A few days ago someone handed me the latest copy of SING OUT and told me to turn to Pete Seeger’s column “Johnny Appleseed, Jr.” if I wanted to work up a really fine rage. I accepted the proferred magazine and my friend stepped back a few paces and waited for the explosion. There was no explosion. Of course, I disagreed with the article as expected (the contents of same are of no importance here) but I got no satisfaction out of disagreeing with Seeger. I think that the man is really great, in almost every sense of the word and it saddens me to constantly find myself in the opposition camp every time he ventures an opinion. But when he sings—
Artists of Seeger’s genre are hard to come by in this day and age. He is, in my opinion, taste and honesty personified, and a Seeger concert is a lesson which no singer of folksongs can afford to miss. When he speaks on the stage, his voice rarely rises above a conversational level, and yet he is heard. There is no phoney upstaging at all. As a matter of fact “stage presence” of the Broadway variety is entirely absent. Seeger does not act; he is.
I think that this is the key to his entire greatness. The man has no need to act in order to establish contact with his audience. He genuinely respects the people who are listening to him and refuses to insult their sensibilities with insincere theatrics. And they respond, not to an actor or stage personality, but to the man.
He treats his material in much the same way. I doubt if Seeger considers himself a “folklorist” per se; but rather he looks at folkmusic as a human being; subject to love, hate, enthusiasm, sorrow-in short, all of the emotions with which folkmusic deals. He is not “preserving” folklore but living it, and so are we, and he knows it. He neither sings up nor down to his material but with it. And there is no dichotomy between the performer and the content of his songs. This is the reason why one never gets the “isn’t this cute” or “how quaint” impression from Seeger’s singing. When he sings, ALL of him is involved. Which is another lesson that many singers of folksongs could profit by.
SOURCE Caravan 2 (September 1957): 8–9.
Again, I can’t say I think much of Pete’s point of view on many subjects. He is forever espousing causes which at best leave me cold. But I can’t say that I think that he would be better off without his causes and opinions. However wrong I happen to think they may be, they reflect a genuine concern with the real world which, to my way of thinking, is an indispensable part of a whole person, which I think Pete Seeger is.
The tragedy is that there are almost none like him. He is almost unique and insofar as such people in folkmusic are rare, then it becomes necessary to form “societies for the preservation of folklore”—or perhaps the word should be “embalming.”
—Rafferty
August 1957