Definitions of folk music Pete Seeger leaves to the musicologists. He just sings songs, folk songs of America and, as his newest Columbia LP Strangers and Cousins (Columbia CL 2334) demonstrates, folk songs of the rest of the world, too.
“I am no high priest. I have no degree in folklore (nor in anything else). I am no linguist. The only reason I try to sing so many different kinds of songs is that I sing for so many different kinds of audiences,” Seeger says on the back of his new LP.
SOURCE Ralph J. Gleason, San Francisco Sunday Chronicle (This World), July 11, 1965, 43.
“I want to meet them half way. If they are willing to listen to some of my down-home music, at least I can make an attempt to learn some of their own down-home music. I know that in my well meaning attempts I have massacred many a good song. At least in all these attempts I have learned.”
Seeger will present his program of folk music from the world this afternoon at Searsville Lake Park in Woodside, his only concert in Northern California this season.
Seeger, who has been widely known in the folk music field for almost two decades, is only now becoming widely known among the general public.
Recent articles in Life, Holiday and Time have acquainted Americans with him who were previously ignorant of either his talent or his importance and only knew that he was in some way responsible for such songs as “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.”
Seeger’s blacklisting during the ’50s for refusal to answer questions about politics, religion and other personal convictions resulted in a contempt trial and subsequent acquittal by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
However, for many years he was able only to record for minor labels and appear in out of the way halls.
The revival of folk music, in which he had such a major role, produced the TV Hootenanny series which would not present him unless he signed a loyalty oath!
Talent, however, has a way of getting past the artificial barriers. Seeger’s tune—he and Lee Hays of the Weavers wrote “If I had a Hammer” at the end of the’40s and it has since been a top selling juke box hit in versions by both Trini Lopez and Peter, Paul and Mary as well as being a feature of numerous albums by other singers—won him the respect of the formal music industry.
Seeger’s vocal on the Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes” was his own bid for hit parade honors and was, for a short time, ranked on the Top 100 best selling single discs along with the rock ‘n roll and rhythm and blues specialties of a couple of years ago.
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a translation of a Russian poem which Seeger set to music, was a double hit: first in a version by the Kingston Trio and then in another, bilingual version by Marlene Dietrich.
And he has been one of the people responsible for reviving the current theme of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”
Seeger’s position in the world of music is unusual. He stands as the final link to the formal protest folk song movement of the ’30s and ’40s—the folk songs of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. After him come Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and they are rooted in different things and see from a different viewpoint.
Dylan, for example, sings of alienation of the individual in many of his songs, whereas one of the continuing themes of Seeger’s music over the years has been the theme of community.
Where Seeger sees folk music as a turn towards good away from the evil of commercial music (rock ’n roll) both Baez and Dylan dig rock ’n roll and sometimes sing it.
Seeger has achieved his eminent position by a pristine clarity of spirit and objective that has put him outside the commercial market (he shares this with both Dylan and Baez and with few others in music).
I have heard him wonder if the ticket price was too high at a concert, something which is so far removed from the usual performer attitude that it is almost inconceivable.
Some folk singers have been known to insist on a high ticket price in certain halls, as opposed to the Seeger attitude. Thus Seeger is, in no small way, the conscience of the folk movement, and his letters in Sing Out! and his communiqués to Broadside, the two magazines of the folk community, have been gospels to the young.
Seeger links the old and the new graphically. He sings both with equal commitment and he espouses the young artists with an open mind and open ear in a way that inspires them.
“I’m particularly impressed by a young poet, a true poet who makes up songs about the things he sees around him in his world. He is Bob Dylan and I’m convinced he’s one of the greatest.”
That was a statement by Seeger three years ago, and today Dylan is one of the most successful performers and song writers in American music.
Seeger spent a great part of the past two years on a 22-country round-the-world trip singing wherever he could. He was an unofficial cultural Ambassador for the American nation and as such much more successful than some of the official U.S. State Department protégés.
To a reporter for a New Delhi paper Seeger described his family tour and his reasons for making it thusly: “Most of the world, I am afraid, only knows the Coca Cola side of America and we, as a one family musical Peace Corps, hope to show them a little more about all of us. I want to tell them of our miners and our Freedom Fighters through the folk songs.”
He tells his story well. We’d be better off if all our speakers had his honesty.