Pete Seeger: fighting back with music

Pete Seeger: fighting back with music

“I had a beautiful long-necked banjo, the 'Pete Seeger' model ...
and I played it constantly. I had a sweetheart too, who gave me a Pete
Seeger album for my birthday ... At last Pete Seeger came to Chicago's
Orchestra Hall, and spread wide his arms as we sang to him, and it changed
me. It was thirty years ago, and I have not changed back.” — Robert Cantwell,
When we were good: the folk revival.

There are many lives that have been irreversibly changed by the now
80-year-old Pete Seeger. Maurie Mulheron's loving attempt to chart this
influence in his documentary play, One Word ... We!: Pete Seeger
and Friends, is being staged at the Teachers' Federation auditorium
in Sydney this Saturday (May 23). It has been revived for one night only,
to benefit the Maritime Union.

Mulheron's title is well chosen. If Seeger's message could be reduced
to its simplest form, it would be in the transformation of “I Shall Overcome”
to “We Shall Overcome”, “the wonderful first-person plural” that
Seeger often extols.

Group activity is for Seeger the marrow of human existence. It's the
only way things change (for the better); it generates positive, even joyful,
feelings; and it sets up the clearest model for demonstrating that all
human difference is underwritten by our similarities and subsumed under
common interest.

It's in music that Seeger sees all the manifold meanings and experiences
of “we” come to exquisite fruition:

“The most important thing is to get together ... It's this word 'share'
I keep coming back to in my concerts all the time; I think it's more important
than 'love' ... I have the feeling that music is able to do something that
prose and pictures haven't been able to do.”

Seeger came from a privileged background, but saw injustice all around
him, becoming a member of the Communist Party. He was never an ideologue.
His radicalism, derived from his New England Puritan heritage, was grounded
on simple antipathies — a hatred of greed and waste, and a love of ordinary
people.

He sang in the '40s for Communists “because they were idealists, the
hardest working and most honest people in sight at a time when the world
seemed to be going crazy” (Donald Clarke, The Rise and Fall of Popular
Music).

When Seeger's quartet the Weavers unexpectedly hit the commercial bullseye
in the early 1950s, its members attracted the attention of the thugs in
Congress and were black-listed.

Armed with five-string banjo and an inexhaustible store of songs, Seeger
began to fight back. Deeply trusting that the fundamental democracy implicit
in folk music would seep through, he travelled from one meeting hall or
college campus to another, often coming and going before local patriots
could organise to keep him out.

As he sang to his audiences his multifarious songs of hope, they unfailingly
would find themselves moved to sing with him.

Although almost pathologically self-effacing, Seeger owns straightforwardly
to the significance of this phase of his career, in 1993 describing it
as “probably the most important job of music I'll ever do ... [By] the
early '60s my job was done.” Says Tom Paxton of this “job of music”:

“It isn't possible for me to overstate the influence of Pete Seeger
upon me and every musician of my generation. I began to hear him ... in
the late '50s and I was struck immediately by his accessibility, his complete
lack of pretence and his clear message that said, not 'look at me' but
'listen to this'. The message also contained the imperative: 'Go and do
likewise'.”

Seeger has always responded to such assessments as either exaggerated
or unwarranted. He redirects credit to those who have influenced him:
Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Lee Hays; and of course the common people of
and from all ages, represented by that most eclectic and prolific of singer-songwriters,
Trad. A self-evaluation he often makes is simply “a link in the chain”.

But what a link.

The man himself once said, “My main purpose as a musician is to put
songs on people's lips, not just in their ear”. Every personal testimony,
every informed estimation, every individual debt of gratitude and/or influence,
ratifies this stated goal.

Add yourselves as links to the chain — get to the Teachers Federation
auditorium on Saturday night. Tickets are $30 ($20 concession). Book on
9287 2100.

From GLW issue 318