BOOK
March/April 2001
AMERICAN STORYTELLER BY Warren Berger
PETE SEEGER HAS STORIES TO TELL, amazing ones. And he doesn't have to make them up. Sitting in front of a crackling fire at his home in upstate New York, the legendary folk singer can regale you with tales of being on the road with Woody Guthrie, as the two played impromptu tunes for striking oil workers in Oklahoma. He can talk about leading a crowd of civil rights marchers — with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. right up front — in a rendition of "We Shall Overcome," a song that, thanks in large part to Seeger, became the anthem of a movement that changed the world.
He has stories of war, with men "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," preparing to die. Or about life at the top of the pop charts (a place Seeger never wanted to be), or about the wonder of seeing little ditties he created with mode expectations-"If I Had a Hammer" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"-begin to spread, inexorably, to villages around the world, becoming part of musical history. He can also tell you the flip side of that story: What it's like when the broadcast networks ban and censor you; or what it feels like to be surrounded and pelted with stones, and then to stand trial and face prison, just for singing songs.
But the eighty-one year old's agile mind is also filled with other types of stories, ones that have nothing to do with his remarkable life as a musician and social activist. These are stories about foolish frogs, a magic comb, talking light bulbs and a giant named Abiyoyo. Some are stories his father told him in the dark when he was a small child and which he, in turn, has shared with his own children and grandchildren through the years.
To Seeger, sharing stories is a near-sacred tradition. And he believes it is an endangered art, which is partly why he co-wrote Pete Seeger's Storytelling Book with Paul DuBois Jacobs, a young carpenter and first-time author (and a grandson of Walter Lowenfels, who co-wrote songs with Seeger years ago). The book encompasses everything from classic bedtime tales to stories derived from the Bible and American history. But it is more than just a collection of stories. It's a plea to preserve the practice of everyday storytelling and a challenge to all of us to participate in this process.
"I wanted to write a how-to book on storytelling," Seeger explains. But aren't there lots of people who already know how to tell stories? What about all the writers, the singers, the creators of movies and TV shows? That's part of the problem, he insists. "Today, we sit back and let the professionals do all the storytelling, and we don't participate in that. Parents rely on television to put the kids to sleep instead of telling stories themselves," Seeger says. He maintains that anyone can be a good storyteller, and that rich source material is "all around us-in a movie you've seen, or something you've read in the Bible." But to really bring these stories to life, he says, we must make them our own — changing and adapting them along the way. "You make the story fit your life, your times, your own kids."
In effect, Seeger is advising his readers to do what he and some other folk singers have always done, taking old songs or tales and giving them a fresh spin and a new life. Through the years, Seeger has found material for his songs all around: For example, the inspiration for "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" came from an old Russian song about Cossacks going off to war; Seeger latched on to a couple of phrases in the original, then rewrote it with new lyrics and music. He found the words to "Turn, Turn, Turn" in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, adding only the music and one powerful closing line ("A time for peace ... I swear it's not too late"),
Roger McGuinn, who turned that song into a hit record with his rock group the Byrds, says Seeger's storytelling approach to music influenced a whole generation of musicians who, like Seeger, began to share tales with their audiences, both within and between the songs they sang. "When he sang, Pete always shared with people the folklore and the history behind the song," McGuinn says, "and that inspired a lot of other folk musicians to do the same."
Seeger's book has an overarching message that goes beyond storytelling: It's about participation. From his earliest performances, he has always believed that the audience should join in the process of music-making rather than sit back and let the professionals have all the fun. In fact, according to Arlo Guthrie, Seeger's longtime friend and sometime collaborator, Seeger is uncomfortable with the very notion of a "professional" musician who stands apart from the audience. "If you think about it," Guthrie says, "Pete's life spans the distance from when songs and storytelling were part of people's everyday lives, on through to the technological revolution — at which point people began to get their stories and songs from records and CDs. But Pete has always tried to get everyone to sing along and tell their own stories, and he reminds us that you don't have to be a professional to do it. These traditions of story and song belong to everyone."
These days, Seeger can still be found leading groups of people in song at various gatherings, though they tend to be modest in size: You may find him at a local union hall, a Jewish community center, an elementary school. After a rough bout with Lyme disease last year, Seeger is in good health, still sharp as a tack and spry enough to chop wood. But his voice — the cheerful bell that rang out all those years, sometimes to sound a warning — has lost some of its range and steadiness. Because of that, Seeger, a humble man who worries about giving people their money's worth, is reluctant to sing before large groups.
Seeger's low profile of late could also be seen as a sign of the times. In the recent era of bull-market prosperity and high-flying technology, there wasn't much call for a simple banjo player who sings about peace, justice and human rights. Indeed, Seeger can easily seem like an anachronism in a time when so many popular entertainers are either hard-edged and cynical or glossy and upbeat; in the gamut that runs from Eminem to Britney Spears, where exactly would Seeger fit in? One critic, writing recently in The New York Times, dismissed Seeger as a writer of "earnest" songs that don't wear well with the passage of time.
There is also the likelihood, as Guthrie suggests, that Seeger's earnest, heartfelt songs will far outlast the fashionable cynicism and the prepackaged hits of the moment. "If you had to pick a song of the century," says Guthrie, "I don't know that you could do better than 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone.' It's a song that unites people everywhere, and those are the great songs, the ones that last." Guthrie is also quick to point out that any talk of posterity, or of Seeger's place in the pecking order of the music world, means absolutely nothing to the man. Seeger turned his back on fame and fortune decades ago, choosing to live a simple rustic life, in a mountaintop house he built himself fifty years ago.
Getting to Seeger these days takes some navigating. You drive through the hardscrabble town of Beacon, New York, and, as he advised me on the phone prior to my visit, "look for a telephone pole with a red ribbon on it." Then you turn and climb a steep, snow-covered hill (or, if you don't have four-wheel drive, Seeger will gladly come and fetch you in his intrepid, creaky old Subaru). One more thing: "When you arrive," Seeger explains, "you'll see a black dog and a brown dog. The black dog makes a lot of noise, but he won't bother you." And the brown dog? "He nips people," he says, without apology. "Best to keep your hands in your pockets."
Seeger shares the modest, slightly cluttered house overlooking his beloved Hudson River with his wife of nearly sixty years, Toshi (his three children are grown, with families of their own). Reed-thin, and clad in a ballcap, an old sweatshirt, jeans and snow boots, he led me past piles of books-"I'm a bookaholic," he says, noting that he particularly devours history, science and anything having to do with "how man can save himself." There's a Peruvian flute hanging on the wall alongside his trademark banjo, the same one he's used for forty-five years. Inscribed on its head are the words "This instrument surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."
Seeger walked over to a wood-burning stove, bent down and hoisted up a huge log, dropping it onto the flames. He then settled into his rocking chair, while Toshi set out coffee and homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. The ornery brown dog was locked away, but one of his cats hopped into my lap and curled up immediately, as Seeger started to tell stories, all kinds of them. He told of how the Boy Scouts got started (one man's ambitious endeavor to deal with the rowdy kids who played on his property); and about the Big Bang and sub-Quarks; and life on Mars; and the "Down-rent wars" of the 1840's; and about his great grandfather, who opened a boiler that exploded one day ("They brought his wife a hand with a wedding ring still on it — that was all that was left of him," he said).
Of course, Seeger's best story is his own life, which seems to encompass all of America in the twentieth century. He was born in New York City in 1919; his mother taught violin at Julliard, and his father was a college professor of music whose outspoken political views eventually got him fired from a job from the University of California at Berkeley (clearly, Seeger inherited more than just his interest in music from his dad). When Seeger was still a child, the family went on the road to teach music to poor folks out in the country. But it's fair to say the city sophisticates learned more than they taught, becoming enchanted with the simple music traditions of ordinary Southerners. The music seemed to get into young Pete's blood, and he began playing the banjo as a teenager. At nineteen, after dropping out of Harvard University, he took a job as an assistant to the noted musicologist and field recorder Alan Lomax, who was amassing a huge archive of folk and country music for the Library of Congress. The two spent long days listening to countless records, and Seeger soaked it all up like a sponge.
Then Lomax did something that would change Seeger's life; in 1940, he invited the folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was at the time just starting to gain wide recognition, to come east and record some songs for the archive. Seeger was immediately taken with the rollicking, plain-spoken Guthrie. "His was the genius of simplicity," Seeger recalls. The two began playing music together and collaborated on a songbook called Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People (with an introduction written by John Steinbeck). Guthrie urged Seeger to come on the road with him, to experience life among "real people." They traveled down South together, playing music for strikers along the way; after Guthrie went home, Seeger kept traveling. But they reunited in 1941 when Guthrie joined a new music group Seeger had started called the Almanac Singers. The group's songs, which praised the working man and the union and protested war, became increasingly controversial as patriotic fervor mounted and America drew closer to involvement in World War II — "Franklin D., listen to me/You ain't gonna send me 'cross the sea," one song declared.
By 1942 Seeger himself was in the armed forces, mostly playing his banjo for the troops. He dutifully sang "Get Hitler" fight songs, but a part of him still felt that war was not the answer, even in the face of Hitler's aggression. Seeger has pointed out that Hitler might have been stopped by quarantines; he has clung to the belief that freedom can be better spread by education than by warfare. "I've always felt that if the government did a good job of dropping leaflets, they wouldn't have to drop bombs," Seeger says. (He also believes the world might rid itself of dictators through better child psychology, reforming the bullies while they're young — does this make him an optimist or a Pollyanna?)
After the war, Seeger resumed his involvement with folk music and left-wing politics, forming the Weavers in 1948 with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. The group soared to the top of the pop charts with apolitical, sweet songs like "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" and "Goodnight Irene." But the Weavers also sang about social injustice and racism in America, which Seeger himself had experienced firsthand in an incident that became a defining moment in his life. In the fall of 1949, Seeger appeared at a concert in Peekskill, New York, with the African-American singer Paul Robeson, who at the time was barred from many concert halls across America. After the concert ended, Robeson and Seeger were set upon by Ku Klux Klansmen, as the police stood by. "The attack was organized just like a battlefield," Seeger recalls; they were surrounded on all sides, and the rocks came from all angles, smashing Seeger's car windows. He saved some of those stones and cemented them into his fireplace at home, where they're still embedded today.
It was just the beginning of Seeger's long involvement with the Civil Rights movement, which brought him in touch with Dr. King and eventually drew him south to Mississippi and Tennessee. Seeger wanted to contribute music to the movement and, along with three other musicians, eventually helped adapt and publish a tune that had been sung, in various forms, by gospel singers through the years. Seeger takes only a small share of the credit for "We Shall Overcome," and he takes none of the royalties (profits are donated to civil rights groups). But the song is one reason why the musician and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte praised Seeger as one of the earliest and most vocal proponents of the movement.
Indeed, Seeger was speaking out on race, class and other hot-button issues before it was safe to do so. For this, he paid a price. Part of it came at the expense of commercial success. "My publisher," Seeger recalls, "used to say to me, 'Why can't you write more nice songs like "Goodnight Irene"? I can't sell these protest songs of yours!'"
But it wasn't just a matter of dollars and cents; Seeger's politics made him a marked man in the McCarthy Era of the 1950s. When "If I Had A Hammer" was written with his partner Lee Hays, the manager of the Weavers warned the group not to sing it, Seeger recalls. "He said, 'I'm trying to get the blacklisters off your back-and that song will just encourage them, with all that singing about freedom.' "
Needless to say, Seeger did not heed such warnings; he went on singing "dangerous" songs and soon found himself appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated communist influence in the entertainment industry. On the witness stand, Seeger was asked if he sang for the communists; his reply was that he sang for everyone. Seeger chose not invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects a witness from incriminating himself; instead, he thought it more appropriate to rely on the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech. And he also chastised his questioners, saying, "I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked." Reflecting back on the incident fifty years later, Seeger says, "At the time, I didn't have the sense to laugh at them, but I should have."
Seeger was charged with contempt of Congress and was subsequently convicted in 1961. When Judge Thomas F. Murphy asked Seeger if he had anything to say before the sentence was passed, Seeger asked if lie could sing a song called "Wasn't That a Time," which had been characterized during the hearings as subversive. He wanted to show that "it was just a song about American history," he recalls. "I thought they should hear it and judge for themselves." Judge Murphy wasn't interested.
Seeger was sentenced to a year in prison, but his conviction was later reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, and he managed to avoid prison. But throughout the 1950s and well into the '60s, he was unofficially banned from radio and television broadcasts. Even as the folk music that Seeger helped shape was becoming a phenomenon in the early '60s, hit TV music programs like Hootenanny wanted no part of Seeger. The ice was finally broken in 1967, when Seeger was invited to appear on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. But shortly before the program aired, the CBS network censors cut one of Seeger's songs, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." The anti-war tune seemed to be taking a swipe at President Johnson with the lyric, "We're waist-deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on." (The Smothers Brothers, upset that the song was cut, eventually pressured the network to bring Seeger back on a later show to sing it.)
The various attempts to stifle Seeger only seemed to rally more support around him. "All they were giving me was free publicity," Seeger laughs now. "None of them understood that. All through the years, I'd go to campuses, and if the American Legion had a picket, it usually meant I'd sell more tickets." That was particularly true in the '60s, as a new generation of rebellious rock-and-folk balladeers embraced the middle-age Seeger. "He was the real deal when it came to folk music," recalls Roger McGuinn. "People appreciated his authenticity." To some extent, McGuinn says, Seeger was eventually supplanted in the '60s by Bob Dylan, "who, without necessarily intending to, kind of usurped Seeger's authority and became the voice of the left. But Pete was always a presence."
Eventually Seeger was accepted, even lauded, by the institutions that had tried to shut him down. In 1994, he received the Kennedy Center Honors, with President Clinton on hand to lavish praise (Clinton called him "an inconvenient artist, who dared to sing things as he saw them"). Seeger was not impressed. "I never should have accepted that award," he says now. Why not? "Too much publicity! Afterward, I had people coming up to me saying, 'We want to use your name for this or that.'" Another thing about it that annoyed Seeger, he says, was that "I had to shake hands with that foolish president."
A couple of years later, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Seeger showed up reluctantly, wearing his father's ill-fitting tuxedo (he sees no reason to buy fancy clothes of his own). And, Guthrie recalls, "when it came time for Pete to give his acceptance speech ... he didn't say a word. He just refused. He understood that there was really nothing worth saying about an event like this."
Seeger did bring his banjo up to the podium, of course. In lieu of a speech, he just strummed a few chords from ''This Land is Your Land," then he glanced up at the crowd and said, "You all know this one, don't you?" And just like that, the people in the tuxes were all singing along.
That's Seeger's mission now: Not to sing anymore himself, but to get others to sing and tell stories among themselves. His most recent release, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," is a collection of thirty-nine Seeger songs recorded by an all-star list of contemporaries ranging from Studs Terkel to Bruce Springsteen (the last track is the only one Seeger recorded himself). "These days I devote most of my time to organizing," Seeger says. His top priority is his Clearwater Foundation, which is trying to get the Hudson River cleaned up; Seeger often leads the local members of the group in song at small rallies in the area. He's also organizing a boat-building club in an urban New York neighborhood; he wants to teach city kids to do something they never could have imagined doing. And he's trying to spearhead a movement, known as the Public Domain Commission Project, to ensure that royalties are paid to a song's country of origin; Seeger knows that he and other white American songwriters have sometimes gotten too much credit through the years for tunes that originated long ago and far away.
As for writing more of his own songs, Seeger says, "I get ideas and don't know how to complete them. I'll come up with a good line, but no song for it. For instance, I have a line for an Irish song that goes, 'And who'd believe/I'd feel so good/To discover I'd been wrong.' But that's all I have."
At many points in our conversation, Seeger broke out into spontaneous song. If you ask him about a song like "If I Had a Hammer," he will start to tell you about it — but he will end up singing it for you, too, in a voice that still has the familiar lightness and clarity, though it's softer now. Even when I talked to him on the phone, Seeger would, at times, start singing into the receiver. He can't help it, it seems. The funny thing is, he insists he's retired from singing. Asked why on earth he'd want to do such a thing, Seeger shot a quizzical look and said, "I can't sing anymore — you heard me. I can fake it on a quiet song, but I can't hit the high notes or the lows. However, I'm a very skilled song leader."
Guthrie was surprised when, a couple of years ago, Seeger withdrew from the Thanksgiving weekend concerts they'd been doing together at Carnegie Hall for the past few decades. "He felt that because his voice wasn't as good as before, the audience wouldn't get what they expected," Guthrie says. "I said to him, 'Pete, you may not be able to sing as well as before — but remember, the people in this audience can't hear as well as they used to, either.'" But Seeger insisted he shouldn't perform. "He'd come and sit in the audience, and it was kind of sad," Guthrie says. "Finally, we got him to come up and sing a couple of songs. And as he walked out that night, the whole place just stood and cheered." And how did Seeger react? "Oh, you could just see him in torment," Guthrie says. "A standing ovation? That's the kind of thing that makes Pete uncomfortable, because he really tends to think, 'There's nothing that special about me.' The biggest pain in the butt for someone like Pete is just trying to deal with the accolades. He never wanted to be a hero; he's an anti-hero."