Yes, I know him, had many of his records and those of the Weavers and listened incessantly. Once I went to a concert by him at Carnegie Hall and even spoke with him briefly at intermission. Of course, I am of that age. I even owned a Peggy Seeger (his sister) album.
But the last time I saw him left a sour taste in my mouth. It was February, 1993. The following day would bring the first World Trade Center bombing. My daughter was a member of a group of singers called The Streetsingers that Seeger sort of ran. They were scheduled to give a concert at a Brooklyn HS as part of Black History month. Seeger came and welcomed the mostly black audience and started by proclaiming what a great melting pot New York was with large populations of people from Africa, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Domincan Republic, and Puerto Rico. He refrained from mentioning 25% of the NYC population, obviously out of deference to the blacks. I lost all respect for him at that point.
I saw Pete at Ravinia in 1977, the summer after my freshman year at shcool. He was old then. My older brother (who went with us) told me that Pete was getting pretty old and I had better see him while I had the chance. (Of course, I was in Chicago that whole summer, but I never got the chance to see Steve Goodman; I guess my brother thought there wasn’t much urgency to see Mr. Goodman).
Although I wasn’t yet 20 at the time, I knew who he was. Of course, I grew up watching The Smothers Brothers and similar and my parents listened to folk music a lot.
I also remember on of my brother’s friends was an avid audiophile; he would buy albums at the rate of one to four a week, and had for decades. This guy bought and listened to a lot of all kinds of music. This guy said he bought one from a guy named Bob, thinking it might be a relative of Pete. Was unpleasantly surprised. When I got back to school, Night Moves was all over the radio, but I refused to like it, or even listen to it, because of what his guy had said about him.
OK, I’m a freak - I admit it. But as much as I liked his music I really knew him more for his politics. And while I may not have agreed with everything he supported, he spoke well for his beliefs.
Of course. Old folkie here. Dave Van Ronk’s Mayor of Macdougal Street is a fine account of his life as a young musician & leftist back in the 50’s/60’s. In those days he could be savagely critical of what he considered Seeger’s party-line Communism. Then he wrote this:
van Ronk had mellowed quite a bit by the time his memoirs were collected. But he wrote this back when he was an angry young man. And he loved Pete Seeger.
There was a thread when Pete Seeger passed away. (Has it been almost two years? :smack: ) In the earlier thread many of us made comments similar to those we’d make here: Bridget posted the quote from Dave van Ronk. Someone needed to contribute by connecting Seeger and Stalin. I linked to “My get-up-and-go has got up and went” from the Weavers’ Reunion concert. I see Ronnie Gilbert passed away a few months ago. Fred Hellerman is still alive.
No idea, but yesterday I was looking for Little Boxes and I hit on his cover of it. It sounded good.
ETA after a quick skip of the thread: damnit, now I have a hammer hammering all over my ears!
I play oldtime banjo, so yes. It is kind of the law that I have to know who he is. In fact I listened to his album where he visited Sesame Street earlier today.
I taught a college course on “Global Sustanability.” During the section on post-1965 US environmental activism, I told the students all about Pete and the Clearwater. What a brilliant idea (not his alone): build a replica of a beautiful old ship; sail up and down the Hudson, inviting anyone to come aboard for a few minutes or a few weeks; get them interested in why the river was so dirty and what could be done about it. It worked!! It was especially clever to make it something kids would love.
As I noted above, I grew up a few hundred feet from the river’s shore (right wher they’re currently replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge). At age five --1975-- I went to a day camp where we’d swim in the river, but it was just barely swimmable – the cleanup sparked by the Clearwater was just beginning to have an effect. Now it’s much cleaner, and some of the fish have returned.
British, aged 67 – extremely unmusical, but had a long time ago, a sort of half-baked enthusiasm for folk music: in the course of that, came across Pete Seeger and his stuff. Context here, was non-political – from an “art” point of view only.
“This land is my land,
It isn’t your land,
I’ve got a shotgun,
And you don’t got one,
If you don’t get off,
I’ll blow your head off,
This land is Private Property.”
