Pete’s organizational juices began to flow while still in Saipan, where he discussed with Boots Casetta and others starting a progressive songs organization once they returned to civilian life. Back in New York by late 1945 he returned to his role as a professional musician. A brief item in the New York Times on December 29 mentioned his appearing with Tony Kraber in “Folksay” “as the wise-cracking folk-singing chorus that sits on the sidelines with guitar and banjo,” part of a larger dance program. He soon returned to the recording studio, which would long remain his home away from home. He joined with Hally Wood, Lee Hays, and others in late 1946 for the Asch album Roll the Union On. Pete was a complex mix of performer, organizer, promoter, and teacher, a combination that he was always able to keep in delicate balance despite the nasty political attacks that would periodically crop up.*
Having survived the depression, then the war, Pete and his friends had heady thoughts of continuing the New Deal programs and their support for civil rights, labor unions, economic justice (socialism), and world peace. People’s Songs, founded during a meeting at Pete’s in-laws in Greenwich Village on December 31, 1945, was designed to use music to promote their heady political agenda. Woody Guthrie’s creative essay captures the music and politics of that first gathering. He mentions those involved, while putting Pete (and Toshi) at center stage; Woody would remain a staunch member of People’s Songs. Mike Gold in the Daily Worker captured the mood of the initial crowd: “In the underground basement before a big open fire, with Pete Seeger, that great young artist, strumming a heavenly banjo, and Lee Hays’ mountain voice booming out—it was certainly like old times.” Even Time magazine had a positive take on People’s Songs, “a new organization of leftwing folk singers who in the past three months have given concerts to strikers in Pittsburgh, New York City, and Schenectady.” In June 1946 Pete also appeared with the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, the Golden Gate Quartet, Paul Robeson, Josh White, and Sonny Terry at the Big Three Unity Rally in support of famine relief in South Africa before nineteen thousand at Madison Square Garden.*
SOURCE Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal, eds., Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait, Woody Guthrie (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 154—58.
I was in the merchant marines. Three invasions, torpedoed twice, but carried my guitar every drop of the way. I washed dishes and fed fifty gun boys, washed their dirty dishes, scrubbed their greasy messroom, and never graduated up nor down in my whole eleven months. Two NMU Brothers, Jimmie Longhi and Cisco Houston, rode with me on every trip, and we carried a mandolin, a fiddle, and one more guitar, plus a whole armload of new strings which we lent to the troops and sailors on all of these boats. We walked all around over North Africa, the British Isles, Sicily, and sung underground songs for underfed fighters. We sung with prisoners of war on both sides, and held meetings on the troopships to get the men to write letters to their congressmen. Then I got sucked into the Army on VE Day, May the Eighth, 1945, the day that Hitler gave up. (He must have seen me coming in) (Me and that Red Army and a couple of million Yanks and others on the outskirts of Berlin and Burtchesgarden). I sang in the Army Camps around my barracks, the PX, the beer gardens, and the rifle ranges, hills and hollers, and down in Texas, then across the Mississippi from Saint Louis, then out Las Vegas (Lost Wages), Nevada. They counted my kids in Las Vegas, found out I had an Army of my own, and sent me back to Mitchell Field, N.Y., where I got more IQ’s, Interviews, Movies, Shots, Lectures, Films, Sermons, Preachments, Exercises, Blank Forms, Signatures, Seals, Documents, Medals, Emblems, amongst which, as I flew out at the gate, I seen was an Honorable Discharge.
I beat my way to Forty-second Street, swung a Seabeach Subway train, switched over to a 1894 Norton Point trolley car, and this took me to 36th Street, where I walked one block to home. I kissed my wife, baby, friends and comrades, neighbors, and then looked in my Daily Worker and saw that there was a meeting of some people that called their selves “Peoples Songs.” I grabbed my guitar and lit out to Washington Square, walked one block to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ohta, their son, and their daughter, it was the daughter, Toshi, that had married my long tall banjo playing pardner, Pete Seeger, before he went into the Army, and I took off on my boats.
Daddy Ohta had been all over the waters and lands of the Pacific working in the Army as an interpreter, because, being Japanese, he knew all of the tricks that the Fascist Japs could throw at him. He had a lot of jobs to do, to study and to report on psychological, physiological, geographical, astronomical, germicidal conditions, their police and their thoughts about their Rulers and the Allies. I don’t know what they called Father Ohta, and I don’t think he ever had any set title, just called to do the jobs nobody else could do. His wife was so glad to see him come home that she allowed Pete and Toshi to use her house for Peoples Songs meetings without much protest. Mother Ohta comes from Virginia, is proud of it, and proud to speak in her southern voice over the fone to several hundred that ring in every day to ask about People that are a part of Peoples Songs.
I got down into their basement front room just about sundown and Toshi showed me a piece of sewer pipe the plumber had just taken out from under their floor, “One hundred and seventy five years old and older,” she said he had said. I asked her where her husband, Pete, was at, and told her, “I am a firm believer in this idea of a Peoples Songs organization, because we can carry more filth out of this town in one year than that old sewer pipe took away in a century and three quarters, where’s Pete?
Pete walked down some steep stairs before Toshi could tell me where he was. Pete saw my guitar, unslung his banjo, and before we could shake hands or pass many blessings, we had played, “Sally Goodin,” “Doggy Spit a Rye Straw,” “Going Down This Road Feeling Bad,” “Worried Man Blues,” and “Fifteen Miles from Birmingham.” This gave Toshi her chance to carry the joint of lead pipe somewhere back into the rear. I saw that the room was an old settler, with a low ceiling, dark shadows, stains of several memories, filled with dim lights from two or three standing lamps, and hung full of Japanese prints, drapes, paintings, metal incense burners, ancient ash trays of bronze and copper, Japanese and Chinese paper lanterns, a rock floor in front of a wide open fireplace burning full of old boxes and kindling found along the curbs. But Pete’s banjo sort of drowned all of this out, and he sung me all of the new songs of satire, wit, anger, protest, hope, and longings of the GI’s that he had played with and sang with out in the Pacific. “The Bungalow of the Island Commander,” “I Just Want To Go Home,” “Uncle Sam, Won’t You Please Come Back To Guam,” “Quartermaster’s Store,” and others that sounded like an Army wanting to march nowhere but to home. Pete played louder, faster, better than ever. He told me that I also had got better. And then we set our boxes over in a corner and Pete told me all about the idea that he had cooked up about Peoples Songs.
“To organize all of us that write songs for the labor movement, to put all of our collections of songs into one big cabinet, and to send any union local any kind of a song, any kind of a historical material about anything they might need, and to shoot it out poco pronto, in today and out tonight.” He stretched his legs out from his sofa across two reading tables and one padded chair where ….
“The unions have cried for the material that we’ve got, they need our several thousand songs, and they need new ones made up on the jump as we go along. They have written to me, to you, to every other songwriter or collector and had to waste time while you wrote to me and I called somebody else and they chased the next one up one side and down the other. All of this time was wasted. The bosses and the monopoly folks own their leather lined offices, pay clerks big money, pay experts, pay detectives, pay thugs, pay artists to perform their complacent crap, pay investigators to try to keep our stuff beat down, and the only earthly way that we can buck against all of this pressure is to all get together into one big songwriters and song singers union, and we will call our union by the name of Peoples Songs. And if we all stick together, all hell and melted teargasses can’t stop us, nor atoms hold us back.” I had never seen Pete speak any other way since I’ve known him, and so was surprised to hear him vision out a new plan to help the life of the trade union bubble up bigger and plainer.
I don’t guess we talked about Pete and Toshi’s four months old baby that died while he was in the Pacific. But I had heard said that Toshi was pregnant again and I must have heard all of this in the sounds of their voices. Pete stopped talking and Toshi leaned toward me as I walked around the room, she rested her arm on the padded chair and said, “We thought you would rather like the idea. And I’m sure you will enjoy the meeting here tonight. You will see all of your old friends, Robert Claiborne, Horace Grenell, Herb Haufrecht, Lee Hays, Lydia Infeld, George Levine, Simon Rady, and there’ll be Saul Aarons, and Charlotte Anthony, Edith Allaire, Bernie Asbel, Dorothy Baron, Oscar Brand, Agnes Cunningham, Jack Galin, Tom Glazer, Mike Gold, Baldwin Hawes, Burl Ives, Rockwell Kent, Lou Kleinman, Robert Kates, Millard Lampell, John Leary, and you may know Mildred Linsley, or Bess Lomax, Alan Lomax, Walter Lowenfels, Francia Luban, Jesse Lloyd O’Connor, or remember, Shaemas O’Sheal, or David Reef, there’s Earl Robinson, Bob Russell, Betty Saunders, Paul Secon, Naomi Spahn, Norman Studer, Mike Stratton, or Josh White, or Hy Zaret, or if not all of these, then the ones that aren’t too busy or too far away to come. But they’re already excited enough about the general idea to be on our sponsor committee. You see, we will print up every month a bulletin, a little bulletin.”
“Not too little,” Pete put in.
“Anyhow, a bulletin, either by mimeograph or photo offset.”
And Pete said again, “Or off the presses of the Daily News.”
“Well, not just overnight, anyhow,” Toshi smiled, lit up a cigaret, and knocked the ashes off into an incense burner on the green wooden tea table at her knees. And in that special way that a wife treats her husband after his first or second week back from a long fought war, Toshi let other lights come across her face as she followed her thoughts around the room and the globe. “Of course, later on, we will buy out the Daily Mirror and run a Peoples Songs paper every day, with whole columns and pages about the struggle of the working people against their owners. But for the present moment, we will be satisfied with a little mimeographed bulletin just to more or less plant the seed of our ideas in the minds of the people we are trying to reach. Of course, me, I want to raise a houseful of children for Peter to sing to sleep. But, maybe I can find some sort of an organizing career here working with Peoples Songs.”
“Your job is to keep me organized,” I heard Pete laugh.
Our banjos and guitars layed in their corners and echoed with everything we talked about. Mother Ohta set a long table full of meat, rice, gravy, sauces, glasses of milk, and she filled each Mexican clay plate with its fair share, then lit two lonesome looking candles, and rounded up Takashi or Daddy, and the boy they called just Brother, then herded Pete and me away from our couch and Toshi out from her arm chair. At the table we went over all of the larger and smaller plans of the Peoples Songs, and by the time we had cleaned our plates, the first early comers had found their way through the door.