Pete Seeger will be forty-six next year. He has been singing professionally for twenty-five years, and as an amateur for many years before that. His first recording was made in 1941 (with the Almanac Singers). This review is not of any one of his discs, but makes some general comments on all of them, the forty or fifty solo LPs he has done for Folkways, and the five he has done for Columbia in the last three years.
Taken all together, they form one of the most horrendously uneven bodies of recorded music that any performer could boast of, or perhaps be ashamed of. Now, it is true that some songwriters have written thousands of songs, and let posterity decide which few dozen of them were worth singing. But does a performing artist have the same right to spew out thousands of recorded performances to the commercial market, without being judged for the poor ones as well as the good ones?
Some of Seeger’s earliest discs, such as Darling Corey (1948), have the nearest to traditional folk music on them, although a still earlier one, Talking Union (1941), is the most frankly propagandistic.
SOURCE Sing Out! 15, no. 1 (March 1965): 85, 87 (ostensibly written by Toshi, but actually by Pete himself).
Scattered throughout the discs, you will occasionally hear some passable ballad singing. (Pete’s sister Peggy is a much better ballad singer. But if you really like ballads, why not listen to the master balladeer, Horton Barker, on Folkways and Library of Congress LPs?)
As for banjo-picking, Pete only occasionally does some good traditional picking. His brother Mike can play rings around him, not only on the banjo, of course, but on guitar and half a dozen other instruments which Pete mercifully does not attempt. But much of P.S.’s banjo accompaniment is tasteless whamming.
If community singing is your meat, you can probably learn a lot from him, since he has been at this game for a long time—according to his own account, since his mother gave him a ukelele at the age of eight. But if you prefer your folk songs less noisy, better performed, and with a smaller number of voices, best steer clear. He also has a disturbing habit of singing harmony to his own songs, when the crowd is warmed up. On the stage, perhaps he can get away with it. Over a loudspeaker in one’s living room, it can be just plain annoying.
If you like blues, don’t even bother listening to him. He doesn’t know how to sing or play blues, though he occasionally tries to.
If you like spirituals and gospel songs, he does a little better here—in fact, better than most white musicians. But still his voice tends to get tense and hard, and he rarely achieves that full, relaxed, but powerful tone that most good Negro singers have naturally. No, if you like spirituals, listen to Vera Hall (Folkways) or Blind Gary Davis, or the Gospel Keys, or the modern commercial singers such as Mahalia Jackson (her early discs, for Apollo, are some of her best).
Pete Seeger’s concerts are a different matter. I will not mention them in this article except to say that while there’s hardly a song he sings which couldn’t be sung better by someone else, his concerts—most of them deft improvisations upon program themes he has developed through the years—are often masterpieces of programming.
This is probably why his records are rarely criticized properly. People like the guy, and hesitate to slam his discs as they should.
Sometimes the intensity of his performance can pick you up and carry you away, especially if you agree with what he is saying (not all do, of course). Jimmy Durante, the old-time comedian, is supposed to have said once, “When I face a crowd, I give ’em all I got!” and Seeger, when he walks out on a stage, often seems to follow this philosophy. Probably it is for this reason that some people wildly applaud him, and try to recapture the excitement by listening to his records. Others, who know what kind of music they like, will not join in on the chorus, and feel more and more repelled. You’re either with it or you’re not, honey.
It is probably because of his indefatigable concertizing that he has made so many records. Any recording company knows that sales follow personal appearances. Probably a number of readers of this article were first introduced to folk music through a Seeger concert at some college. They can be a lot of fun, and if you let your guard down, a deeply moving experience.
But that doesn’t mean one has to like his records. Really, I don’t think the guy listens to them himself. In between two pretty good songs is sandwiched a sentimental little piece of nothing. If someone recommends a Pete Seeger record to you, the standing rule should be: don’t buy it sight unseen, or sound unheard. You might like it. You might not be able to stand it. The discs range from children’s songs through standard American Folk Repertoire to modern composed songs by people like Malvina Reynolds and Bob Dylan, and to songs from a dozen different countries. Which prompts one to say that Seeger would probably do a better Job generally if he didn’t spread himself so thin. Perhaps he has opened up Young America’s ears to new sounds and songs, but he has also given them a bad example: “You, too, can sing in sixteen idioms.”
It’s not true. He can’t, and you can’t.
He is known to go out on a stage before a thousand people (who have paid hard-earned cash for tickets) and, sticking the words of a song with scotch-tape to the microphone, sing them for the first time in his life. You may be able to get away with it on a stage, but do you have to record it, Peter?
To sum up, if one could dub onto a tape a few songs from here and there on his many LPs, one might have quite a good half-hour or one-hour tape of Pete Seeger. The trouble is, no two people would make the same selections. And therein lies his only defense.