Pete Seeger, Sing Out! cover, May 1954. Cohen collection.
In May 1950 People’s Artists, with Pete’s fervent support, launched a monthly magazine, Sing Out! He was initially listed as one of the contributors, along with Paul Robeson, Alan Lomax, and Irwin Silber. The notice in The Worker mentioned “A new magazine of songs for struggle,” and the name came from a line in Pete and Lee Hays’s “The Hammer Song,” which was featured on the first cover: “I’d sing out danger, I’d sing out a warning.” In the second issue Pete joined the smaller music staff but by year’s end was again listed as one of the contributors. In October 1951, with Silber now the editor, Pete’s name had been dropped from the masthead and would not reappear among the contributors until May 1953. Although they had worked closely during People’s Songs and the Wallace campaign, Silber was a lukewarm fan of the Weavers. In a review of their Town Hall concert in December 1952, he criticized their humor, which “stemmed from songs and/or remarks in the vein of male supremacy,” and complained, “there seemed to be a total absence of folk songs of social protest.” “Limited space does not allow me to cite all of the positive aspects of the concert, which were many,” he yet concluded. “The variety, the spirit, the audience singing, the tasteful arrangements, and the excellent string bass accompaniment by Sid Weiss all contributed to a fine evening.”*
Although listed as a contributor, for a while Pete seems to have been little involved with Sing Out! While somewhat critical of the Weavers, in a review of A Pete Seeger Concert, his Stinson album, Silber had nothing but praise: “Perhaps the most valuable thing about this new album is the lesson it can teach other performers in techniques of programming. The fourteen songs … present a great variety of people’s music from all over the world.” Much of the May 1954 issue was dedicated to Pete, with a drawing of him on the cover. In his article, “Pete Seeger—Voice of Our Democratic Heritage,” Silber lauded his music and ability to overcome political adversity; as he noted in the issue’s introduction: “On behalf of many thousands in this country and throughout the world, we want to say: ‘Keep singing Pete! We need your songs and your good singing more than ever before.’”*
Due to financial difficulties, a somewhat fatter Sing Out! became a quarterly with the Fall 1954 issue, which also included the first publication of Pete’s column “Johnny Appleseed, Jr.,” which continued in each issue for many decades: “This column is dedicated to Johnny Appleseed, Jr.—the thousands of boys and girls who today are using their guitars and their songs to plant the seeds of a better tomorrow in the homes across our land …. This column aims to print news of and for these modern Johnny Appleseeds. I have met them in every state of the union, playing their guitars and building a new folklore out of the best of the old.” This issue also moved Pete to Sing Out!’s staff of four, working closely with editor Silber. Moreover, in 1954 Pete published the second edition of his banjo instruction book, now professionally printed, accompanied by a Folkways album, which “should be of special value to those who cannot read music, or have no banjo playing friends or teachers to help them over the hurdles.” An expanded third edition would appear in 1962. Pete was first and foremost an educator and communicator.†
Starting in October 1954, ending in late January 1955, Pete launched six evening concerts, with commentary, at Columbia University, charging $5 for the series. Beginning with “The traditions of England Scotland and Ireland, especially in native balladry,” the sessions proceeded through “Negro folk music and African traditions in music,” “Traditions arriving with more recent immigrations from Europe and Asia,” “Influence of our neighbors—South and Central America and French Canada,” “Religious folk music, covering shape-note hymns and recent gospel music,” and ended with “American history in song, and the folk music of New York City.” His eclectic approach was well represented.‡
I’ve been a Pete Seeger “fan” for more than twelve years now. It will be thirteen on July 4, 1954. The reason I remember the date so well is that I first heard Pete sing on July 4, 1941—and Pete’s singing has helped to make that date an unforgettable one.
It was in Philadelphia’s Town Hall at a national convention of the American Youth Congress—and I had just been elected a delegate to that convention by a gang of fellow teen-agers from my neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City.
SOURCE Sing Out! 4, no. 6 (May 1954): 4–7.
Today, thinking back on it, it’s hard to pick out individual pieces of that convention in my memory. But I DO remember the opening session. There had been a lot of very exciting speakers (including a United States Senator), when the chairman said something about taking a break for some entertainment. (They didn’t introduce singers well at that time either.) A group of young people came on stage and said that they called themselves the Almanac Singers and that they had just completed a singing tour under the auspices of the newly organized CIO. They then sang some of the songs which they had written for and with miners and steel-workers all over the Midwest, including “Union Maid,” “Which Side Are You On” and a few others. Then the tall, skinny member of the group who was playing a banjo with the longest neck I’d ever seen stepped up to the microphone and started a little chant-like speech while he played:
“If you want higher wages,
Let me tell you what to do;
You gotta talk to the workers
In the shop with you ….”
Afterwards I found out that his name was Pete Seeger.
Since that time, Pete’s seen a lot of this country and the whole world. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Pete Seeger has sung for more people “in the flesh” than any other folk-singer in the history of the United States. By now, his five-string banjo (whose neck seems to get longer every time I see it) has been heard in every one of the 48 states and all over Canada.
After spending a number of years in the Pacific during the war—during which time he made some fantastic collections of song material of soldiers (see “Songs of Saipan” and “Report from the Mariannas” in People’s Artists Library)—he came home to start the biggest, most ambitious project of his life—People’s Songs.
People’s Songs Inc., an organization of folk-singers and song-writers and other interested folks, came into being in the basement of Pete Seeger’s apartment on MacDougal Street in Manhattan. In the three hectic years of People’s Songs’ existence, Pete served as its full-time national chairman, walking music library, main Bulletin contributor, head Hooteneer and chief bottle-washer. People’s Songs Inc. as an organization was completely impractical from the start—if we were to go by the usual standards for deciding on a business venture. But as an organization which was needed and had a lasting impact on the trade union and folk song movements—it was practical as Hell!
In the course of its three years, People’s Songs produced the first major songbook of workers’ and people’s songs since before the war, published a monthly song bulletin for 2,000 subscribers all over the world, organized more than two dozen branches and singing groups in as many cities, ran dozens of Hootenannies and song-fests all over the country—and when it was finished (because it just ran out of money), the course of American folk music wasn’t nearly the same. And right in the middle of it, with his unmatched talent, energy and organizing drive was Pete Seeger—still figuring out new ways of reaching more and more people with songs of peace and love and Justice.
Ever since the Almanac Singers had to dissolve with the coming of the 2nd World War, Pete had hoped to be part of a singing group again. Being a solo singer was fine, as far as it went, but Pete has always felt (and still does) that the best way to sing folk songs and people’s songs is with a group. And so, in 1948, he organized The Weavers—a folk song quartet composed of Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and himself. The Weavers sang together for a year with great artistic (if not financial) success. Then, in the Fall of 1949, they auditioned for Max Gordon, owner of a Greenwich Village night club, The Village Vanguard. They opened just before Christmas in 1949 and stayed there for close to six months—one of the longest engagements in the history of that night spot.
It was just at this time, too, that the denizens of Tin Pan Alley were quite concerned with a deafening silence which had descended on the cash registers of the commercial music world. It was becoming more and more apparent as the “hit” records and sheet-music lay piled up on dealer’s shelves, that the tried and tested song gimmicks were fast losing their usefulness and popular appeal. Gordon Jenkins, one of the top band-leaders and arrangers for Decca Records, came down to the Village Vanguard one night, heard The Weavers, and came up with an idea which was to revolutionize the output of Tin Pan Alley for the next few years. While the commercial tune-smiths were still trying to find new ways of rhyming “June” and “moon” with “spittoon” and looking for all kinds of new melody ideas—here was a great untapped source of vital music which apparently had a small (by commercial standards) but enthusiastic following.
Decca signed The Weavers to make a couple of records just to see what would happen—and in a few weeks’ time the whole country was singing “Good Night Irene,” “Old Smoky,” “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You” and many other traditional folk songs. Soon other companies caught on to the idea and plunged into the “bonanza” of our folk song heritage. The library card became a songwriter’s most important asset as old folk song books were ploughed through in the search for new hits. The second hand bookshops reported an “amazing” run on their dust-laden stocks of old songbooks of every description. In a matter of months, the cash registers came back to life. The Weavers’ recording of “Good Night Irene” alone sold over two million copies.
A discussion of the values of this development rightfully belongs in another article. But in the midst of this, Pete Seeger and The Weavers skyrocketed to a fame and affluence (comparatively) which was unprecedented in their lives up until that time. They appeared on radio and television programs, in fancy night clubs all over the country, and they made dozens of records which were heard throughout the world.
It wasn’t long, however, before the self-appointed vigilantes of our time began to attack The Weavers (and Pete in particular) for the fact that they had performed for union audiences, peace groups, and the world-famous Peekskill concert with Paul Robeson. Bookings were cancelled, radio and TV programs dried up, record distributors and disc jockeys were pressured into refusing to handle their material.
Unfortunately, The Weavers allowed themselves to be intimidated by these attacks. They allowed themselves to be cut off from their main source of strength—the audiences of working people throughout the country who respected them as artists and individuals with integrity. Still maintaining certain basic principles as honest Americans, they resisted the efforts to get them to turn on their former associates and play the role of stool-pigeons to the various assortments of inquisitors and home-grown fascists. So they drifted along in a no-man’s land between these two areas—and essentially were not supported in their fight to keep performing by any sizeable section of the population.
The inevitable happened. Today, The Weavers no longer exist as a functioning performing group. But Pete Seeger is still singing—more than ever before perhaps—for enthusiastic audiences all over America. To those who think that Pete’s career as a singer was ended when the witch-hunters stopped his night-club and TV appearances, he can say as Paul Robeson has said: “I’m singing more often and for more people than ever before.”
Variety, the trade-paper of show business, no longer knows what Pete Seeger is doing. But in San Francisco, in Cleveland, in Detroit, in Toronto, in Los Angeles, in Kansas City, in St. Louis and, of course, in New York City, there are tens of thousands of working people who are being inspired by America’s folk songs—both the old and the new—performed by an artist who knows that his whole vitality and strength comes from this audience.
The disc jockeys aren’t “spinning his platters” any more—but in Montreal, a group of young people are still singing the wonderful songs they learned from him there—and they’re getting others to sing them too. There are no big write-ups by the night club columnists any more—but Pete is writing articles himself for SING OUT and other publications which will help others become fine people’s artists by learning from his experiences.
When an audience at a Hootenanny sees the familiar five-string banjo bobbing up and down—leading them in a new song about high prices or Joe McCarthy; or teaching an old African or Indian folk song; or accentuating the fire of a militant union song;—they know that it’s people’s music in the air and that nothing is more powerful!
Alan Lomax has called Pete Seeger “America’s greatest folk singer.” History will endorse this judgment.