High Fidelity
January 1963
PETE SEEGER by J. C. Barden
Twenty-three years ago, in a saloon in Rapid City, South Dakota, a joyous young man in faded blue jeans and flannel shirt strolled about singing folk songs to the accompaniment of a five-string banjo for whatever the customers felt the entertainment was worth. It was an exceptionally good night, he recalls, when a woman gave him three silver dollars for that many renditions of Makes No Difference Now.
Today, Peter Seeger sings in Carnegie Hall, before audiences of up to three thousand, who listen with the attentiveness of chamber music devotees while he picks out his tunes on a long-necked banjo with a few extra low notes that he designed himself for his low-pitched voice. He receives as much as $3,000 a concert, but just as often he will be found singing for free at a church social.
Seeger has changed little with success. He travels around the country on his concert tours in a battered station wagon (always with some of his family along); goes miles off a concert path to sing for people who haven’t heard him; never bothers to ask what he will earn, and contributes his talents any cause that interests him. At forty-three, the Manhattan-horn, Harvard-educated troubadour delivers his concerts wearing heavy-soled work shoes, purple socks, wrinkled brown pants, a bright red sports shirt, and a yellow tie. He also performs with an unceasing youthful enthusiasm. When he strides before an audience—a tall, skinny guy with a pronounced Adam’s apple, thinning red hair almost combed in place, banjo strung over his shoulder — he does so with the self-confidence of a revivalist preacher going before a Sunday tent congregation, both implying that they have the cure for all spiritual ills. Brief, homey introductions precede most of Seeger’s selections.
‘Here’s a song I learned from a friend of mine a few years back," Seeger may say, picking his banjo lightly. "She learned it from an old lumberjack who used to live in the Adirondacks. His name was Yankee John Galusha, and he knew a great many songs. Then he sings Blue Mountain Lake as his fingers ripple over the banjo strings and his feet keep time with violent whomps:
Come all you bold fellers,
where’er you may be,
Come sit down a while
and listen to me:
The truth I will tell you
without a mistake
Of the rackets we had
about Blue Mountain Lake;
nary, down, down,
down, derry down.
(As sung by Pete Seeger, Folkways
Records FH 5003, "Frontier Ballads.")
Singing in a baritone voice that one critic has described as "so carefully cognizant of mood and texture of material it is as another instrument," Seeger manages to communicate to his listeners a good share of his own feeling for and enjoyment of his songs. His love for his material, and his zest in rendering it mean equally exciting performances before all audiences, no matter what the size.
"It would of course be impossible to re-create the aura in which the songs were originally sung," Seeger says. "Many were sung by men living in poverty, ignorance, and hardship. But if you can capture the feeling of the people and the times, you have folk music." Inasmuch as he believes this is sometimes more easily done with the help of an audience, he seeks audience participation on more than half his tunes—with results the most successful Rotarian song leader might envy. When Seeger sings, he is representing the people he sings about, and he delivers their songs with such integrity that his audience can almost experience the same emotions.
Pete has traveled thousands of miles (some of it by freight) hunting down folk songs and learning about the people they came from, perfecting his playing of the five-string banjo along the way. "When I heard a song I didn’t know," he says, "I sat down to learn it. If I met someone who played the banjo, I asked him to play for me. I figured I could learn a little something from everybody. As a result, he estimates that he knows two hundred songs, half knows three times that many, and plays the banjo in several different styles. "Pete listened with a keen and perceptive ear," says Alan Lomax, folk song collector and writer, "and now uses the singing and playing styles of our folk faithfully and sensitively."
Seeger has, in fact, hardly stopped traveling and learning since he left Harvard in 1938, in his sophomore year. He now tours the United States, Canada, and the British Isles, making more than one hundred appearances yearly at high schools, colleges, summer camps, and concert halls. Hootenannies, folk music hoedowns which Pete was largely responsible for popularizing, are still one of his favorite means of entertaining an audience.
For the last dozen years or so, Seeger, his wife Toshi (whose father is Japanese and mother Virginian), and their three children have lived in a two-room log cabin built, with the help of friends, on land overlooking the Hudson River sixty miles from Manhattan. Seeger says he moved out of the city because he feels more at home in the country, where he spent much of his time as a boy, either with his grandparents or in a Connecticut boarding school. "I’m just lucky to be able to earn a living way in such a way that we can live on a mountain," he confesses. An incurable do-it-yourselfer, Pete is constantly making improvements to his property, often pressing visitors into service to help. He built a garage apartment, and is now working on an addition to it, to house the many acquaintances who constantly drop by. "If there’s less than ten at the table," says Toshi, "there’s a feeling of emptiness about the place."
The singer’s love for his mountain retreat and his seeming unconcern about money explain his light concert schedule. "In my fifteen years with Pete," says Harold Leventhal, his friend and part-time business manager, "I’ve never known him to ask what his fee would be for a concert." The singer’s income is about $20,000 a year. "He could be making $70,000 if he wanted to play the big halls on a full schedule," Leventhal avers.
Seeger’s deep-rooted desire to spread folk music leads him to seek bookings in as many widely scattered places as possible. As a rule, he shuns night clubs. "I often don’t think I’m in show business," he says. ‘I feel I’m building a healthy musical life for people who seem to have lost it somewhere in the machine age."
Teen-agers have always made up the big majority of Seeger’s fans, a fact which makes him happy because he knows he is always reaching new people. His desire to spread folk music stems from his desire to perpetuate it. Through folk songs, Seeger feels, "future generations will be capable of living fuller lives by understanding these times." Of his need to perpetuate the music, Seeger says: "Any person interested in life is interested in more than his own life, and these people are profoundly concerned with the future of humanity itself."
When Seeger goes before an audience, he knows one song he is going to sing—the first one. "I used to write down a few," he says. "Somehow, they never seemed to fit in—so I gave it up." Many of the songs deal with social inequality, with the bomb, and the question of peace. As a humanitarian with a strong feeling for justice, Seeger wants to help solve the problems he sings about. This moral integrity is the source of his strength and beauty as a performer. He has not sacrificed his principles, as have many of today’s urban folk singers, out of a prudent avoidance of anything controversial.
Some songs in the folk song tradition have always carried political and social overtones, for the most part expressing radical views. In this vein, one of the most currently popular is Seeger’s Where Hall All the Flowers Gone:
Where have all the young men gone
Long time passing?
Where have all the young men gone
Long time ago?
Where have all the young men gone
They’re all in uniform.
Oh, when will you ever learn?
Oh, when will you ever learn?
(Copyright 1961, Fall River Music Co.
New York, N. Y., used by permission)
Again, his Hammer Song ("I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters"), which he and Lee Hays wrote some twelve years ago, espouses the cause of racial equality. Seeger comes from a long line of active participants in the social problems of their times—his greatgrandparents were abolitionists before the Civil War—and he believes he is following in their steps. "My feelings haven’t just sprung up," he says; "they’re a part of my American heritage."
Seeger first became identified with so-called radical thought through appearances before left-wing and labor groups soon after leaving college. During this period he met two leaders of the Thirties’
folk song revival who had more effect on his career than any other artists: Woody Guthrie, the prolific folk song writer from Oklahoma, and Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter, an ex-convict from Louisiana whose talents opened a new world for him in New York. Their influence on Seeger stemmed in part from his fondness for the men themselves, but it was their music that attracted him most.
"They wrote folk songs with teeth," Pete says, meaning the songs of frankest protest, such as Woody’s Been in Jail:
Rich man builds his jail house
Working man sleeps down on the floor
Working man sleeps down on the floor
They jail me for vag ‘cause
they won’t give me work no more.
They got a union man in jail here
Just for fighting for higher pay
Just for fighting for higher pay
I’ll turn this union man out,
put that old police in someday.
(Words and music by Woody Guthrie.)
Another of these "songs with teeth" is Bourgeois Blues which Lead Belly wrote after he and his wife and friends had looked without success for a place to bold an interracial party in Washington, D.C.:
Me ‘n my wife run all over town
Fv’ywhere we go the people
would turn us down,
Lawd, in a bourgeois town,
Hee! it’s a bourgeois town,
I got the bourgeois blues,
gonna spread the news all around.
(Words and music by Huddie Ledbetter, edited with new material by John A, and Alan Lomax, copyright 1959, Folkways Music Publishers Inc., New York, N. Y., used by permission.)
In most of his concerts, Pete devotes some time to the songs of Woody and Lead Belly, often playing them on the instruments with which the composers were identified—a conventional guitar for Woody and a 12-string guitar for Lead Belly.
From the time he left college until he entered the Army in 1942, Seeger sang around New York, then hit the road, often traveling with other folk musicians. These included the Almanac Singers, which he labeled "an amorphous group—someone would leave and someone else join up."
After the war, during which Seeger spent much of his Army service entertaining troops both in the States and in the South Pacific, he became convinced that the country was ripe for a folk song revival. "1 knew it was about time for people to realize how much better folk music was than the stuff they were getting on the radio," he says. Like many others, Seeger thought the revival would come through the unions, since they had always welcomed folk singers on their strike lines and in demonstrations. At the time, it seemed unlikely that there would be a large commercial demand for folk music. It surely would have been thought inconceivable that The Weavers, which Seeger and Lee Hays organized, would sell over a million recordings of Goodnight Irene, a song that Lead Belly put together. (Pete’s personal singing commitments and his desire to spend more time with his family, were responsible for his departure from The Weavers, in 1958.)
The expectation that a folk song revival would come through the labor movement led Pete and others to form People’s Songs, an organization aimed at helping it along. People’s Songs, with about three thousand members at its peak, published a folk song magazine and provided an artists’ bureau for booking performers. But the country turned out to be not quite ready for the revival, and the demise of the organization came with Pete’s national tour in 1948 with the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, Henry Wallace. Pete sang and Wallace spoke.
Few other successful entertainers have so openly displayed their radical political beliefs. Because of his views, he was called to testify in 1955 before a subcommittee of the House on Un-American Activities, then investigating alleged Communist infiltration in the entertainment field. The singer’s stand before the committee, in which he cited the First Amendment for refusing to answer questions rather than the Fifth, resulted in his Contempt of Congress citation. Had he invoked the Fifth, guaranteeing the right to avoid self-incrimination, he could not have been prosecuted. The First, of course, guarantees the right of free speech and association. Seeger feels, as do Civil Liberties groups, that it also guarantees one the right to remain silent about personal beliefs.
"In my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature," Seeger said at the hearing. "I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this committee."
(The case came to an end only last May when the U. S. District Court of Appeals set aside Seeger’s conviction by a lower court, which had sentenced him to a year in jail. The Appeals Court decision had nothing to do with Seeger’s stand, however; the indictment against him was ruled faulty because the House committee gave a "wholly misleading and incorrect statement of the basis of that authority" under which it was holding hearings. "This not only runs afoul of accepted notions of fair notice," the court stated, "but goes to the very substance of whether or not any crime has been shown.")
While Seeger was under indictment and sentence, he received thousands of letters of encouragement, and hundreds contributcd to a group formed to help defray his court expenses. "If it hadn’t been for all my friends," he says, "I never would have seen this through so well. I don’t feel I deserve all the help I got, but I allowed it because I felt my fight was a fight for all Americans."
Seeger’s intransigent views have limited, to a small degree, the places where he can appear. While he has never been prevented from singing at a scheduled concert, the American Civil Liberties Union had to step in to see that he was allowed to go ahead with performances in Detroit and San
Diego, and in some smaller cities groups wanting to book Seeger have sometimes been unable to get a hall. The singer’s politics have cost him some fans; they have also given him one of the most loyal followings possessed by any entertainer.
Pete’s run-in with the Un-American Activities Committee has injured him most in the television industry, where, he says, he is "pretty effectively barred from working." This troubles him only because he feels it cuts off his best means of spreading folk music. "I’m convinced that little square box could do more for folk music than anything else," he says. "Folk songs are just made for living rooms and back porches."
While Seeger’s income this year won’t approach the amount Leventhal thinks he is capable of earning, it is likely to take a healthy jump as the result of his transfer from Folkways Records to Columbia. During his thirteen years with Folkways, Pete made forty recordings. which sold a total of one million copies. Columbia, however, has a much wider distribution—its first Seeger album, "Pete Seeger Story Songs," issued in September 1961, sold twenty thousand copies in the ten months following its release, and the company expects to do even better with the new Seeger disc published just last month. The singer admits that he underwent a great deal of soul-searching before he decided to leave Folkways, and its production director, Moe Asch, who used to refer to Pete as "his son" [see HIGH FIDELITY, June 1960]. He says he was finally swayed by the fact that he can reach more people with Columbia, and is happy that his contract will allow him to make some records for Folkways.
Almost until the time Seeger actually became a professional musician, such a career was the last thing he thought he wanted—chiefly out of resistance to his family background. His mother is a violin teacher and his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist, now in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California at Los Angeles. The son’s aversion to taking up his father’s profession resulted in his having practically no formal training in music. His original aim was to be a journalist (during his boarding school days he had put out a newspaper), but in the summer of 1935 he experienced a decided change of mind when he heard the five-string banjo at a folk festival in Asheville, North Carolina. A year later, after he had left Harvard to "get out of the world of books," Pete went to work for Lomax, then curator of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, as an assistant classifying records. Lomax says he watched Pete tinker with the banjo for hours while listening to the library’s recordings.
Six months later, an itch to know the people making and singing folk music took Pete from Washington to roam the country. His musical career was born when he made a "wonderful" discovery during his early travels. "I found that as long as I could play the banjo," he says, "I would never starve to death."