Probably the one most important trait of U.S. folk music, as compared to the folk music of the British Isles, is the hard-driving, accelerating rhythm of the folk music of the U.S.
In action Peter Seeger—the pendulum swing of the GI-shoed feet whomping the platform, the whole body stiffening and rearing back to drive a chorus home, but, above all, the banjo rippling and stinging in perfect time, beginning to gallop, rolling into a tearing run on the home-stretches of a song and then thundering into a finale of Spanish rasgados just as if a herd of wild horses had suddenly milled, bunched and stopped, trembling.
What happened across three hundred years to Anglo-Scots melodies tropically stimulated by contact with African music in the new land of America has happened to Yankee Peter Seeger across 15 years of contact with southern singing and banjo-playing. Son of a musicologist father and a longhair violinist mother (May 3, 1919, New York City), Peter naturally shunned any formal musical instruction in prep school and at Harvard. He reluctantly admits that he learned some harmony playing the tenor banjo in his school jazz band and by very casual questions addressed to his parents. Then one summer at the North Carolina Festival in Asheville he heard ballads with banjo.
In school he had decided to become a reporter. In the mountain balladeer he saw a career combining reporting and banjo playing. Peter spent some months with me in the Archive of American Folk Songs in Washington, listening to the records from across the country and deciding upon the five-string banjo for his instrument. Hours and hours he tinkered with his instruments trying to figure out by ear what those southern banjo aces were playing. He was New England shy but New England determined, and he sang everywhere he had a chance, and, when he didn’t have a chance, he organized one, like the 1939 summer tour of a puppet-theatre to help out the dairy farmers union during a milk strike.
SOURCE Alan Lomax, liner notes to Pete Seeger, Darling Corey: Picking the Five String Banjo and Singing, Folkways Records, FA 2003, 1950.
In 1940 he had learned all he could from the records and the books and set out to explore America on his own. He and the Okie balladeer started together and went as far as Texas. Pete doubled back and hitched along down through the Shenandoah valley, across Tennessee into Arkansas and Missouri, playing for eats, learning songs and people and ending up in a camp of evicted sharecroppers in Missouri. “The music in the little church they had made was just beautiful,” says Pete, who always finds beauty and wonder where others can find only barren poverty, “and I began there to really work on my banjo.”
Jumping off a freight train on the way to Montana, Pete broke his banjo, hocked his camera for a guitar and got along with it for the rest of the summer, playing the taverns and the back porches. When he needed a haircut, he would swap a ballad for one. Chicago and then south into Alabama, living with friends, walking and hitching into the countryside to find musicians and swap songs. By the time he hit New York late that fall he was ready to play on my CBS programs.
With Lee Hayes, Millard Lampell, Woody Guthrie and others he organized the Almanacs, and as the whole country swung into the war, the Almanacs began turning out stirring ballads like “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” (which opened and closed the war on CBS), “Reuben James,” “The Martins and the Coys,” “Deliver the Goods.” Writers and broadcasters found these songs invaluable for broadcasts to Great Britain about wartime America.
World War II dissolved the Almanacs, and Pete spent almost four years in the army—a year and a half singing and entertaining in the Pacific Theatre. By now that right hand on the banjo had become a steel stallion that could gallop out any kind of rhythm (with all the counterpoint and pedal point anyone could wish) in flamenco, blues, jazz, hillbilly, minstrel, dulcimer, or guitar style. By now there was no better singer or song-leader in the country, none more honest, none more capable of setting a crowd on fire than Peter Seeger, who had puzzled and practiced his way to perfection by listening to what the people had learned to do in their folk music.
Peter might have traveled the usual success route, but he did not choose to. Instead, deciding that the people of America needed a big circulation of folk songs and new topical ballads about the-American problems like jobs, peace, Jim Crow and the like, he organized People’s Songs. In a year and a half there were two thousand-odd junior Peter Seegers round the country picking the guitar, composing topical songs, ready to sing folk songs anywhere. A lot of hardworking youngsters ran themselves ragged to keep People’s Songs and its (collector’s item) Bulletin going, but it was Pete who managed to tour and write and organize and father a couple of kids and make every singer feel important, that kept the organization going. When the record book on this half century is closed, Pete’s organizing and composing performance, climaxed by his cross-country tour with Henry Wallace, will go down alongside the performances of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Aaron Copeland, Jimmy Rogers and the other standout originals.
By now Pete has sung over all the networks, played in Dark of the Moon, made the best of all our folk music shorts (To Hear My Banjo Play), set Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and all sorts of other auditoria on fire on occasions too numerous to mention, appeared on shows like This Is War, We the People, Cavalcade of America, Theatre Guild, National Barn Dance, and started a new national crush for the five-string banjo—about which he has written a most original musicological book, deceptively called “How to Play a Five String Banjo,” actually a brilliant analysis (and the first one) of our most significant instrumental style. This forty-three-page mimeographed volume with diagrams and illustrations by the author is available for one dollar and fifty-nine cents from the author, Beacon, New York.
Peter Seeger is possessed of that rarest of human qualities—the inquiring mind. This gentle and at the same time fiery and unbeatable spirit pervades his music, his friendships, his beanpole body and his thought. His performances are true to our folk music traditions. He has listened with a keen and perceptive ear and now uses the singing and playing styles of our folk musicians faithfully and sensitively. The reason he is now our best all-round folk performer is obvious in this quotation from his book:
“The people I learned banjo from were mostly old farmers, miners or working people who had played the instrument during their courting days and later kept it hanging on the wall to pass away the time of an evening. Often they knew only a few tunes apiece and maybe only one method of strumming, which they had picked up from their father or neighbor. Yet what they knew, they knew well and their banjo had more art in it than many a, hectio performance by a professional virtuoso …”