Re: Pete Seeger: Dead at 94
If I had a hammer, I'd make this land my land cuz it ain't yours.
Re: Pete Seeger: Dead at 94
The above is why I don't actually write music. I rewrite a LOT of lyrics, but don't write my own songs.
hehehe
But, commie, yes, good singer, no, writer, not bad - but still a commie.
Only post this because when I was a kid I sang those songs before I really knew what they meant, who wrote them or who he was. And because I'm learning to play "folk music" - because, honestly I LIKE folks music.
Pete Seeger, famed folksong crooner and writer, dead at 94
Seeger was an iconic figure in folk music. He performed with the great Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Tuesday, January 28, 2014, 9:30 AM
Folk Singer Pete Seeger has died at the age of 94, following six days in the hospital. Seeger was known as much for his social activism as his singing, and even joined the Occupy Wall Street protests in his 90's.
Pete Seeger, whose name became synonymous with American folksong and who believed there was no injustice a song could not challenge and someday overcome, died Monday at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was 94.
Seeger’s grandson Kitama Cahill-Jackson told The Associated Press his grandfather had been hospitalized for six days, but remained healthy until then.
“He was chopping wood 10 days ago,” he said.
With his lanky frame, his head thrown back and a banjo strapped across his shoulders, Seeger became the defining image of the American folksinger.
He helped popularize the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” reflecting his deep personal involvement in more than 70 years of activist causes, from unionism to desegregation to pacifism to the Occupy Wall Street rallies of 2011.
His tireless devotion to what he considered the tenets of human justice, which once got him labeled “un-American,” eventually earned admiration up to the level of the White House.
When he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 1994, President Bill Clinton hailed him as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them.”
Seeger and his wife Toshi, who died last July, were known locally for their campaign to clean up the Hudson River, which flowed near the backyard of the Beacon, N.Y., cabin where they lived for almost 70 years.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo.../526474770.jpg TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
Pete Seeger, seen here performing on stage in 2009, has passed away. He was 94 years old.
To promote that campaign, Seeger built the sloop Clearwater and launched the annual Clearwater Festival, which also showcased musicians he felt were underappreciated.
Musically, Seeger was a godfather to almost every subsequent folk musician, preserving and performing an infinite expanse of folksongs from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and “Joe Hill” to children’s songs to complex traditional ballads to popular standards like Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene.”
While he always distinguished his work from rock ‘n’ roll, saying “I don’t put my songs into any category except hopefully the music of the people,” he also became a major influence on the rock world.
Bob Dylan was an early disciple and Bruce Springsteen recorded “Sessions,” an album of Seeger songs, in 2006. Seeger reacted to “Sessions” with a note of caution, saying that while he appreciated the thought and the music, he himself might have made it a little “more serious.”
Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” was a major hit for the Byrds, and other songs he wrote or cowrote became radio hits in different versions, including “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.”
His early-1950s adaptation of a South African folk chant called “Wimoweh” morphed into a No. 1 hit called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for the Tokens in 1963.
In 1996, Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an “early influence.”
Seeger’s own stage personality, developed through thousands of appearances over eight decades, was jovial, warm and engaging at the same time he never allowed it to seem frivolous.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...5/92640328.jpg Brian Shuel/Redferns
A youner Pete Seeger performing at a concert in honour of Paul Robeson.
PHOTOS: IN MEMORIAM: STARS WE'VE LOST
“Having a good time singing a song doesn’t make the reason for singing the song any less important,” he said several years ago.
From his earliest stage days he encouraged audience participation, developing a signature call-and-response technique where he would cue the audience on the next line.
He frequently sang for children’s groups, saying it was never too early to expose young people to music. Folksinger Eric Weissberg recalled that when he went to the famous Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, there would be Saturday morning “wing dings” where artists like Seeger, Guthrie, Cisco Houston and Leadbelly would sing and tell stories.
While Seeger was best known as a solo troubadour, he was also a member of two highly influential folk music groups.
In the late 1930s he helped found the seminal New York group the Almanac Singers, which also included Guthrie, Sis Cunningham and Lee Hays.
After World War II he and Hays joined Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman to form the Weavers, the most influential folk group of modern times.
The Weavers were also Seeger's most successful commercial enterprise, scoring top-10 hits with songs like “Goodnight Irene,” “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.”
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...eeger-0128.jpg Courtesy of Andy Clayton
Pete Seeger perform during a tribute to The Weavers show (65th anniversary of the band) at The Town Crier Cafe in Beacon on November 17, 2013
Seeger was somewhat ambivalent about the group’s success, because arranger Gordon Jenkins “sweetened” the music with strings and Seeger worried that it began to sound less authentic.
The Weavers’s bigger problem was being accused of communist affiliations in the witch hunts of the early 1950s. Bookings dried up for several years, though they scored with a triumphant, and defiant, 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall.
Seeger left the group in 1958 after, among other things, disagreeing with the decision by the others to accept endorsement money for a cigaret commercial.
He remained a solo act for the rest of his career, though he frequently collaborated with other musicians on- and off-stage.
He sang with a young Dylan both in Mississippi fields and at the Newport Folk Festival. In 1963 they sang a duet at Newport called “Playboys and Playgirls,” with lines like, "You red-baiters and race-haters / Ain’t a-gonna hang around here.”
Two years later at Newport, Seeger was at the center of a famous incident wherein he was allegedly so outraged by Dylan performing with an electric backup band that he threatened to take an ax and cut the power cable.
Seeger insisted years later that the story was wrong. “I was only upset at the terrible quality of the sound system,” he said. “The audience couldn’t hear the music.”
Seeger was born May 3, 1919, in New York City, son of a World War I conscientious objector. The family was well-to-do and Seeger attended boarding school in Connecticut before entering Harvard as a classmate of, among others, John F. Kennedy.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo.../526474765.jpg MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performing during the We are One Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 18, 2009.
He dropped out after two years, saying that was not the life to which he aspired. In 2011, he recalled to The Associated Press that a sociology professor told him, “Don’t think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it.”
PHOTOS: PETE SEEGER'S LIFE AND CAREER
Seeger disagreed, leaving Cambridge for the less comfortable life of the folk and activist community.
Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie paints Seeger as wanting to leave his affluent world and live a “proletariat” life. Klein recounts a road trip during which the idealistic Seeger and Guthrie decided to eat in a black café, but found the owner wouldn’t serve them because he couldn’t understand why two white men could be there except to cause trouble.
When Seeger sang songs critical of President Roosevelt at the American Youth Congress in 1941, Klein noted, he used the pseudonym “Pete Bowers” in part so his father, who had a job in the Roosevelt administration, wouldn’t get in trouble.
But nothing softened Seeger’s activist beliefs. He joined the Young Communist League when he was 17, and while in later years he said his beliefs became more “communist with a small ‘c’,” he never felt any major American political parties had the commitment to freedom, equality and social justice that he considered imperative.
His activism led to several famous adversarial moments. He was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1955, refused to say whether he had communist affiliations, and in 1961 was convicted of contempt of Congress. The conviction was overturned in 1962.
In 1968, when he was booked on the Smothers Brothers television show, the CBS network refused to let him sing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a condemnation of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war policies.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...5/85516194.jpg Gems/Redferns
Singer and songwriter Pete Seeger in 1965.
After a lingering controversy, he sang it on a subsequent appearance.
“I never saw the value of compromising your views or your message to make them more ‘palatable’,” he said several years ago.
While his clash with HUAC in 1955 had complicated his life, he said, he never regretted lecturing the committee “on who exactly was being un-American.”
“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs,” he told HUAC. “I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.
“I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.”
Besides playing music himself, Seeger worked all his life to keep the international folk legacy alive. One of his specialties was adapting songs from other culture for American audiences, while “Turn, Turn, Turn” was adapted from Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
He wrote, compiled or co-compiled books that included “American Favorite Ballads,” “The Bells of Rhymney,” “How to Play the Five-String Banjo,” “Henscratches and Flyspecks,” “The Incompleat Folksinger,” “The Foolish Frog” and “Abiyoyo,” “Carry It On,” “'Everybody Says Freedom” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”
He hosted a PBS television show in 1965-66 called “Rainbow Quest,” in which he interviewed and played with musicians from folk, blues, country and gospel traditions.
Seeger said he was particularly proud of these 39 shows, with artists like Mississippi John Hurt, Johnny Cash, the Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson and The Rev. Gary Davis, because they preserved critical elements of the folk tradition that were not being recorded anywhere else.
Seeger's own screen career included appearances in the movies "To Hear My Banjo Play" in 1946 and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in 1970, as well as a 1980 Weavers reunion concert that became the film "Wasn't That a Time."
Seeger remained active as a musician to the end of his life, though his voice began to weaken in the 1990s.
"I was never the best singer or the best banjo player anyway," he said at the time. "But that never mattered. What mattered is what I was singing, and what I could get the audience to sing. As long as I can wave my hands and get people to sing 'This Land is Your Land' and understand what it is really saying, I'm doing my job."
Re: Pete Seeger: Dead at 94
I didn't even know who he was when I heard his death announced.
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Re: Pete Seeger: Dead at 94
