Pete Seeger, The Steel Drums of Kim Loy Wong, 1961. Cohen collection.
The Kingston Trio’s skyrocketing popularity beginning in 1958 was certainly surprising, but they were not the first commercial folk success. The Weavers had major hits in the early 1950s, followed by the Tarriers and Harry Belafonte by mid-decade. They were soon joined by a host of folk groups and individual performers into the 1960s. The number would quickly grow, with Pete now the elder statesman, despite his only just reaching his forties and with his political troubles continuing to brew. He pursued his various activities while taking a concert trip to England in 1959, where he performed at St. Pancras Town Hall in London in October. “That dynamic man, that tireless singer, looks almost sleepy, lazy, on stage … and yet he is heard. His manner is diffident, his approach to his material is modest,” Eric Winter wrote in the glowing liner notes to the subsequent Folklore Records album.*
Art D’Lugoff (1924–2009) had opened the Village Gate in Greenwich Village in 1958, a jazz and folk club with Pete as his beginning act. The booklet accompanying the 1960 Folkways album Pete Seeger at the Village Gate with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon—Pete loved performing with blues musicians—included Pete’s essay “On Singing Folk Songs in a Night Club,” where he encouraged performers to appear in night clubs, which were more intimate than concert halls. Still, they are expensive and “are all too hot, smoky, and one still has to compete with noise from the kitchen. But all this is petty carping. I repeat: it is good practice for a singer to try singing in a saloon occasionally.”†
In 1960 Moe Asch and Irwin Silber launched Oak Publications, which published dozens of folk-related books until 1967, when they sold the company. One of their first was Seeger’s American Favorite Ballads, designed for grassroots musicians, which included a Foreword by Asch and Pete’s Introduction. Asch praised Pete for helping “to spread the folk music seed,” while Seeger emphasized that the “sequence of the songs has purposely been made from a singer’s or a listener’s point of view.”* As usual, he turned the spotlight away from himself to his audience, in this case those who would use the book for their own purposes. Pete published The Steel Drums of Kim Loy Wong: An Instruction Book about the same time. He had first met Wong on his trip to Trinidad in 1956, where Pete made a short film, and three years later Wong came to New York and recorded two albums for Folkways. “In a short film entitled Music from Oil Drums, Toshi and Pete Seeger have given us a remarkable insight into a unique musical instrument, the West Indian steel drum, and glimpses into the people who make them and the island where they are produced,” Ed Badeaux wrote in Sing Out! in 1958. There was a companion Folkways album, The Drums of Kim Loy Wong with the University Settlement Steel Drum Band: An Instructional Record in 1961.†
SOURCE Pete Seeger, American Favorite Ballads (New York.: Oak Publications, 1961), 7.
Seeger had often criticized the popular music industry and had serious misgivings when the Weavers had their surprising early popularity, appearing in fancy nightclubs, with Decca insisting that their recordings include big band accompaniment. In his Foreword to Reprints from the People’s Songs Bulletin, an Oak publication in 1961, Pete noted that in 1946 we “had the utmost contempt for normal commercial musical endeavors,” although we were soon forced “to make a living in commercial ways.” He much preferred Folkways Records and Moe Asch’s casual approach—an amazingly wide range of music and spoken word albums covering the world—as well as congenial politics, but Pete also had a difficult time declining to reach a broader audience.‡
He had early met the famed record producer John Hammond (1910–1987), who had joined the People’s Songs board of directors and now worked for Columbia Records. Asch encouraged Pete to sign with Hammond so that he could reach a much wider audience, although Hammond had to convince company executives that this was a safe political move. He prevailed since, as he later wrote, “I was sure the growing interest in folk music in the United States would make him popular with young people …. So, Pete Seeger was signed and I did a lot of good recording with him.” Folkways would continue to issue a large variety of his albums, while his first for Columbia, Pete Seeger Story Songs, recorded at the Village Gate on April 30, 1961, and issued the following September, was followed by numerous others into the early seventies. In his album liner notes Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939), a budding actor, journalist, and later a noted Hollywood director and writer, deftly captured Pete’s recording style at the Village Gate, where he was surrounded by many of his friends, including, surprisingly, a very ill Woody Guthrie: “The Gate is dimly lit, people meandering about, Pete Seeger is sitting on the stage apron alone, hunched over his guitar, practicing. Seeger is wearing an aqua shirt, tangerine-colored sweater, grey pants, Indian beaded belt … heavy brown stomping shoes. He’s a tall, suntanned, midwestern-looking gentleman with slightly crooked teeth, thin, receding reddish-blond hair. He has an ingratiating smile, he’s shy and a bit nervous.” Besides Guthrie, the select afternoon audience included Sis Cunningham, Ronnie Gilbert, Erik Darling, Fred Hellerman, Theodore Bikel, and the Nigerian musician Olatunji. Bogdanovich concluded: “Seeger ends the session. Says meaningfully, happily: ‘I’ve had more fun at this recording session than I ever had in my whole life and believe me, it’s thanks to you.’ He applauds us and we applaud him.”*
The February 1962 issue of Gent, a men’s magazine, reported: “Pete Seeger, the most infectious folk singer alive, has left the artsy-craftsy confines of Folkways Records for the larger and undoubtedly more commercial environs of Columbia. Judging from his first record under the new label, the change has wrought no adverse effects. Story Songs, ‘A Baker’s Dozen of American Ballads, About 3 Saints, 4 Singers, and 6 Other People’ (CS 8468S) was taped by A & R man John Hammond at the Village Gate, and not a whit of the great balladeer’s spontaneity is lost.” Columbia also issued a limited number of 45 singles, starting with “Mail Myself To You” / “Little Boxes” in 1962.†
This land is your land
This land is my land
From California to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters …
The ever-continuing search of Americans for an identity of belonging is best exemplified through our folk music—in song, ballad and tune. As Woody Guthrie pointed out in the song quoted above—this is a big country. People from all walks of life and areas of the world have made America their home. Their children and grandchildren have left behind most of the ethnic ties that bound the old folks to their previous homelands. The schools, newspapers, novels, and media of the airwaves keep reminding them of the history that made the United States the land they know today.
This history is filled with the heartaches, hardships, triumphs, disasters and love that have molded us all into a common experience. It is these qualities which folk music reflects—from “Yankee Doodle” of the Revolution to the desires for a better world expressed in “Passing Through.” Appropriately enough, both of these songs are in this collection.
It was not until after World War II that young people in all walks of life and all parts of the United States made use of this folk music tradition and adapted it to their way of expressing their feelings and of tying up the past to their future.
Pete Seeger, of all the singers of folk song, made the transition possible for them. In the past 15 years, Pete Seeger’s concerts—from Carnegie Hall in New York to the smallest school auditorium in the hinterlands—have helped to spread the folk music seed. And, in the tradition of Johnny Appleseed, what Pete Seeger has sown over these years has grown, until now the tree is ripe and one can issue a book such as this without fear of contradiction or a patronizing pat on the back—for the song has come from the earth, regrown, and attained maturity.
Now it is up to the children and grandchildren to take it from here. Folkways Records, Pete Seeger, Sing Out magazine, and the host of folk song collectors, folk singers and record companies have made their contribution.
And so this volume is dedicated to the young. But in making such a dedication, the others should not be forgotten. As Woody Guthrie advised those who heard and sang his “Songs To Grow On”:
“Now I don’t want to see you use these songs to divide nor split your family all apart. I mean, don’t just buy this book and take it home and keep it to yourself. Get your whole family into the fun. Get papa. Get mama. Get brother. Get sister. Get aunty … The friends. The neighbors. Everybody.”