the country by storm.
In the background was the Cold War. To McCarthyite ears, even the words "It's the hammer of justice, it's the hammer of freedom" began to sound "anti-American." And in places like Peekskill, N.Y., simple concerts turned into melees between
I a rising tide of "patriots" and the people who were branded as commies. Hundreds of concertgoers and singers at Peekskill were caught in the violence, including Pete Seeger and his family. Cars were overturned, crosses burned, a man was stabbed. It was an omen.
In 1951, they cut four records for Decca: "Goodnight, Irene" (with "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena" on the flip side), "The Roving Kind," "So Long" and "On Top of Old Smokey." "The hottest singing instrumental group around today," Variety described
them in August of that year after they had racked up an astonishing four million sales. Newsweek featured them; Las Vegas wanted them, and so did prime time television.
A year later, it ended. A blurb in Red Channels magazine, a publication dedicated to exposing alleged members of the Communist Party, listed the Weavers as "commies." Recording dates, concerts and radio appearances instantly evaporated.
Seeger was called before the Un-American Activities Committee in 1955; he refused to answer questions about communist activities. Indicted by a grand jury, he was later convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The
charges were overturned on a technicality after lengthy appeals.
Seeger spent the blacklist years writing music and performing for small crowds that would have him. Eventually, the blacklist lost its grip. Harold Leventhal in 1955 managed to book a concert at Carnegie Hall. "There wasn't a major label that would record it," Leventhal explained in the Weavers' documentary, Wasn't That a Time. A small private company was hired instead.
With no place to play, the Weavers had little choice but to disband. Seeger spent his next two decades traveling, and eventually performed all over the world. At a Moscow concert in 1964, Seeger had 10,000 Russians singing "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" in four-part harmony, despite the fact that none of them spoke English.
It would be 15 years before Seeger would be considered "safe" for prime time American TV audiences. In 1967, the Smothers Brothers featured him as a guest.
Perhaps music couldn't change the world, Seeger began to think. Perhaps music could only change the region. And so he has devoted himself more these days to matters at home: the Hudson River, his grandchildren, local politics.
And when human arms fail, there are things more easily reached with a banjo, he has learned. "This machine surrounds hate," as the words say on his five-string, "and forces it to surrender."