Ruth Daniloff reports from Moscow: The Soviet audiences were obviously puzzled when the tall gangly American folk singer stepped out on to the stage carrying two guitars and a banjo, They are a formal people and are used to performers dressed in their Sunday best, not someone who looks as though he has just blown in from a hiking trip in a baggy sweater and dusty boots. “I guess people wondered whether I was the artist or just someone carrying on the instruments,” Pete Seeger said afterwards.
Against a backcloth of red plush on which was mounted a giant portrait of Lenin, Seeger broke into his first number, the old American folk song “John Henry.” This was the last performance of his Soviet tour before he left for London’s Palladium (where he appeared last Sunday), and he was singing before a hall of Moscow economics students.
Although Soviet audiences are not used to joining in with the show Pete Seeger soon had them taking up the chorus. “You got in free, now sing,” he told them. Little slips of paper containing requests showered on to the stage. Someone wanted a twist. Another wanted to know, “Why don’t you sing about love?” It was a pity that many of the words were lost on the audience. There was a translator on hand but the Soviet Institute of Foreign Languages had not taught her how to deal with such idiom. How was she to know the correct translation of “Bolweevil”?
SOURCE Peace News, May 15, 1964, 12.
This is probably the first time that Russians have had a chance to listen to a real American folk concert. Although they are proud of their own traditional songs, most “serious” musicians consider them somewhat lowbrow. Nevertheless, when Pete Seeger addressed a group of musicians from the Union of Musicians in Moscow he managed to get them to join in the chorus!
Due to the fact that many of the words had to be translated to the audience much of the performance was taken up with explanation. Some Russians complained that they wanted to hear more song and less talk and one young man in the audience, a musician himself, complained: “A performer shouldn’t mix politics with art. He’s always making propaganda.”
Many Russians remember the publicity that the Soviet press gave to Seeger’s prison sentence during the McCarthy era and thus some interpreted his explanations as “meddling in politics.” Ironically enough, they, who receive their daily ration of propaganda from the Soviet press, seem surprised when Seeger stated: “Most of the modern rhythms have started with the most oppressed and then been taken up by the rich,” or with regard to the twist, “this was a Negro folk song before Hollywood commercialized it.” At one of the Moscow concerts he even had the audience singing, “We Will Overcome,” the theme song of the American Integrationists. But as Seeger puts it, “I consider every song propaganda. A love song is propaganda for love. Any child knows that a lullaby is propaganda to get him to go to sleep.”
The question as to just how much so-called anti-American propaganda visiting American performers should or should not present is a controversial one. Many people, including Sol Hurok, the American impresario who is largely responsible for negotiating exchanges of artists between the US and the USSR, believe that such a film as West Side Story should not have been shown at the Moscow Film Festival last year. Stanley Kramer, the head of the American delegation at the festival, replied to such criticisms at the opening showing by telling the Russian audience: “We want to show you that we are free to criticise ourselves too.” The same thing could be said of Pete Seeger.