Down Beat
May 30, 1956
Seeger Helps Restore American Folk Heritage
By Paul H. Little
If this nation has seen a restoration of the glories of the American folk song, a good deal of it has been accomplished through the itinerant, indefatigable banjo and infectiously happy voice of Pete Seeger.
For Seeger has provided a glimpse of the American musical heritage by showing that we possess an untapped wealth of music in our own land, music that could foster a symphonic master, just as European folk songs have assisted the creative maturity of Zoltan Kodaly, Bela Bartok, Leos Janacek, Modest Moussorgsky, Bedrich Smetana, and Antonin Dvorak.
Seeger is a sort of reincarnated troubadour who has the genius to make us laugh or cry or think nostalgically. He is an American tuning fork.
The folk song is the oldest original music of a nation. It expresses elemental emotions — hopes, fears, and joys of a people — more directly and eloquently than can symphony or opera; yet, it can give impetus to these classical forms.
We are still young as nations are reckoned by centuries, but the work songs of the Negro slaves on the plantations; the chanties of the sailors on the earliest merchant ships, and the chants, laments, and ballads that arose from our early prisons, wagon trains and marching troops are timeless in their meaning and application to the future.
So long as man makes music, he will make the folk song; he will reshape and hand down to his successors tunes and words he learned in childhood, and they in turn will fashion new songs which have the same power as the old to stir the heart. These songs outlast the latest commercial outpourings of Tin Pan Alley; yet the authentic folk singer has the secret lore of fashioning a turn of a phrase or a melodic intonation to make the oldest verses come tinglingly alive and meaningful. This is what Seeger can do.
With him have come a host of other folk singers, who have won commercial fame - Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte, Richard Dyer-Bennett, and Carl Sandburg. But Seeger, more than any of these, represents a resurgence of basic qualities associated with true folksong - the neighborliness, the old-fashioned community sing, the active sharing by his audience of his songs and moods.
Seeger was born May 3, 1919, in New York City. He now lives in the town of Beacon, N.Y. His mother was a violin teacher and his father a noted musicologist, hut Pete says he never intended to study music himself.
"You know, if your father's a minister or a lawyer," he says, "that's the very thing you just make up your mind you're not going to be." However, he confesses to having taken up the ukulele when he was 8, and he played the tenor banjo in the school jazz band. "I knew by heart," he says, "practically all the hit tunes of the 1920s and the early '3Os. This gave me a feeling for words and music." But he had still not found what he was seeking.
It wasn’t until 1935, when he visited a square dance festival in Asheville, N.C., that he discovered something he felt worthwhile. Here he observed the gregariousness of people, sharing a communal pleasure in music. Here, then, was the first true fusion of words and music that was to set him on his future course.
He spent some time with Alan Lomax in the archives of American folk music in the Library of Congress, where he heard many of the recordings Alan Lomax had made of songs of America. Then, for a period before World War II, as he puts it, he "hoboed around with my banjo" through the southern and midwestern states, meeting and observing the people who sang and played in the mountains, valleys, and plains.
From 1942 to 1945, he was in the armed forces. His talents for communicating music to large audiences was discovered in special services. He wryly observes that this "means that when my kids ask me, 'Daddy, what did you do in the great war?' I tell them, 'I played the banjo'." Which he did for the soldiers in the name of morale building.
After the war, he joined the Almanacs, a singing group which included such noted folk artists as Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell. They traveled across the country, made some recordings, and sang everywhere.
In 1949, Seeger helped form the Weavers, which included Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. He was with them until 1952. A year after he joined them, the song Goodnight, Irene, which they used at their recitals, made the Hit Parade and brought the Weavers national fame.
This song, Pete points out, first was popularized by Lead Belly and was drawn from his life. Lead Belly's death six months before the song attained nationwide popularity was the final touch to a life largely of disappointment and frustration. Seeger often has drawn from Lead Belly's vast collection of songs to focus his audience's attention on the timeless moods and expression they convey.
It is before a classroom audience that Seeger perhaps is at his best. Pete has made two 10-inch LPs for Folkways Records (Birds, Beasts, Bugs and Little Fishies and Birds, Beasts, Bugs end Bigger Fishies) which perpetuate a zest and an emphasis on being good neighbors which he conveys in his singing before any audience.
Acting out a song is one of the traditions of folk singers; with Pete it is an art but never an affectation. So naturally and easily does he link ideas with music that he projects the spontaneous, honest feelings of the song. To see him sing I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly - which details a wonderfully incredible adventure whose taglines are "I know an old lady who swallowed a horse - she’s dead of course - as he acts out vocally and facially the lines "riggled and jiggled and tickled inside her," is to understand the immortality of the folk song.
Most important of all to Seeger is the growing enthusiasm for making music. Folk song clubs have started in colleges; many FM and radio programs feature recordings of folk music. And audiences for this basic kind of music are greater than ever, Pete says.
He points out that when he was in Ciro's night club in Hollywood with the Weavers, he sang to perhaps 1,000 persons a week. Recently, in a series of concerts at three Los Angeles colleges within a few days he sang to more than 5,000 persons.
"Folk music," says Seeger, "is at its healthiest when people participate. I notice also that you'll find more awareness of counterpoint and harmony when you have an audience sing along with you today than was the case a few year's ago.
"This is healthy indeed, for it stems from the pioneer days when a community was made of good friends and neighbors. It's this attitude which drives out prejudice, snobbery, and class distinction, which, in a word, makes us know that America is truly a land of freedom for all."
Pete and his wife now are embarking on a two-year study project delving into folk music's instrumental techniques. "Very often," he said, "you'll hear an old song played on an instrument for which it was never intended. And again, there's the matter of phrasing and shading. Those slurs of the guitar which punctuate a stop or a transitional point in a song are made by stretching the strings with the finger's in just a certain way - but it's a neglected technique.
"To revive folk music to he played exactly as it was meant to be, will carry along the genuine feeling of the song, and help the audience share it more fully."