Pete Seeger: 1919-2014

by Julian Spivey
“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender” proclaimed the inscription on Pete Seeger’s banjo and it’s a motto he lived up to all his life. The legendary folk singer died on Monday, Jan. 27, at the age of 94.
​
Seeger is one of the most influential artists in the history of popular music and continued performing and dedicating his life to important causes until the very end. He was essentially a human timeline from the folk music days of Woody Guthrie through the genre’s renaissance today as part of the Americana tagline.

Pete Seeger was American music, even and especially during a time when Joe McCarthy and his cronies were accusing him and others of being un-American.

Seeger never wavered in his beliefs and, like his peer Guthrie, was one of the very first popular American artists to use his music for good, for civil service, as a means of civil protest. It was this aspect of his career that influenced so many artists, particularly those of the Vietnam era, to express their frustration and distaste for things like war and racism.

Seeger’s “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy” and “Where Have All The Flower’s Gone?” became popular cries to end war in Vietnam in the ‘60s and he notably performed ‘Big Muddy’ on an episode of the hip, counter-culture variety series “The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour,” with his performance infamously being censored by CBS, before the network relented and allowed him to perform it again on another episode.
Seeger also helped to popularize folk songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome” (adapted from a gospel composed by Charles Albert Tindley) and Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” (with the popular folk group The Weavers), as well as write some of the genre’s most notable and greatest works like “If I Had a Hammer.”

Seeger also wrote “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which would go on to become a number one hit for The Byrds in 1965. The song was written based on Bible verses in The Book of Ecclesiastes, and according to Rolling Stone, since the song takes lyrics from this Biblical passage it makes it the chart-topper with the oldest lyrics.

Seeger would prove to be a huge influence of Bruce Springsteen, who recorded an entire album dedicated to his songs or songs popularized by Seeger with “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” released in 2006 and would go on to win a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. The two would become good friends and it was Springsteen that talked Seeger into performing “This Land Is Your Land” at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009.           

Springsteen would call Seeger: “the father of American folk music.”

Seeger always backed up what he sang, truly being an activist first, musician second. He refused to give into McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunt, becoming blacklisted at his most popular period, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and at the elderly age of his late 80s and early 90s even protested the war in Iraq and performed and participated with Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Seeger fought for good and fought off the hate his banjo promised it would. He fought against war, he fought against racism, and he fought against those trying to take basic American freedoms.

Pete Seeger was a great American hero who performed great American songs.