Studs Terkel (1912–2008) was an award-winning oral historian, actor, and radio personality. And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (2005) is one of the many books drawn from his fifty years of interviewing all manner of individuals, in this case musicians and composers, particularly on his long-running radio show on WFMT-FM in Chicago, his hometown. His musical tastes were far reaching, including classical, opera, jazz, blues, and folk music. A struggling actor and political activist, although he had a law degree from the University of Chicago, he first met Pete Seeger in July 1941 when the Almanac Singers (Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays) were on a crosscountry trip. The four stayed in Terkel’s apartment on 52nd Street. Terkel quickly identified with Seeger’s left-wing politics as well as his musical style and versatility, and he became his champion until his own death almost seventy years later. Often a guest on Terkel’s radio show, in this 2002 interview Seeger focused on his family background and early career, giving the usual credit to his father, stepmother Ruth, and Alan Lomax. Terkel was instrumental in Folkways Records issuing the 1956 album Studs Terkel’s Weekly Almanac on Folk Music Blues on WFMT with Big Bill Broonzy and Pete Seeger (FS 3864)*.
SOURCE And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (New York.: The New Press, 2005), 213–23.
Whenever you see a young folksinger, banjo chest-high, Adam’s apple bobbing, you know that Pete Seeger—the legendary folksinger and song-writer—has, like Kilroy, been here. (Kilroy was the name left as graffiti on walls by all GIs in World War II as they moved through foreign lands.) I know of no singer who has influenced more young people singing or at least attempting to sing folk music.
My-great-great-grandfather, Karl Ludwig Zaiger, was fourteen years old when he read the Declaration of Independence. He lived in Stuttgart, which was then a small town. The Duke of Wurtenburg needed a veterinarian for his horses. He gave my great great-grandfather a free education. The subversive document, the American Declaration of Independence, circulated through Europe and inflamed the heads of all sorts of young people. Ten years later, my great-great-grandfather graduated from the gymnasium. One of his classmates was Friedrich Schiller, the poet, writer of William Tell. He set out to this country, probably hitched a ride on a riverboat going up the Necker River to join the Rhine, and down the Rhine River to Amsterdam, where he somehow got a boat for the USA. He wrote a note to the duke: “I want to be a doctor of people, not a doctor of horses.” Over here, he ended up marrying into old New England. My father knew that in his ancestors were doctors and businessmen and some preachers. One was a preacher in Salem, Massachusetts, during the witchcraft trials. I read that he tried to save the life of one of the witches but did not succeed.
My mother’s grandfather came over from France. He landed in New York a hundred and fifty years ago or more. He put an advertisement in the paper saying: “If you want your son to go into the diplomatic service, he should know French. Very exactly. Come send him to Professor Charlier.” My great-grandfather was the son of a Huguenot minister. Pretty soon he was hiring other people and getting a big brownstone house. Now the Park Lane Hotel is there. My mother took me around to see it in the 1920s, before they tore down the old building. From the letters I’ve read, I remember that Professor Charlier’s daughter married a conservative, a quiet doctor, whose father had run a business in Troy making steam boilers. He married an Irish girl who was supposed to have sixth sense, they called it in those days. One morning she said, “Darling, please don’t go to work, I dreamed that something terrible was going to happen at the factory.” He said, “Well, I can’t not go to work just because you had a bad dream. There’s things that have to be done there.” In the middle of the morning, there was a loud boom. An hour or two later workmen brought his hand to his wife, with the wedding ring on it. He was testing a steam boiler and it blew up. My grandfather was about six years old at the time. He became a doctor. His uncle was mayor of New York back when the Brooklyn Bridge was built, back in the 1880s, and should go down in history because he made the kind of speech that should be made. It was the shortest speech of the day. There had been one speech after another, and the crowd was getting restless. Edson was my mother’s maiden name. Mayor Edson was my grandfather’s uncle. He got up and said, “It seems to me that everything that needs to be said has been said. Congratulations to everybody!” And he sat down. You can bet he got a large applause for making his speech so short.
They were of very different opinions. My mother’s father was descended from a well-known Tory up in Massachusetts, Deacon Edson, a deacon in the church. When George Washington won the Revolution, a mob came to his house and said, “Why don’t you go back to Canada, or go back to England if you love your king so much. We don’t want you around here.” But he said, “No, I’ve lived here all my life and I’ll live here the rest of my life if the Lord allows me to.” And they weren’t up to lynching him, so they grumbled and went away. You have to hand it to him. My grandfather was still conservative. One of his papers said: “What a shame England and America couldn’t have settled their quarrel amicably. Together, we could have shown the world true civilization” [Chuckles] My grandmother, who married Edson, the doctor, sent my mother to the Ethical Culture School just so she would not have to hear the word God every day. She died at age ninety-four, still a cheerful agnostic. In her later years, she joined the American Labor Party and voted for Mayor LaGuardia, all four times.
My father was completely into music. He didn’t think anything else in the world was worth thinking about. At a very young age he was appointed head of the music department in Berkeley, University of California. Some fellow professors took him out to the San Joaquin Valley. This was about 1911. My father was horrified by what he saw. He came back and gave a speech somewhere in San Francisco. “It’s disgraceful that such things should happen in America.” He started making speeches against imperialist war. He was given a sabbatical and told not to come back to work. He was the professor in charge of the music department, from roughly 1911 to 1918, through World War I. My mother said, “Can’t you keep your mouth shut? You’re not going to be drafted, not with two children, and wearing glasses and all, and your deafness.” But he said, “No, when something’s wrong, you must speak up!” He came back East, where his parents had bought an old farm north of New York. He had a grand idea. He told my mother, who was an excellent violinist, “Why should we just play our good music for rich people in the cities? Why don’t we take it out to people in the small towns, in the countryside?” Kind of like Chautauqua. He spent the whole year building one of America’s first automobile trailers. Tongue and groove, maple, brass screws. It was meticulously made. It looked a little bit like a covered wagon. Instead of a team of horses pulling it, it was a Model T Ford. He had a special low gear put on the Ford so he could pull the trailer up hills. They started off...
I was the third of three boys of my father’s first marriage. My two brothers had tiny bunks in one end of the little trailer. My cradle hung from the hoops that held up the canvas top. My father and mother slept in a big bed at the other end. It was a beautiful little trailer. There was a six-foot-square platform, which could be pulled out from underneath the trailer. My mother would stand up there playing her violin, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. My father bought a folding organ, the kind the chaplains used in World War I. It had about five octaves there, and he would accompany my mother. They headed down through Virginia, into North Carolina. When I was a small child, my father told me a story of a terrible rainstorm. The roads weren’t paved in those days; they were all dirt roads. The ruts got deeper and deeper. Once the rain just kept on going all day long and the puddles got deeper, until finally the road was completely under water. My mother was getting hysterical. She says, “Charlie, why don’t you turn around?” He says, “I can’t turn around, it’s only a one-lane road. All we can do is go ahead. There’s another town up ahead and we’ll get there.” The water got over the tires, then it got over the hubcaps. My mother was hysterical. She was ready to abandon things. But all my father knew was to keep on going ahead. “If it doesn’t get to the carburetor, the motor will keep on going.” So that little Model T Ford kept up, putt-putt-putt-putt. When I was a small child, he’d tell this story to me every night, over and over. Finally, way up ahead, they saw some trees, and sure enough it got shallower. They were on more or less solid ground. My mother said, “Charlie, this is not going to work. We’re going back to New York. I can get a job teaching, you can get a job teaching.” She knew Frank Damrosch, who ran the Institute of Musical Art, that later on became Juilliard. My father said, “We can’t get back, the roads are too bad.” Next morning they were woken up by five or six local farmers, with guns, who said, “We don’t want no Gypsies around here.” My father, in his New England accent, says, “We’re not Gypsies, we’re musicians.” “You’re what?” My mother brings out her fiddle and my father unfolds the organ. The farmer says, “Well, I guess you are.” My father says, “Actually, we’re looking for a place we can spend the winter because the roads are so bad we can’t get back up north.” One of the farmers said, “I got a wood lot. If you don’t mind camping out there, you can stay there for the winter.” So they spent the winter in a wood lot. My mother, washing my diapers in an iron pot over an open fire, and scrubbing them on a washboard, with her violinist fingers and all. One evening they took the good music, Bach and Beethoven, up to the McKenzies’ farmhouse to show them what kind of music they played. The McKenzies were very polite. They said, “Oh, that’s very nice. We play a little music too.” They took down banjos and fiddles off the wall and fiddled up a storm. Years later, my father said, “For the first time, I realized that people had a lot of good music in them. They didn’t need my good music as much as I thought.” [Laughs] In Chapel Hill, about three years ago, I’m singing and two middle-aged women came up to me and said, “Are you by any chance related to the Seeger family that spent the winter with the McKenzies in Pinehurst?” I said, “Good Lord, are you from that family?” She said, “Well, I’m the great-granddaughter. My mother never stopped talking about that family from New York that spent the winter with them.” Nineteen twenty. [Laughs] This was in 1995 or something. My mother finally was fed up with my father’s not very businesslike way of handling the family’s finances and their marriage gradually broke up.
My father, a few years later, met a talented young composer, Ruth Crawford. She was writing what they call modern music, dissonant counterpoint. She was living in Chicago, a close friend of Carl Sandburg’s. She’d written the accompaniments for some of the songs in his book, The American Songbag. My father was teaching at the Institute of Musical Art, Juilliard. She wrote him a letter. She gets a letter back “Dear Miss Crawford, there have never been any good women composers. I think you should turn your talents to other fields.” She was outraged. She went east and the moment they met, they got along famously. I once saw my father and my stepmother sit down at a piano and with their four hands play Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. It’s all full of notes going here, there, and everywhere at the same time. Somebody turned the pages for them, and they went right straight through that whole thing without a stop. I was amazed. My stepmother stopped composing. She says, “I’m composing babies.” Michael was her first and Peggy was her second. She had two more, both girls. In 1935, ’36, they go down to Washington to work in the New Deal. My father worked in the same little office that Ben Shahn, the painter, was, along with Nick Ray, who later on became a well-known Hollywood director—he directed Rebel Without a Cause. Nick, working with Alan Lomax, was put in charge of the archive of folk song of the Library of Congress. Alan had been helping his father collect ballads and folk songs with very heavy recording equipment. About a hundred pounds of batteries and turntables and so on, they had to lift in and out of a car. Around 1933, when Alan was eighteen, he said, “Father, I want to carry on your work.” With great self-confidence he went up to New York and knocked on the door of the president of Columbia Broadcasting System and said, “You’ve got a school of the air. Why don’t you take a year to tell the American people about American folk music? I’m in charge of the Archive of American Folk Song and I plan the programs for it. And you can have the Columbia Symphony Orchestra get composers like Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland, and Ruth Seeger to make symphonic arrangements of these folk songs.” So first there’d be a program, there’s old sailor dad from Sailor Snug Harbor. This was 1939. The Columbia School of the Air. And there would be old sailor dad, singing in his cracked old voice some old sailor ballad from the nineteenth century.
Before you know it, Ruth and my father were working with Alan Lomax, and Ruth got deeply into the music that Alan had collected. Not only the old Irish American cowboy songs, but the newer African American work songs. Old John Lomax had contacts in Texas. He says, “I’ve got a recording machine here, and it’s important that I record the folk songs of Texas.” They let him right into the prison farms, and he went out with the chain gangs and recorded people singing music that might have had English words, but the tunes went right back to Africa. I remember one of the songs Alan and his father collected was “Long John.” I used to sing it … [He sings, “He’s Long John”] And the crowd says, “He’s Long John … He’s long gone … He’s long gone.” Just a solo and a repeat, a solo and a repeat, each line. Whatever they were doing. I think they were chopping. An anthropologist who came back from West Africa around 1951 had a little portable tape machine. And he recorded that exact same melody in West Africa. [He hums the tune] Ruth was fascinated with this music and she learned how to transcribe it very accurately. In a sense, she had a second career. Her first career was writing very complicated modern music. Ruth’s String Quartet is quite famous around America now. Now she was transcribing folk songs. Just as Ruth was planning to get really into composing again—she was fifty-two years old—she got cancer and just was carried away a few months later. I was always learning new songs from Alan and from other people, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie.
We were raised with the promise of hopefulness. But often it was misplaced hope. During the 1920s my father kept his mouth shut and kept his job. But along comes ’29, the crash, and it seemed to a great many people this was the end of the free enterprise system around the entire world. It was going to take some discipline to see that people were fed and clothed. The question is, who would be in charge of this? My father was used to the idea of the symphony orchestra, and there was a dictator, with baton, who’s completely in charge. Now the question is, who is in charge? You couldn’t do it Mussolini’s way. He got the businessmen of Italy behind him and they brought order out of chaos to Italy, and he called it fascism. Hitler was planning to do it in Germany, and the militarists were doing it in Japan. My father said, “Let’s try it the way Lenin has tried it. He claims that the working people could be in charge.” Well, that was the theory. When people ask me am I a communist still, I say, “I became a communist at age seven when I read about American Indians. They had no rich, no poor, and I decided that’s the way people should live. But at this late age of eighty-two, I call myself a Luxemburgian communist.” Rosa Luxemburg was a German socialist who spent World War I in the kaiser’s prison. She was against the war. She writes a letter to Lenin in January of 1919, and said: “I hear that you have instituted press censorship and you have restricted the right of people to freely assemble, to address grievances.” She said, “Don’t you realize, in a few years, all the decisions in your country are going to be made by a few elite, and the masses will only be called in to dutifully applaud your decisions.” Boy, wasn’t that exactly what happened? If it hadn’t been Stalin to take over, it would have been somebody else. Because if you don’t have freedom of the press, if you don’t have freedom of the airwaves, and freedom of speech, inevitably things go from bad to worse. The USA would not be here if it had not been for our Bill of Rights. Thanks to the Bill of Rights, the abolitionists could agitate and agitate until we got rid of slavery. And women could agitate and agitate until they got the right to vote. And black people could agitate and agitate and finally Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
Before the New Deal even came along, in 1931 and ’32, my father said, “We should be composing songs for the working people.” So he started a composers’ collective with Henry Cowell, another modern composer. There were about eight or ten members, among them Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein [composer of The Cradle Will Rock]. They tried to compose songs, which the proletariat would sing on the way to the barricades [laughs]. Three or four years later, my father said, “Let’s face it. The workers don’t seem to like our music.” In 1934, my father said, “Let’s learn the vernacular. If we want to create new music, let’s start with the music that people already know.” If you live in the city, you better know jazz. If you live in the country, you better know country music, and of course, there’s different kinds of country music. The Cajun people have their own style in Louisiana. And the Latinos have their own vernacular. I remember my mother left musical instruments all around the house, not just piano and organ, but there was a marimba and a squeeze box, and a penny whistle. Then at age eight, she gives me a ukulele and I’ve been into fretted instruments ever since. I switched over to a tenor banjo so I could play in the school jazz band. And then in my late teens, my father helped me learn the long neck five-string banjo, and took me to this festival in North Carolina, where I heard some people who really knew how to play it.
When I dropped out of Harvard in ’38, after a year and three-quarters, Alan had me help him out in the Library of Congress. He had thousands of records he was trying to listen to and evaluate. He went up with John Hammond, up to the CBS factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They were going to throw out old country records, what they called hillbilly records, or what they called race records. Alan just piled up all these records and said, “Don’t throw them out.” He went down to Washington with literally a ton of 78 rpm shellac records. He said, “Pete, now, you listen to them first. I don’t have time to listen to all of them. If there’s something strictly schlock, throw it out. If you come along something that sounds interesting, then make a note and I’ll listen to it.” So I went through thousands and thousands of records. This is how I became a great fan of Uncle Dave Macon, who played his banjo on the riverboats in the 1890s, and sang a song about the Coal Creek Rebellion of 1892. So it was a great education for me. I was working for Alan when Will Geer, the actor, writes me a note saying, “Pete, I’ve run into a great ballad singer in California. I’m going to try and persuade him to come to New York and you’ll meet him. His name is Woody.” And in February of 1940, Woody Guthrie hitchhikes to New York. There we had a midnight benefit concert on Broadway. Will Geer was playing the lead in Tobacco Road. The scenery on the stage had two sharecropper cabins, and one of them had a porch. I remember Leadbelly up on the porch of one of the cabins singing some songs. I was twenty-two. Can you imagine Woody in the month of February with his thumb stuck out into the February winds, and the cars going zoom? And he’d go in for a cup of coffee and there on the jukebox, Kate Smith was singing “God Bless America.” Woody made up another song, of six verses. It was “This Land Is Your Land.” His original last line was “God blessed America for me.” Around 1944, he changed that last line to, “This land was made for you and me.” In ’49 he records it for a tiny little company called Folkways. A big sale for them was a thousand records. [It was run by] Moe Asch, the son of Sholem Asch, the famous novelist, who wrote in Yiddish. Stinson was the record producer. They went bankrupt.
You know how Moe got started making records? In 1939, his father said, “Moe, you have a recording machine. We gotta drive to Princeton to record Dr. Einstein in a short message which can be played on the radio, urging American Jews to give more help to their relatives in Germany to get out of Germany.” In those days the recording machine was a big heavy thing weighing fifty or a hundred pounds. And they record the little five-minute message from Dr. Einstein. Over supper, Dr. Einstein says, “Well, young Mr. Asch, what do you do for a living?” And Moe says, “I make a living installing public address systems in hotels. But I’m fascinated with this little recording machine and its possibilities. I’ve met a Negro folksinger in New York named Leadbelly, and nobody’s recording him because they say he’s not commercial. I think somebody should record him.” Einstein says, “You’re absolutely right. Americans don’t appreciate their own culture. It’ll be a Polish Jew, like you, who will do the job.” So Moe recorded Leadbelly. Years later I asked Moe, “How many records did you sell?” He said, “One hundred copies in one year.” Some anthropologist might come back from the far ends of the world with some tapes. He’d call up. “Mr. Asch, my students keep wanting to listen to my tapes, or make copies. But I don’t have time to make copies. Would you want to bring this out?” Moe said, “I’d be glad to put out twelve-inch LPs.” Now a record comes out called Religious Music of Northern Afghanistan. Moe says, “Oh, here’s my conditions. I will pay you one hundred dollars, and that will be all the money you will ever get. The only thing I can promise you is that this record will never go out of print as long as I’m alive, and I hope after I’m dead that it will still be in print.” When Moe died his family made a deal with the Smithsonian that they could not reprint any of his records unless they’d reprint the whole catalogue, all two thousand titles. Every new month he’d bring out a new record. Music from every kind of society and culture.
I don’t think we can kid ourselves. Deep in our chromosomes is the ability to hate people who look different, who speak different, who use different names for God, different customs, who eat different food. Because for two million years, maybe more, our ancestors lived in little groups, ten, twenty people, and they shared everything they had. If there was food, everybody ate. If there was no food, everybody went hungry. So within that narrow group, it was tribal communism. Even if it was a big tribe—some American Indian tribes got to be several hundred or even a thousand members. Within our own family, we had big differences of opinion. My grandfather was a small businessman, an importer. His father was the abolitionist doctor. My grandfather’s father died young, and his mother really had to pinch pennies to raise three boys. He went to work as a teller in the local bank, up in Springfield, Massachusetts. And he thought if he worked hard, someday he’d be president of the bank. But he thought it would take too long. So my grandfather read in the newspaper that President Porfirio Diaz was welcoming American businessmen to Mexico to help build up the economy. My grandfather studied Spanish with a friend and got a job as a reporter on the Financial Times, a little newsletter for the businessmen in Mexico City. Within a year, he knew where the money was and he was in business himself. Four years later he had a house and servants.
My father was born in Mexico City. My father’s younger brother, Alan, was an enthusiastic young daredevil. He said, “Who wants to live a long, boring life?” And when he graduated from college—he was in the same class with Heywood Broun, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed, and putting out the Harvard Monthly—he tells his parents he’s going to be a poet. So he went to Paris. When the Germans invaded in 1914 he only waited three or four days and joined the French Foreign Legion. My father wrote him a letter, said, “Alan, don’t you realize the class of people that run Germany are really not much different than the class of people that run France? You should have stayed out of it. I don’t expect to see you again.” And he didn’t. Alan was mowed down by a German machine gun in 1916. But a few months before he died, The New Republic magazine printed his poem. [Pete shuts his eyes and recites from memory the whole poem] “I have a rendezvous with death / When spring comes back with rustling shade / And apple blossoms fill the air / I have a rendezvous with death / When spring brings back blue days and fair / It may be he shall take my hand and lead me into his dark land / And close my eyes and quench my breath / It may be I shall pass him still / A rendezvous with death / … At midnight in some flaming town / When spring comes north again next year / And I to my pledged word am true / I shall not fail my rendezvous.” It became a famous poem. I saw a picture of troops wading across the Mekong River, and all of a sudden one line came to me: “Waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on.” I’m not a facile songwriter. It takes me sometimes weeks to write a decent song, or it takes other people to rewrite it. That’s what happened with “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” It was a crisis, and crises make for people wanting to sing or make up songs. It happens when somebody falls in love, they start writing poems. This is what happened in 1941, when the CIO, industrial unions, were being organized. There were four of us on the road in a jalopy, different cities and towns. We were the Almanac Singers, consisting of Woody Guthrie, Big Lee Hays, young Millard Lampell, my age, and young me. We’d sing union songs in halls, soup kitchens, on picket lines. The CIO had shown the labor movement that you could organize the unskilled as well as the skilled, if you take in everybody. All of a sudden, within three years, the CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations, signed up like seven million new members and threw the fear of God into the Big Boys. We made up an album of union songs and we sang them all across the country.