Pickin'
May 1976
Workin' at the Other End: A Conversation with Pete Seeger by Roger Siminoff and Don Kissil
We had decided to make a weekend of it. Going up to meet with Pete Seeger was an exciting and important project for me and I wanted to be fresh for the morning’s interview. My wife, Mattee, and I drove to Connecticut and had dinner at a nice little inn and then drove down to New York State to stay overnight.
Sunday morning was chilly cold in Beacon, N.Y. We got ourselves together and headed towards town and the boat dock where we were to meet. We went down a small road and over a wooden bridge which spanned the railroad. The buildings were typical of an aging boat dock and I had thought that my directions must have been wrong. A sharp right turn led us to a quiet parking area where the old Beacon train station, built in the late 1800’s, and a harbor-like area of the Hudson River share a common home.
We parked and walked around and though we were alone, we could sense a presence and warmth amidst the crisp morning. Transformed into an old diner, the Sloop Club was cheerfully decorated. Behind the diner was a partially finished dugout canoe and a path that led along the river’s edge and on towards some picnic tables. Unlike the surrounding area, this little piece of Hudson River bank was tidy and cared for.
After a few moments, a car came down the ramp and pulled alongside us. The driver was clearly recognizable. Thoughts ran through my mind as to whether I had prepared my interview properly—whether there were things I had forgotten, or things I shouldn’t ask at all. We greeted, made small talk about the weather and the Hudson River behind us. A few minutes later, Don Kissil and his wife, Claire, drove up and the greetings and discussion about the weather were repeated. Pete took his banjo out of the car and remarked that "it would be most quiet out on the dock". So...in single file, we followed him behind the Club and out towards the water. He selected a pontoon-type dock just big enough for the five of us to float on.
Here we were. ..sitting privately with someone we had listened to and loved for so many years. He seemed so regal just sitting there, holding his banjo as if it were a natural extension of himself. It was cold and quiet. Don set up his camera. I snapped my tape recorder on and fumbled at my first question.
Roger: Many of your followers during the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s were concerned about what happened to you that got you off of radio and television. Is this something that you don’t want to talk about?...I mean the blacklisting problem?
Pete: No, because it’s very important. It’s a world-wide problem. I’m glad to tell what I know of it.
Roger: There seemed to be a problem at one time when you were involved in a lot of court litigation. I even remember some newspaper reports in the early ‘60’s, where you were held in contempt of court. Can you tell us the whole story?
Pete: Well, I couldn’t tell the whole story. Carl Sandburg has that line... "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and he said: "No, I can tell you all I can, but only the ever living God can tell you the whole truth and if he did, what he’d tell you would freeze your soul with the horror and pity of it all."
So I’d say back in the 1930’s when I first dropped out of school and got involved in singing for labor unions along with Woody Guthrie, I faced the fact that if you got involved in controversial politics, it would probably cause you to lose jobs. For entertainers, that’s the least of your problems; all kinds of people lose jobs—teachers or ditch diggers or cooks because they get involved in controversial politics. And learning how to agree or disagree is the big thing that the world’s got to learn. We tried to solve it with the First Amendment of the Constitution, and we partially did. But Woody and I in 1942 sang a song, "The Sinking Of The Reuben James" on CBS Network Television and the next day comes an article in the N.Y. World Telegram Newspaper..."Commy Folksingers Try To Infiltrate Radio", and that’s the last job we got in radio and TV Woody Guthrie, the composer of "This Land Is Your Land", could not get a job on radio. We figured "The rich guys aren’t going to hire us, so we’ll go sing for the working guys."
But in 1948, the cold war closed in and I couldn’t even sing for the labor unions. So I got used to singing for college students in the 1950’s. Then in 1955, there I was making a living singing for college students and the House Un-American Activities Committee decided to question me along with about thirty other people. I was a very unknown entertainer, relatively speaking, and twenty-nine out of thirty refused to cooperate with the committee because we all felt this committee was basically not interested in exposing conspiracy, just in exposing heresy. I didn’t bother using the Fifth Amendment because I felt I was on stronger ground. For you see, there wasn’t any job they could fire me from, and I really wanted to take a stronger stand. I said, "I feel you guys are unconstitutional". Legally, the Fifth Amendment says you have no right to ask me this question. The First Amendment says you have no right to ask any American citizen such questions. And that’s essentially what I was doing. "Everybody’s got a right to their opinions," I said. "You have a right to your opinion and I’ve got a right to mine, Period." I wasn’t going to talk to them any further. They said, "Mr. Seeger, we do not consider that an adequate answer; you’re going to be cited for contempt, do you realize?" and I said, "Well, I’ll take my chances", and sure enough I was cited for contempt. Six years later, I was sentenced to a year in jail. I didn’t go, but a year after that, I was unanimously acquitted by the Appeals Court. But it wasn’t just on a technicality, as they say, this was a basically important point of constitutional law—that you got a right to your opinion.
In fact, right here in Beacon there was an old fellow running a hardware store that I bought my tools from when I was building my cabin on the side of the mountain. He said, "Well, young fellow, I don’t know your opinion, but it’s American that you got a right to your opinions", and he was as conservative a man as could come, voting for Goldwater and all. But he knew me and felt I was an honest and hardworking person. And so he wasn’t going to fault me, no matter what my opinions were. And that’s what I think of real Americanism—this guy. This is what in the long run is going to save this country. We are a lot of people who have a basic strain of decency, not that we may be fooled for awhile; a good many of us get fooled from time to time, but if we’re not in too much of a hurry, I have faith that this country and the human race can get out of it.
Anyway, in 1964, an ABC television show wouldn’t let me on "Hootenanny" unless I was willing to sign a loyalty oath. Well, I said, "This is ridiculous. I’d sign ‘em, if you sign ‘em, and everybody whose born will sign ‘em, then we’d all be clean." But it’s silly just to pick out one person who you’ve thought had done something wrong by asking him to sign something. It’d be like a young man suddenly asking the girl he’s going to marry to sign a statement that she’s a virgin and have it notarized, or else he won’t marry her. How ridiculous can you be?
Roger: Did you find that you had something that you had to tell to America and all of a sudden someone closed the door in your face?
Pete: Well, they closed it, as it’s always been closed to me, on the mass media, so most of my life I have tried to find other ways to reach people. I’m not singing to millions, but that doesn’t matter. I’m strongly of the opinion we got to get over the idea that if you’re not reaching millions, you’re a failure. This is what the machine has done to us; it’s persuaded us that if we can’t be big we’re nothing. This is a lie. We can be quite small and still be something. When I meet a musician, a good musician who feels he’s failed because he never got a hit record, I say, "You’re out of your mind. You’re a good musician, people love to hear you, and you think you’ve failed because you haven’t got a hit record? Boy, you’ve been brainwashed by the machine".
Roger: When you went into court, you went in with the intention of singing them a song. Do you remember what it was?
Pete: Yup. The song I wanted to sing them was called "Wasn’t That A Time". It was written by an old radical poet friend of mine together with Lee Hays. Lee was the bass in the Weavers. He is the son of a Methodist preacher and a matter of fact, he was saving souls at age twelve as a lay novitiate of sorts. Lee used to say, "I married people and I’ve buried people; can’t say that all people I’ve married have stayed married, but I haven’t had any comebacks on the funerals". Lee lives now in Croton (N.Y.) and Ronnie (Gilbert) now lives on the West Coast, and Fred (Hellerman) (all of the Weavers) is a publisher out of the same office I work out of in New York, with Harold Leventhal, who produces our concerts. Harold is now working on a movie about Woody Guthrie with David Carradine; it’s about two-thirds finished. Anyway, this song (singing)
"Our fathers bled at Valley Forge
the snow was red with blood.
Their faith was warm in Valley Forge their faith was brotherhood.
Wasn’t that a time,
wasn’t that a time a time to try...
the soul of man.
Wasn’t that a terrible time"
Then it has a verse about Gettysburg and the verse about the Fascists came.. .and the last verse says:
"Our faith cries out, we will not fear.
We dare to reach our hand
to other neighbors far and near...
To friends in every land."
And back in the ‘50’s, this implied that you could actually be friends with a Russian or a Chinese. This is quite an acceptable idea right now, but back in the ‘50’s, only "Commie Traitors" could believe such an idea, and there I was singing this song and they wanted to know. .."Did I sing this song?" And I said, "Yes, I know that song and it’s a very good one and I’d be glad to sing it for you, but it’s no concern of this court where I’ve ever sung it".
Roger: Was that part of the case, that..."Did you sing this song"?
Pete: No, it was "Did you sing it at the following places at the following times for the following people?" It was still guilt by association. In other words, if there was a Communist there and I’ve sung this song, then I’m guilty partly too—that’s what they were saying.
Roger: It was certainly hampering one of the most fundamental rights, wasn’t it?
Pete: I think so. There will always be debating and arguing going on about when things are so dangerous that you’ve got to be strict. I’ll admit that you can’t put down in the First Amendment to the Constitution all the dangers of this world. For example, you and I, we believe in freedom of the press, don’t we? But would we want to see somebody put down in a little publication "How to build an atom bomb in your basement for fifty dollars"? And put it on the newsstand?
I have come to the conclusion that nobody in the whole world really believes in complete freedom at all times...Justice Holmes was right—that you don’t have the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. But what actually is shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre? It’s a poetic simile, and you have to argue when it applies.
And on the other hand, I’m convinced that one reason that America has been able to weather 200 years through some pretty big crises is because of this extraordinary tradition that the First Amendment gave us. And when we got in trouble, it was when the First Amendment was ignored.
That’s why the South was not able to get rid of slavery itself. The first abolitionists, the first antislavery societies, were in the South—before they were in New England — but the Southern slave holders would not allow it. They hounded these people out of the South. But some stayed down there working underground in the 1840’s and 1850’s to try to save the country they loved. They didn’t want to run away from home. But, uh, if the First Amendment had been followed, it’s very possible that the Civil War never would have taken place. The Southerners themselves decided that slavery was something that sooner or later had to go.
Roger: Don’t you think we’re going back? Don wrote a piece in Pickin’ awhile ago about going back and about getting back to the earth - camping out, back to the soil, bring your own instruments.
Don: That was the Harrison, Arkansas story. Conceptually, the thing was trying to say that the difference between the folk thing you had in Newport was there you brought the artist to the people in a relatively urban setting; but now the movement is really bringing the people out to meet artists on their own home ground...our Bluegrass festivals all over the country do that.
Pete: The funny thing is during the whole period of the Newport festival, my wife and I were trying our best to persuade the people who ran it, to have camping and encourage small workshops. They said, "Oh no, it can’t be done, it’s impossible, we have no space, and so on and so on. No one will come".. .and that’s one of the reasons we finally discontinued working with them.
Don: It was fifteen years ago and we had just come back from Europe having spent a year abroad, and camping was so obvious, like everybody did it, but the Newport police were going to "burn our tent down" unless we took it down in five minutes. I wrote George Wein a scathing letter, and he wrote back something like "next year I have two complimentary tickets waiting for you, so come back, and we love to have your support"...anyway we didn’t go back.
Pete: Well, George is fifty now—and I think he may be learning.
Roger: I’m sure you are aware of the tremendous image you have created.
Pete: Not really.
Roger: I was hoping you’d say yes...and then I could ask you how you felt about it.
Pete: Such as it is, I’m not enthusiastic about it because any image is an oversimplification. I’ve been quoting for years that line of Whitehead’s, "Strive for simplicity and learn to mistrust it" and he also said "No one should speak more clearly than he thinks and. ..any image is probably an oversimplification," so I’m uh, to the extent to which there is an image, I guess I’m not happy about it. At the same time, I try and expose some of the inconsistencies. I was telling you that I’ve done so many foolish things in my life, more than the average person. One of them was that I fathered three nice little kids and spent most of my life traveling away from home. Now they are all grown up and I realize how much I’ve missed and I realize that it’s much too late.
Roger: Why were you doing so much traveling?
Pete: Well, a musician has to travel if he is going to make a living, and I wanted to reach people because I was denied a chance to reach people through radio or TV or Hollywood. So I had to travel. If I got a letter from Seattle or England, I would go over there and sing for them.
Roger: Do you still feel that way today?
Pete: Well, I travel a little bit, but I refuse most offers. I’ll sing maybe once a week out of New York and the rest of the week I’m in the Hudson Valley.
Roger: Are you doing that primarily because the "Clearwater" and the Sloop Club are most important to you now?
Pete: Well it’s a lot of fun. Every Sunday I’m down here on the waterfront and I teach them how to sail and do a little carpentry and just mess around down and around with the river, rapping with people. And if it gets a little too cold, we go inside and sit around the stove and sing some songs. Also saving this river is a very interesting battle. It’s only one little corner of the world, but you’ve got to start where you are. So starting right here along the Hudson,.. .within the last two months the work we’ve done on the Hudson is now having a national effect. This chemical, PCB, polychlorinated biphenols, is probably going to have to be banned like DDT. It causes too much sickness in people, not just animals. But it was here in the Hudson that finally the story broke and it was the Hudson River sloopers that raised a holler. My daughter made some banners to hang on the "Clearwater", thirty-eight feet long and two and a half feet wide, saying "NO MORE PCB", and we sailed it up to Albany and got it on television.
Roger: But when you were a young man and traveling through the country by yourself and with your companions, you certainly had a chance to hear a lot of the beginnings of Bluegrass, when it was in the form of what you probably called at the time "hillbilly" music or "Old Time". When did you hear your first Bluegrass music?
Pete: Actually, when I traveled, I heard a lot of different kinds of banjo picking, double thumbing, a fair amount of frailing or what we sometimes call rapping or beating—some people who kind of strum it, like you pick up with your index finger and strum down with a back stroke. But I don’t think I heard real Bluegrass until 1950 when I was in New York City, and Tom Paley, who was at that time with the New Lost City Ramblers, told me about this extraordinary kind of banjo picking by a guy named Earl Scruggs. Just about my age incidentally. And I went around to Rosalie Allen’s, I think that was her name. She had a little country and western record shop in mid-downtown Manhattan and got a record of "Bluegrass Breakdown" and it blew my mind - how does he do it? And Tom says, "Well, he uses three fingers, he does this and that", and I tried to slow the thing down to a growl and transcribe some of them, rather amateurishly. And in one of the Weavers’ recordings, I tried doing a little three finger pickin’ myself, in 1952; it was called "Hard Ain’t It Hard". First time I tried to do it.. .Wow!
But I heard what Bluegrass came out of because when I was sixteen in 1935, I went to Bascom Lunsford’s Mountain Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and that’s really what got me playing a banjo. Up to that time, I’d strum the ukulele and the tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and when I heard Samantha Baumgarner lean back in her rocking chair and play "Lord Thomas" or "Lord Randall" or one of them other "Lords", why I just thought that was wonderful. And Bascom himself gave me a little ten-minute lesson in banjo picking. Oh he was a wonderful guy. He died last year around age ninety and yet it was the perseverance of people like him that refused to allow this music to be buried, and he helped to bring it out. Everybody helps in this world including some people who disagree with each other violently, you know! I sometimes think of the human race as being a chain—the links are painted different colors, but underneath, it’s the strength of the chain that does the job.
Roger: For some reason, you still chose to follow the route of work songs, union songs, and folk music as we know it today, and you steered away from that which you heard which gave you your beginning interest.
Pete: As a city person, I was exposed to hundreds of different interests; I was exposed to jazz and to calypso, classical, European music, Brahms, Vivaldi, Bach that my mother’s violin students played, Stravinski, I heard recordings of Indonesian gamelans and South African choruses. So I was susceptible like any other young person to trying to do too many things. Now my younger brother, Mike (Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers), has been much wiser I think than I have. He decided early what he liked and decided to stick to it. I got into what I did because of the message, and at the union and labor camps, I had large groups of people together. (Here Pete tuned up his banjo and sang a passage from "Harry Sims".)
"Harry Sims was a pal of mine
we labored side by side
Expecting to be shot on sight
or taken for a ride
By them dirty cooperator gun thugs
who roam from town to town
A shootin’ down the union men
where ‘ere they may be found
Harry Sims was walking down the track
one bright sunshiny day
He was a youth of courage
his step was light and gay
He did not know the gun thugs
was hiding on the way
To kill our brave young comrade
this bright sunshiny day
Harry Sims was killed on Brush Street
in nineteen and thirty-two
He organized the miners
into the N.M.U.
He gave his life in struggle
that was all that he could do
He died all for the union
also for me and you."
Jim Garland is a man now in his sixties. He was blacklisted because he was an organizer for the National Miner’s Union. He wrote this song. He knew Harry Sims personally. Harry was a nineteen-year old Jewish youth from Springfield, Massachusetts, had gone down just like kids did in the ‘60’s, went down to the South to try to help people, because he thought they needed help. And for his trouble, he was shot in the stomach, by local gun thugs. They brought him to a hospital, but it was a company hospital and they wouldn’t take him unless they had the cash money. And while Jim Garland was going around and raising the cash, Harry sat there on the curb holding his guts and bleeding to death. They took him and he died on the operating table. And so Jim wrote this song. It was a very angry ballad. Working class fights the bosses. And now in this modern age, you can look back and say "Look what happened to the unions". I don’t think that’s all the answer; you could just as easily sneer at the Vietnam war and say "Look what happened in 1970 and 1976". The truth is that Harry Sims was a real hero and Jim Garland was performing the function of ballad singers throughout history. And I hope that future ballad singers will do the same thing. I’m not a good song writer like Bob Dylan, but I’ve tried to do the same things.When I put on a concert, I mix it up ‘cause you don’t want to do a whole concert of sad ballads. At the same time, I don’t want to do a whole concert of sweetness and light either. That ends up with like a whole meal of nothing but zip.
Roger: Were you sailing long before the Hudson River program started?
Pete: No, about fifteen or twenty years ago I started. I never lived near the water, so when I moved up near the Hudson, I learned.
I don’t know if I answered that last question, but I was trying to tie the influence of Bascom together with the other music.
Roger: Well, my whole basis for the question is that Don mentioned to me a few months ago that he’d felt you’ve been a tremendous kindling flame for many people who have gotten into Bluegrass. Bill Keith told me that you were really a big influence to him. I don’t remember speaking to anyone who hasn’t remarked about Pete Seeger. You have been a big "root" to so many in our music. Don said to me, "Gee, Pete Seeger might have been the Father of Bluegrass music if he had a mind to." You were exposed to so much in your traveling....
Pete: I think that I would have to have been the jack of all trades to do it. A real performer just puts everything out of his mind and concentrates. Family, friends, everything just goes by the boards, and just concentrates on not being second best but that you’re the best. And I’ve been just distracted all my life doing a little this and a little that.
But I am deeply proud that while I have failed in an awfully lot of things, I feel that there’s a lot of people who have gotten interested in the idea of making music through hearing me. I joke about it. They figure, well, if that guy can sing, why can’t I?
Roger: You know, we spoke about what happened to folk music in the early ‘60’s.. .It got commercialized and became a huge commercial thing. How do you feel about that and what has it done to folk music?
Pete: Some people have learned a lesson from that experience, and said "The heck with trying to get on the top 40. The heck with money, period, let’s just go ahead and enjoy life and make music with our friends." And it’s almost funny to think how in thousands, for all I know, tens of thousands, of places around the U.S.A. are little knots of people making the most beautiful music, but hardly anybody knows about it. And if someone comes up and says we want to put you on TV, they say don’t bother me. "We’ll pay you a lot of money," they say. ..and they answer, "Well, how much will you pay me? $500? Well it’s not worth it, get somebody else." These people have seen what happened to the private life of a professional performer. Damn hard to keep a family, remember. I keep quoting Doc Watson; when someone asked if he advises them to take up music, he says, "Only as a last resort". But one of the lessons we learned from 1964 is that good music doesn’t need the media if you know how to make it. On the other hand, the funny thing is that the world has the media now and I’m anxious to see the media used better.
Roger: How?
Pete: I would like to see the media get out of the top 40 trap. Print, that is paper, is starting to do it because in this day, printing paper is relatively cheap and printing presses are available. It’s much easier to publish a magazine like Pickin’ here than it would be, in say, Trinidad, for example. They have to order their paper from a foreign country and their machines from a foreign country. They don’t have a circulation to support at all. But paper and print have been relatively free to experiment. TV is in a real straight jacket. Now we talk about TV in some countries of the world as being in a censorship straightjacket. But I don’t think it’s any more a straightjacket than we’re in here - we’re in a money straightjacket. You go to any TV station with a great idea and say, "Boy, I know 50,000 people who would give their eye-teeth if they could see a program on this subject." And they’ll look you right in the eye and say, "50,000? Are you out of your mind? If we can’t reach five million, we’re losing money." And us, we’d say, "Well, how much does it cost to run your station for an hour?" "Well, the station costs so much and so." And when you come right to it, it would be possible if it were not for a competitive economic system. That means you’re either in competition with the big guys or you’re dead. There’s no room in America for a little TV station who is just scraping by. ‘Cause you’re out-priced in everything. ..union wages, for one. The union wages are set up for the big networks. So to do the simplest little thing costs an arm and a leg. Like fifteen or twenty dollars an hour to move a chair. And for me to go on to a talk show—fifteen minutes on a talk show—they pay me several hundred dollars, it’s ridiculous. But that’s what TV has become, it’s unnecessary, and one of these days anybody who is concerned for the future of the world will have to look at TV and see what can be done about it. Now at the moment, the only people who are really concerned are groups like the parents who are worried about what the children are looking at, or a few political-minded people who are upset because their point of view is never represented. And that goes for John Birchers, as well as the socialists. But the air belongs to everybody just like the Hudson River belongs to everybody. The Federal law says that the air belongs to the people. Herbert Hoover in 1927 said that it is "incredible to think that the air should be run by the advertisers". But, at the moment, that’s what the situation is. If you want to get good Bluegrass, you’ve got to put on the record, because you won’t see it that often on the TV.
Roger: I guess they don’t feel the audience is big enough, as you pointed out.
Pete: Well, now several things can be done about it. One of them is ideally the United Nations or somebody who would start bouncing programs off the satellites and make TV available to everybody in the whole world at a low price. (Just then, a large fish jumped out of the water near the dock we were on, and as we all looked towards the rings where the fish exited, Pete said...)
Pete: You get lots of fish in the Hudson, just don’t eat ‘em (pause)...Here’s what’s going to happen to TV, and that is the video disc, which may break it, in the same way the LP record made it possible to break the monopoly of Victor, Decca, and Columbia all through the ‘30’s. Three companies had ninety-five percent of the business. The moment LP was invented, their days were numbered and now the Motown, the Nashville, and a hundred other places have a chance to get heard. And when video discs become general, it means that you are going to be seeing things, not just hearing them. Then who knows, it may even be that instead of having hundreds of tons of paper weighing down our libraries, we may be putting them on tape or video discs or microfilm.
Don: Pete...you should read our November editorial. There’s a fellow by the name of Doe Williams in the West Virginia area who wrote a letter to the commissioners of the FCC requesting a little more sense of fair balance for "local generation on TV because nothing is locally generated anymore on TV We took a very positive position on that as a way for the little guy to beat the network and the TV as a medium itself.
Pete: Funny thing is that the big guys are in the trap, too. I went down to Atlanta two weeks ago to a conference of ACT - Action for Children’s Television, started by some parents in Boston who were horrified by what the children were looking at, and in four years they had a number of small successes like we’ve had here in the Hudson. But they keep running up against the hard economic facts that the large corporations are following the laws, the rules of the game. They said "Look, if we’re in competition with them, how do you expect us to quit this if they’re doing it?" And it’s one big world.
Roger: One thing that’s always a concern...There are so many people to get to...the machine is so large.
Pete: That’s right. In six months, ABC destroyed the definition of the word "Hootenanny" which Woody and I worked for twenty years to build up. In six months, with no trouble at all, they steamrollered us. And so you’re right. We’ve got to pay attention to the media, but at the same time, I think you’ve got to work at the other end. There’s a quotation that some kid painted on the side of my barn. He wanted to paint some pictures and I said, "Well, take the back side of my barn." And when he’d finished scribbling, here was a quote from William James. It said:
"I am done with great things and big things
With big institutions and great success
And I am for all those tiny invisible molecular moral forces
That creep from individual to individual
through the crannies of the world,
like so many rootlets or like the capillary
oozing of water.
Yet which if you give them time will lend
the hardest monuments of man’s pride."
Isn’t that great? And so I’m going to work on. Since I can’t get on TV, I’ll work at the other end.
Roger: Do you think you’ll be able to get back on TV?
Pete: Indirectly...yes, I’m sure.
Roger: How about directly?
Pete: Once in awhile I get on a talk show, like the Today Show, or something like that, and sing a song.
Don: What ever happened to the series you did for public television called "Rainbow Quest"?
Pete: "Rainbow Quest" could have kept on going if we had twenty stations that would play it. One hundred dollars a week is all that it would have cost, but only thirteen carried it and we lost all the money that we had, and we couldn’t put in any more. We put in every cent of savings that we had.
Don: Do you still have them in the can?
Pete: Thirty-nine shows. ..I think historically they’re going to be valuable. Interviews and singing and playing with Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt....
Don: How many records have you actually cut?
Pete: I usually say too many—I guess about fifty or sixty or something like that.
Roger: Have you known Doc Watson for a long time?
Pete: Yes, I guess since about 1962.
Roger: Where did you meet him?
Pete: Through my brother (Mike). He met him playing guitar for Clarence.. .can’t remember his name. Fine old man. He died about four or five years ago. He had a fiddle band down there and my brother Mike met Doc and then brought him up to Newport, and then I went down and visited with him in his home. Did you know that Doc wired his whole house himself? Blind as he is. He’s one of the world’s most fantastic people. His family was against him marrying. But they said, "Oh, no. A blind person’s got certain things he must understand he can’t do." So he and his wife just cut loose, and he wired his whole house electrically, all the junction boxes and fuse boxes himself. He walks from his home to the little store, about a half mile, with no assistance on a busy road, just tapping his cane. I said, "How do you know a car doesn’t come along and hit you?" He says, "Well, I stay on the side of the road." Well, I says, "How do you know?" And you know, he can tell by the sound, whether he’s near the edge of the road or not.. .by the sound! Well, when you lose one sense, you strengthen another.
Roger: When you play for audiences, do you always perform by yourself now?
Pete: Pretty much. I like to sing with a group of other people, so the thing I do is make the audience my group. For years this has been what I enjoy doing. I like to do some guitar picking and a little banjo picking, give the audience a rest occasionally and let them just listen. If I can’t get ‘em all singing with me at the end, I feel I haven’t really succeeded.
Roger: I don’t remember sitting out in the audience where you haven’t had everybody singing.
Pete: Well, it has happened. Once I was singing for the Kansas City Art Institute; these talented young people from small towns were eager to go to Paris and Greenwich Village.. .but me, I come to them and start singing the ballad of "Jesse James". And they looked at each other and said, "Well, this is what Uncle Joe does on the back porch and we’re ashamed of that".. .Well, they wouldn’t open their mouths. I couldn’t get ‘em to sing one word.
Don: Have you considered the possibility of taking the alternate tack with regard to the media? Maybe you might think in terms of having the media work for you, ‘cause that’s what it’s really designed to do.
Pete: Be more explicit.
Don: In other words, those thousands of groups that are around the country who are playing the kind of music we’re talking about — when the media comes to them and asks "Don’t you want exposure?" and they say no, really what they’re saying is "It’s about time that you work for me, rather than me work for you." They are saying, "If I’m important enough, the media would seek me out. I must have some other value." In other words, TV might make it a news value rather than an entertainment value. The media goes crazy running for a simple news piece, like murder or rape or political corruption.
Pete: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. If TV had any sense, they would have done it themselves. As it is, we’re going to have to make TV do it. We’re going to have to force TV for the good of the world, not just for the good of small people. These people are making music themselves, they don’t need TV, TV needs them—and the millions and tens of millions of kids who are looking at TV need this too. Charles Kuralt started the idea with his "On The Road" series, but so far it’s just Charles Kuralt and that means it’s just tokenism. Tokenism is a step in the right direction which if it leads to more steps in the right direction...then that’s good. But if it’s a step in the right direction which prevents us from taking another step, well, they’d say, "You don’t need anything more, you’ve got Charles Kuralt. What do you need anything else for?" On the contrary, we got to say "no." There’s a hell of a lot of things in this country which TV isn’t showing and TV is going to have to show it to us. They say, "Tell them to come into the studio." And we’ve got to say "Uh, uh, no. You’ve got the cameras now that are light and portable and you got the recording machines, light and portable. You go where it is." In fact, one of the worst things about the "Hootenanny Show" was that it always took place in a big studio environment. If you had a real hootenanny show, you’d go to all the little nooks and crannies of this country and you’d have a Bluegrass get-together here, and a gospel church sing there, and Lord knows what somewhere else.
Don: Thanks for saying that...It’s what most of my editorials try to say, but you said it best.
Roger: What was it that happened with the Weavers when Eric Darling came in and took your place?
Pete: In 1957, it was really very simple. I was trying to sing on my own — and I did. And the Weavers said, "Can’t you sing with us, too?" Well, maybe once upon a time I could, but I couldn’t and also have a family here in Beacon. I wasn’t seeing enough of them. To try and be a member of the Weavers, which is like trying to be a member of one family, and have a family here with kids that were growing up without me, and also go and travel on my own—it was just too much. In addition, I was trying to do some movie work. I’d been able to afford to go out and get a camera and I wanted to do some research on folk music techniques. I was wrong; it was one too many things. I should have let somebody else do it. I had eventually let my son take the camera and do some work. That’s really why I asked Eric to take my place. I was the one who suggested that he take my place. Funny how, when the Weavers got together in 1962 for a reunion, our voices just slipped back into the old groove. In fact, just five years ago, we had a birthday party and another reunion and our voices just went back to the old parts again.
Roger: I think that’s a group, the Weavers, that is, that this country will never forget.
Pete: Well, what I would like to see is groups like that in every community. Funny, I used to think I was a radical, because people used to tell me I was a radical, because I believed in socialism. But I believe, I now believe I’m more conservative and traditional than the average person. I’m really sorry to see change occur too quick. I think that the human body can change; it is certainly the most adaptable organism, more adaptable than birds or fishes and so on. Nevertheless, if we try and change too quickly, we lose an awful lot. There’s times we have to change very quickly. Probably you and I are alive today because our ancestors could change quickly. When the ice age suddenly came across us, we learned to confront a new kind of animal or something. I think that one of the most fascinating jobs of these few generations has been the idea of admitting that there must be change while admitting that there must be tradition, and how to balance these two together. Every corner of the world is facing it. And if you think we’re having trouble, think of what Africa and Asia are having ‘cause their old is so old and their new is so new. I once went to Japan and said, "Why don’t you make up new words to your old tunes like we do here?" Well, they couldn’t get it down. It’s just not done. Their old is too old and their new is too new. In America, it wasn’t quite so difficult.
And so, making up a ballad of Harry Sims, using an old English melody with words which are of the 1930’s, is not such a terribly difficult thing to do. The big thing that Woody did for me and a lot of other people was to have a smooth blend between the old and the new.
For other countries, this is much more difficult. I won’t say they’re not struggling with it. One reason I’ve been to the socialist countries to play and sing to them is because of my curiosity to see how they’re solving it. Somewhere they’re succeeding; somewhere they’re failing abysmally. Russia’s idea of folk music is to dress it in costumes and put it on stages under spotlights. Huge choreographed extravaganzas. And they’re great circuses. But it’s not folk music.
Roger: Sort of like going through this life looking for the next restaurant, only to find out that maybe that one back down the road is the place we should go back to. I think if we can go back and choose those things that we found while going forward, and put them together, it would be a nice place to start from again.
Pete: A simile I love to use is. ..I love to hike in the mountains, and anyone who has hiked in the mountains has had the experience of getting off the trail and working their way back to the trail. You’ve gone on what you think is a shortcut and it’s led you to a ledge or something that you can’t get over. And you have to go back. In a sense, I think this is what we’re doing right now - people experimenting with all sorts of fancy ways of making music and we’re coming back to some wonderful old-fashioned ways.
Roger: What is going on in Pete Seeger’s life today? What are you into now?
Pete: Well, I’d like to learn how to retire gracefully. I think this is a job which everybody has got to learn. And that doesn’t mean simply quitting all your work and sitting home and looking at TV or even moving to Florida and spending the rest of your life fishing. But how to keep an active life within the physical limitations of growing older. I can’t sing four times a day like I used to and my brain isn’t as nimble, not that it ever was that nimble, but I believe that you should do what you can do and participate. In ancient times, older people were treasured because they were the repositories of knowledge. People felt that "you can advise us because you remember what was done in the old days".
Now we don’t rely on older people so much. We just look up in a book and find out what happened in the old days. And the tragedy of it is that an older person feels that he is useless. This would not be true if they were participating all along. Now here in the Beacon Sloop Club, I’m very useful to them. As of this year, I’m no longer president of the Sloop Club, but I’m useful to them because I can remember what went on here a few years ago; it isn’t written down. I serve a real traditional function within this community. I think that older people should not move out of their home communities, but should stay in there and fight for the right to be a member of their home community. I’d like to see what the "Gray Panthers" are fighting for. I think it’s foolish to fight for better nursing homes or better retirement homes in Florida. I’d rather fight for better pensions to allow you to live in your own home—right in the home where you lived all your life, and better pensions so you can afford this, so your kids are glad to have you around. There’s room for you if you’re not living right on top of them.
My wife’s father lived in a little house one hundred feet from our house for the last ten years of his life - couldn’t have worked out better. He enjoyed puttering around in the garden, he enjoyed being with his grandchildren, and he got up when he wanted to, made his own breakfast, did what he wanted, came in and had supper with us. He was a member of the family. If he ever had to
live right in our house with us, then it would have been difficult for him as well as for us. His schedule was different from ours. He’d get up in the middle of the night and do some exercises. He liked to get up early and things like that.
So you ask me what I’m doing now—I’d like to learn how to retire gracefully. I’m not going to quit singing until I die, but I just won’t sing so often. And I’d like to learn how to live in the community without being ostracized from it, but also without having to shut my mouth everytime I have an unpopular opinion.
Roger: Is this community open to you?
Pete: Well, it is as conservative a community as any one. Most small communities are conservative. The townspeople here know I’m a radical politically, but they’re not going to kick me out of town. At the Sloop Club here they think we’re a bunch of nuts, but they say, "At least they’re cleaning up the waterfront".
Roger: Tell us about the "Clearwater" and about the program.
Pete: I think a lot of musicians at sometime in life like to see their music helping along some effort. People used music to win wars or in this modern age to win peace. People used music to build churches and, in this particular case, we’re using music to save a river. And there have been thousands of musicians who have helped save this river. Every time the "Clearwater" sails up and down, we pull up on shore and we put up posters and say everybody come down for a free waterfront festival, free music. We have homemade food, too, and games. We get the local Bluegrass band and sometimes a rock band, or classical music or jazz. Don McLean has come and Harry Chapin. Usually it’s just local musicians. And they come down and volunteer their services, and why? Because they also would like to see the Hudson River cleaned up. And although we don’t pay them a cent, we don’t even give transportation, they come down and we have some great music here. I’ve been very proud to be part of it.
Roger: Do you have a message to give to the world, if you could say the most important things on your mind?
Pete: I feel like quoting John Henry.
"Before you let that steam drill
beat you down,
Die with that hammer in your hand."
And that would go for men and women alike. Before we let the machine age kill us all, let’s do our damnest. And playing good music is part of the battle. Making friends and influencing people is part of the battle. I suppose I should try harder to do work with the media, but I think I’d rather not trade on my reputation just to get on TV myself, because there are a lot of young performers who should be getting on. I attended this thing in Atlanta, and just asked them one question. I said, "All you people are interested in making better television for children. Is there anybody who’s trying to persuade children that there are better things to do than look at TV?" And they really didn’t know the answer. Some of them said, "Look at some of our educational programs." But there is no reason that a program about teaching a child how to use carpentry tools just couldn’t be as exciting as anything. I hope I live long enough to see television realizing that. After all, this is true of paper and print, too. If your whole purpose in life is just to get people to read, you’d feel you’ve failed. The purpose of your writing is to get people interested in making music, right? And you feel you’ve succeeded if there are thousands more people who realize what fun it is to do some pickin’. Now if TV was done right, they would likewise feel successful, if instead of having five million people look at a football game, they persuaded even five thousand to go out and play football.