Pete Seeger | 1919-2014: Folk singer mixed music with activism
ALBANY, N.Y. —
Buoyed by his characteristically soaring spirit, the surging crowd around him and a pair of canes, Pete Seeger walked through the streets of New York leading an Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011.
Although he would later admit that the attention embarrassed him, the moment brought back memories as he instructed yet another generation of young people how to effect change through song and determination — as he had done during the past seven decades as a history-sifting singer and gentle rabble-rouser.
The banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk-music heritage died on Monday. He was 94.
With his lanky frame, worn banjo and full beard, Seeger was an iconic folk-music figure.
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He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and wrote or co-wrote If I Had a Hammer; Turn, Turn, Turn; Where Have All the Flowers Gone; and Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.
He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his fingers poised over the strings of his banjo.
In 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a
national folk revival with the Weavers. The group — Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman — churned out hit recordings of Goodnight, Irene; Tzena, Tzena, Tzena and On Top of Old Smoky.
“Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger,” Arlo
Guthrie once said.
His musical career was always entwined with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River.
Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.
Seeger called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the music he, Guthrie,
Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter and others had created or preserved.
His return to network television on the
Smothers Brothers show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist.
Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 and won a Grammy Award in 1997 for the album Pete.
Seeger was born in New York on May 3, 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to religious dissenters of Colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin and taught; his father, Charles, was a musicologist.
He learned the five-string banjo, which he played the rest of his life. On the skin of Seeger’s banjo was the phrase, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
He married Toshi Seeger in 1943, and the couple raised three children. Toshi Seeger died in July at age 91.
In his later years, he continued to take part in peace protests.
“The idea of using music to try to get the world together,” he said, “is now all over the place."