Flyer for “Pete Seeger Sings,” Royal Albert Hall, London, November 16, 1961. Cohen collection.
Pete Seeger, here for a month’s tour, docked at Liverpool last week armed with U.S court and State Department authority. Officials looked suspiciously at a passport that expires on November 21, the day he flies back to America.
Finally, they let him in—with his wife Toshi and daughter Tinya—largely for the on-the-spot impression of personal integrity he created.
SOURCE Melody Maker (England), October 28, 1961, 17.
That’s the sort of man Seeger is. Surprising that the Un-American Activities Committee should consider him a political being at all. His first passionate concern is to get everybody making music.
He seemed to arrive scattering wives, children, guitars, books, records and films all over the countryside—including copies of a new edition of “How to Play the 5-String Banjo,” an instructional record on steel band music, and a prizewinning film, Lines—Horizontal and Vertical, in which, by multiple dubbing, Seeger plays a small folk orchestra.
“I didn’t come here to make money, but to reach people,” Pete told me as I showed him the alternative engagements open to him, inviting him to pick and choose.
He chose to do everything on the list, even if it means several cross-Britain flights and another 1,500 miles.
No club is too small or too unimportant for him. “When Pete first started singing,” Toshi said, “he sang for anyone anywhere.”
Already he’s impressed by the liveliness of the British scene, where he’s getting a welcome of heroic proportions.
At the Liverpool Spinners Club that night, he joined Bert Lloyd, Dean of English folk song, and Jackie Macdonald for a memorable “Johnny Todd.”
Never have so many hung from so few rafters as at the Troubadour, Earls Court, the following evening, as fans crowded in to see this amiable and dignified giant in whom tradition and revival fuse.
Of that other fusion, Ewan MacColl, with whom Pete shared a platform at the Singers’ Club on Sunday, said: “Let’s face it—he’s a genius.”
At breakfast that morning he had regaled my spellbound children and several adults with a history of cornflakes.
He sounded very much the raconteur of Pete Seeger Story Songs, his first American Columbia disc which Philips will issue here shortly.
Some facets of Seeger’s diamond-like personality will come through at his concerts—he is the most successful communicator in the folk field.
Dates set up include: Aberdeen (Oct. 29), Edinburgh (Nov. 1), Glasgow (5), Nottingham (8), Liverpool (10), Birmingham (11), Manchester (12), Brighton (15). London. Albert Hall (16), Cambridge (19).