Pete Seeger, 1919–2014

Having roamed America with Woody Guthrie singing union ballads and anti-war songs, folk singer Pete Seeger made no bones about his leftist politics. In 1955 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked whether he’d ever sung for Communists. “I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers,” Seeger replied, “and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody.” Even after offering to sing for the committee, he was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison. By the time that verdict was reversed on appeal in 1962, however, Seeger had become the godfather of the American folk movement, despite being banned from airplay. And almost five decades later, in 2009, he was singing “This Land Is Your Land” with Bruce Springsteen at President Obama’s inauguration.

Seeger was born in New York City to a musicologist father and a violinist mother, said The New York Times. As a boy he traveled with his father documenting folk music and “became enthralled by rural traditions,” in particular the five-string banjo he first heard in North Carolina. He studied at Harvard, where he joined the Young Communist League, but dropped out after two years. Soon afterward he met Guthrie, “a songwriter who shared his love of vernacular music and agitprop ambitions,” and sang in union halls across the country during World War II. In 1940 he co-founded the Almanac Singers, which switched from anti-war to patriotic songs as soon as Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Soon after, Seeger was drafted and “assigned to a unit of performers.”

After the war he was a member of the Weavers, co-writing “If I Had a Hammer” and making a 1950 hit of Lead Belly’s song “Good Night, Irene,” said The Washington Post. Seeger left the Communist Party in 1949, later saying he’d thought for too long that “Stalin was just a hard driver, not a supremely cruel dictator.” His banishment from television, however, persisted until 1967, when “the Smothers Brothers negotiated a guest appearance” for him on their show. By then he’d become “one of the most enduring and best-loved folk singers of his generation.”

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“Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger,” Arlo Guthrie once said. Seeger revived “On Top of Old Smokey” and wrote “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” He was also “credited with popularizing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” said the Associated Press, helping it to become “the anthem of the civil rights movement” by changing the original “will” to “shall,” a word he thought “opens up the mouth better.”

Even as his protest themes shifted from fascism to racism to Farm Aid to Occupy Wall Street, Seeger’s life had a remarkable constancy, said USA Today. “For more than 60 years, he lived in Beacon, N.Y., with his wife, Toshi, in a cabin he mostly built himself on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.” That river was one of his favorite causes. In 1969 he and others commissioned a sailboat, the Clearwater, to sail the then highly polluted lower reaches of the Hudson to raise money and awareness for its cleanup. Thanks in part to his efforts, the river is now the cleanest it’s been in years. “It’s all these relatively little things,” he once said, “which are going to save the human race.”