Concert flyer for “Children’s Folk Song Concerts: Pete Seeger and Sam Hinton,” University of California-Berkeley, June 28–29, 1968. Cohen collection.
Television had not taken much advantage of folk music’s escalating popularity and commercial appeal until early 1963, when Billboard announced: “‘Hootenanny,’ the first regularly scheduled network TV program devoted to folk music, will make its debut on ABC, Saturday, April 6. Jack Linkletter will host the weekly series. The Limeliters, the Clancy Brothers, Theodore Bikel, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Miriam Makeba and other performers who have become famous in the exploding popularity of folk music will be making appearances on ‘Hootenanny.’ The series will originate at various college campuses before audiences of students.” Initially proving popular, in the fall the program’s half hour was stretched to an hour, the prime Saturday night 7:30–8:30 slot, but it eventually lost its audience and was dropped from ABC’s fall 1964 lineup.*
While numerous performers did appear on Hootenanny, Pete Seeger and various others did not, since he and the Weavers had been boycotted by the network. ABC claimed that Pete was not popular enough to draw a wide audience, but others knew better. Quickly a boycott committee formed, including Judy Collins, Carolyn Hester, and Tom Paxton. Soon Dylan, Joan Baez, and other commercial stars refused to appear. “Pete is indeed becoming an invisible man in some areas of the current renaissance of interest in folk music,” the jazz critic Nat Hentoff commented in the Village Voice. “I expect that the absence of his presence will gnaw at some of the folk singers who are cooperating in the expunging of his voice from network television.”†
Pete had various reactions to the situation, although when asked by his brother Mike, a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, what he should do, Pete responded that he had to make up his own mind, and the Ramblers did appear. Pete was naturally outraged about the situation, but his responses took varied forms. In his Sing Out! column he initially had two suggestions: “First, the way is still open for a decent folk music show to be put on the networks. Fight TV with TV. Second, anyone who knows how to use pen and paper can sit down and write a letter to ABC, to the ad agency, and the sponsor, and give a considered opinion of the shows when they’re aired in April. Those hucksters have no mind of their own, you know.”*
Concert flyer for “Children’s Folk Song Concerts: Pete Seeger and Sam Hinton,” University of California-Berkeley, June 28–29, 1968. Cohen collection.
Pete soon broadened his attack to cover TV more generally, as he expressed in his 1963 essay “Is There a Blacklist in U.S. Television,” sent as a letter to his manager, Harold Leventhal, and others. The continuing blacklist was only part of the problem, since commercial TV was “a national disgrace,” with its racist agenda and narrow programming. As for the Hootenanny show, it served up a watered-down version of folk music with only “well polished city performers” (including some of his close friends). Pete continued to broaden his thinking, as expressed in a letter to Leventhal and other folk entrepreneurs during the summer of 1963. Pete believed that some day the real folk music would appear on TV in its proper setting. He was not against TV, only that it should be used correctly. Indeed, a few years later he launched his own show, Rainbow Quest, on a local educational station, which aired thirty-nine fascinating programs.*
While the Hootenanny TV show expired in 1964, there was no dearth of folk performers appearing in the mass media, as the term “hootenanny” took on wide appeal. There were short-lived hootenanny candy bars, magazines, bath soap, Halloween costumes, paper dolls, beach towels, a pin ball machine, and so much more. Jon Pankake, the coeditor with Paul Nelson of the Little Sandy Review, the champion of traditional roots music, touted Pete’s role in the flourishing, complex folk revival in his insightful article. While others have unfortunately debased the music, according to Pankake, about “five percent of Seeger’s converts have become the core of the sort of revival within a revival that will prove constructive and beneficial,” for which he should be honored. About the same time the mainstream Life magazine honored Pete with a positive, illustrated spread: “He’s been called America’s tuning fork and he looks it.” While mentioning Pete’s legal tussles, the article ended by noting that one judge refused to hear Pete perform, “about the only person in memory who did not want to hear Pete Seeger sing a song.” Pete had now made the big time, although he was still banned from mainstream television.†
At the same time he continued to research the history of the songs in his expanding repertoire. In early January 1963 he wrote to Claude Williams, a southern minister and labor organizer whom he had met in 1940 when Williams was in New York visiting with Lee Hays. Pete inquired about the origins of a number of labor songs he had first learned from Williams, such as “Union Train”: “Since I was not even 20 yeas old until 1939 all I know about the origins of this whole group of songs is what I heard in chance conversations with you and Lee Hays. And I have probably been responsible for garbling up the authorship of many a song.” If Williams “could write such an article it could be printed in SING OUT Magazine, which is now read by about 10,000 young people, all across this country and in several other countries as well …. Claude, it is tremendously important that you do this. Every new generation that comes along must learn what the previous generations have done to fight for freedom. When I was singing in Albany, Georgia, last fall I heard some wonderful music. And they were singing some of the songs which had been passed on from me and which I got from you.” There is no indication that Williams followed through, but Pete tried.*
Alan Lomax has said that he feels the most important thing he and his father ever did in their work in American folk music was to discover and bring to the city the inspired Okie ballad-maker, Woody Guthrie, and the Negro musical genius known as Leadbelly (Huddle Ledbetter). In retrospect, it can be seen that, in giving these two eager Gargantuans access to the publications, the radio broadcasts, and the recordings that would otherwise have been denied them lie the roots of America’s city-based folk song revival of the past two decades.
Neither Guthrie nor Leadbelly were typical traditional American music-makers: the gifted individuality of each man had led him to create a personal body of song derived from his immediate tradition, but generally surpassing it in scope and topical relevance. Both men were flamboyant personalities who, in a manner completely opposite to the more typically passive and introspective purveyor or guardian of a given tradition, dominated their music and made it serve them, shaped and formed it to their personal and public needs. Their songs, being essentially artfully crafted mirrors of deep and powerful personal needs, tended—and still tend—to sound meaningless in the mouths of less virile singers; unlike typical folk songs, they do not speak for a wide range of members of a culture or subculture, but resolutely serve only their masters. Nothing sounds so hollow today as the songs of Guthrie and Leadbelly coming from the lips of the generally sincere but lackluster city singers of the late ’40s who first tried to wrest the songs from the personalities of their creators. Important as they were and are, the songs of Woody and Leadbelly required a vigorous and truthful interpretive voice, and none was available.
Despite the magnificence of Guthrie’s and Leadbelly’s talents, neither man was successful in making himself understood by America’s urban population. They were country men, and they spoke and sang in a language that was largely incomprehensible to city audiences that were as yet reluctant to accept the refined offerings of Burl Ives and Dyer-Bennet. It remained for a performer who could adequately wear the seven-league boots of the Guthrie and Leadbelly personalities and yet who would not sound alien to urban listeners to gain the ear of the public and to thus carry songs like “Goodnight, Irene” and “This Land Is Your Land” to the far corners of the nation that were inaccessible to the Okie and the hard-bitten Negro murderer. The role became Pete Seeger’s—he wore it to the hilt, and it fitted him like a glove.
SOURCE Little Sandy Review 29 (1964): 25–31; reprinted in David A. DeTurk and A. Poulin, eds., The American Folk Scene: Dimensions of the Folksong Revival (New York: Dell, 1967), 280–86.
All of us who participate in the folk-music revival are, in varying degrees of kinship, Pete’s children. It was Pete who first convinced us we could sing, that it didn’t matter how good or bad our efforts were as long as we made a joyful noise unto ourselves. It was Pete who first put a banjo in our lap and told us, “Here, this thing is simple—just go ahead and play it. You’ll sound great!” And such was his conviction, we did as we were told; and his conviction became our own: by God, we did sound good! Or so we thought in the flush of our discovery of ourselves.
We have all seen or heard Pete at one time or another. We have come to expect miracles of his performances, to have the hall light up and the audience take fire from his enthusiasm and indomitable optimism, and Pete has served us well. We have also, unfortunately, come to expect a certain amount of blithely slipshod musicianship, occasional tastelessness in presentation of topical material, and a kind of eager-beaver naiveté that has prompted Peter Clayton to comment in Jazz News: “It was when he turned to attack that log that I began to feel uneasy. He had flung off his jacket by this time and, picking up an axe not quite as long as his banjo, he sang a work song to the rhythmic accompaniment of his own chopping. The chips, significantly, flew everywhere. This ought to have been authentic, but somehow it had the embarrassing tameness of a Zulu warrior exhibited at a fairground.”
The fact that Pete can inevitably triumph over his own shortcomings is the ultimate testament to the illusion his stage presence creates before us. Seeger in action is one of the phenomenal spectacles of our time, the last, perhaps, of the great platform personalities in the American tradition of Mark Twain and William Jennings Bryan. Shameless rhetorical devices become as magic in his hands; before an audience that has never seen him before he will offhandedly say, “I think I’ve told you many times about …” or of a strange song, “You all know this one …,” and one immediately enrolled in his corner, a friend and an intimate. His inevitable “Sing it with me” becomes not a command, but an invitation to share his joy; the songs of Woody and Leadbelly live again, thrilling us even at one remove as they never seemed to from the lips of the masters. In the spell of his personality, we tend not to notice that his musicianship is seldom true to his inspirations, that he is, in the apt words of Nat Hentoff, more a “nimble cheerleader than an excavator of the marrow of folk feeling.” When Pete’s up there before the microphone, we just don’t care.
It is to Pete’s everlasting credit that he has never overtly encouraged young singers to emulate him in any respect save sources. “Don’t learn from me; learn from those who taught me.” It is excellent advice. But Pete has always picked and chosen in America’s fund of folklore with an eye more attuned to using the material for his own idealistic purposes than to honor the art of tradition. He has never bothered to learn the subtleties of traditional performing style, that creative magic that causes often mundane poetry and commonplace melody to seek out and thrill the secret places of our hearts. It is not the true folksinger’s understanding of our hidden desires and fears that we hear in Pete’s performances, but rather the legerdemain of a master platform personality. As a result, it is Pete’s example that has been followed by his starry-eyed disciples rather than his advice.
Like Pete, but lacking his peculiar genius for presentation, the young revivalists have piled haphazardly into America’s great traditions like so many grubby urchins grabbing at pennies thrown into the street. Flushed with Pete’s encouragement, equipped with a week of perfunctory study in his banjo course, their heads still reverberating with the insane ring of the mass communication airwaves, young men and women have snatched up the lifework of centuries of dedicated country geniuses and debased the integrity and dignity of these works by performing them as though they were so many Tin Pan Alley throwaways, not cognizant of their meaning and ignorantly robbing them of their uniqueness and honor. The body of America’s folk music has largely become like the proverbial Flemish description of life itself: “It is a haywain, and everybody snatches from it what he can.”
The bizarre output of the phony trios, the long-haired Greenwich Village madonnas, and the drugstore cowboys did have a unique enough sound to be swallowed up by the omnivorous appetite of the record and TV money boys, and this half-baked, unpalatable mess has been whipped into a national frenzy never visualized by the Lomaxes or Pete. It is, unfortunately, the basis of the American revival—and its faults are those of Pete himself.
There are critics of the current folk-song craze that totally condemn Pete’s leadership and examples as much as there are mainline academic folklorists who despise the work of John and Alan Lomax in the field of folk-music scholarship and publication. The comparison here between Pete and the Lomaxes seems a valid one, and worth examination.
The Lomaxes were the first to attempt to popularize the songs they bagged “along the folk-song trail,” to present them as living music to be used and enjoyed by those who would otherwise not have known of them—not as grist solely for the benefit of the mills located in the scholarly closets of university literature departments, as is all too often the orthodox folklorist’s opinion. They collected widely and indiscriminately and, leaving the scholarly busy work of classification and comparative study to lesser talents, moved on to new projects, depositing behind them a vast fund of song collections in the Library of Congress, the University of Texas, and in private files—and incurring the enmity and scorn of academics who deplored their lack of systematic cataloging and thorough documentation as well as their predilection for the creations of the lower classes.
In like manner, Seeger has continued to tour the country (indeed, the world) inspiring countless audiences of young people to turn to folk music for creative recreation but without remaining behind to see to it that the new converts are directed in constructive and legitimate channels of musicianship. He comes and is immediately gone again in search of new conquests, and his neophyte disciples, left to their own devices, happily begin to bastardize the scanty legacy he has left them. The dishearteningly influential and equally atrocious production of the Kingston Trio gestated between the pages of Pete’s How to Play the Five-String Banjo manual, nourished by his “Gee, it’s fun to doodle with folk songs” philosophy.
The last three years of the revival, however, have proven the Jeremiahs who were decrying the Lomaxes and Seeger as the destroyers of American folk music a bit hasty in their judgments. About five percent of Seeger’s converts have become the core of the sort of revival within a revival that will prove constructive and beneficial to the perpetuation of America’s folk music in its actual form. Scores of extremely talented and serious young people (among them Pete’s kid brother and sister, Mike and Peggy Seeger) have come forward to demonstrate their respect for and interest in authentic material and its methods of performance. Some of them, groups like the New Lost City Ramblers and the Greenbriar Boys and individuals like John Hammond, Dave Ray, John Koerner, Tom Paley, Hedy West, and yes, even Jack Elliott, have immersed themselves in the musical styles of the masters, have lived with the material and met it on its own terms, and have made it their own. In a few more years, these young talents will have nearly attained the stature of genuine traditional performers, and will in turn pass on their knowledge via example to yet a younger generation in the manner of true folk music. It is an extremely small percentage at present, yet it is a precious one—its dedication will last throughout the lives of its practitioners and its influence will be left long after the superficial faddists have become bored with folk music and have moved on to some other temporary kick.
And it will come as a surprise to no one that the material studied and utilized by the serious generation of city performers of country music is, to a large extent, that collected for just such purposes by the Lomaxes, and made available by them through the Library of Congress and commercial field-recordings. In their turn, the dedicated youngsters have themselves gone into the field as part of their education, and a good many of the documentary folk-music recordings pouring off the presses at present bear the names of Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Ralph Rinzler.
Pete has listened politely for years to the worst and most commercialized of his “offspring,” too good-natured and perhaps too uncritical to inform them of the error of their ways, but he endorses with genuine delight and pride the accomplishments of the serious young singers, hovering over some (like Bob Dylan) as would an actual father. Perhaps all along he has known, as does the farmer who toils on barren soil, that most of his seeds will die, but that the ones that grow to maturity will seem the sweeter for their hard-won victory. And perhaps he has been waiting not for his children but for his grandchildren before evaluating the fruit of his labors.
It is a certainty that when the history of the folk-song revival of the mid-twentieth century is written, the name of Pete Seeger will appear not only on the table of contents, but on the initial page. Whether for better or for worse yet remains to be seen—but when Pete himself is so confident, can we seriously doubt?