Pete Seeger at the Hootenanny Club in East Berlin, GDP, March 12, 1967. Daily Worker/Daily World Photograph Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University.
Joan Barthel opened 1966 with a glowing tribute to Pete in the New York Times. He had succeeded, with “no thanks at all to commercial television,” although he had inaugurated his own show, Rainbow Quest, with thirty-nine programs on WNJU-TV Channel 47 from 1965 into 1966. It had a limited initial audience, with only seven stations subscribing, but the fascinating programs would later be available on tape. Pete invited a broad range of performers, including Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Roscoe Holcomb. Barthel touched on his politics, but in no critical fashion: “There are still those who consider Seeger a threat, others who hold him in great admiration and some who, while not questioning his patriotism, consider him to have been guilty of political naiveté. In a way, all this ought to have nothing to do with his music.”* His appearance on network TV would come soon enough, although not without more controversy.
As the war in Southeast Asia escalated through 1965 and into 1966 under the Lyndon Johnson administration, Pete eagerly joined the antiwar movement. He also supported Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association in California (later known as the United Farm Workers), launched in 1962. In June 1966 he performed in Santa Monica at a fund raiser for the striking grape pickers. “Many of the songs were familiar through Seeger’s many recording[s],” noted the L.A. Free Press. “There is no one alive who can get an audience joining in on the chorus, tapping and clapping, like he can.” The albums continued to appear from both Columbia and Folkways, such I Can See a New Day, Strangers and Cousins, Pete Seeger on Campus, Little Boxes and Other Broadsides, God Bless the Grass, Dangerous Songs!?, and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs, all with a mixture of old and new. He also became increasingly active in the growing environmental movement, based on his reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), when it was published in installments in The New Yorker, and fueled by his concerns about the heavily polluted Hudson River. His focus on local issues connected with the need to relate to his neighbors in Beacon and gain their support. “About $1,500 was raised today for a floating Hudson River museum, thanks to Pete Seeger and about 1,000 people who paid to hear him sing ‘My Dirty Stream’ and other ballads about the Hudson,” the New York Times reported on October 3, 1966. “The concert was sponsored by the 15-member Hudson River Sloop Restoration Committee, which is trying to raise $120,000 to build a 75-foot-long sailing vessel to carry the culture of the Dutch and English settlers to the people of the valley today.” Three years later the sloop Clearwater would be launched.*
Pete Seeger at the Hootenanny Club in East Berlin, GDP, March 12, 1967. Daily Worker/Daily World Photograph Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University.
At year’s end he regaled the holiday crowd at Carnegie Hall with his songs. “So it went,” Robert Shelton reported in the Times, “a fine evening with Pete Seeger, with a lapse here and there to give a touch of humanity to his magic.” In January 1967 Pete and Toshi toured in Germany, including East and West Berlin, as well as Lebanon and Israel. “A small concert with the Hootenanny Klub was a great success; its members rejoiced to sing ‘Wimoweh,’ and ‘Guantanamera’” with the man who made them famous,” Victor Grossman, who served as Pete’s East Berlin interpreter, would recall. Born Stephen Wechsler in New York, Grossman had grown up in the U.S. and participated in the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign while a student at Harvard. In the army in the early 1950s, stationed in West Germany, fearing he might be punished for his Communist past, he fled to East Berlin, where his name was changed and he still resided. Grossman was thrilled by the enthusiastic reception: “Pete wondered nervously how East Germans would respond to his music …. He found an antifascist, antiracist audience at perhaps one of his most emotionally charged concerts. At the airport eight youngsters played him a grateful farewell serenade.”*
While Pete’s popularity appeared to be flourishing, he still faced obstacles to performing on prime time TV. He did appear occasionally, such as The David Susskind Show along with Robert Kennedy in October 1965, but two years later conditions were, sadly, not much better, as Jack Gould explained in the New York Times in April 1967: “Mr. Susskind may have been led astray in his opinion that blacklisting was over because he did not thoroughly understand the acid test, to which such judgment must be put …. But the deeper criterion of employability—the real proof of ‘clearance’—comes not on local or noncommercial programs, but in the individual’s opportunity on commercial coast-to-coast network shows.”† In August Robert Dallos announced in the Times that CBS had decided to allow Pete to appear on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. “Industry sources, who declined to be identified, said yesterday that the decision to allow Mr. Seeger to return to prime-time television was taken at high managerial levels,” Dallos explained. “Mr. Seeger said yesterday that he had not been asked to sign any oaths or statements for his appearance on C.B.S.”‡ Pete filmed a twenty-minute segment of the show on September 1 to be broadcast on September 10. Columbia Records had released a single of his antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” also featured on his album Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs in August, but it then provided scant promotion. Pete thought that his singing the song on the Smothers’ Brothers program would certainly influence an audience increasingly critical of the war, but when the program was shown the song was cut from his performance. George Gent’s article in the Times gave the details and Pete’s response: “Mr. Seeger … said the network had asked him to drop one of the verses of ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,’ his latest song hit, and that when he refused the entire song was dropped from the program …. ‘It’s strange that C.B.S. should have objected to it,’ Mr. Seeger said. ‘No song that I’ve done in the last 10 years has got the applause that this one has.’”* The story made headlines throughout the country. Newsweek defended Pete’s “innocent lament” and noted that “the CBS record division touts the song on the cover of a Seeger album.” The following February 25, once the controversy had died down, he returned to the Smothers Brothers’ show and did perform the song to a national audience, less than a month before President Johnson, facing an escalating antiwar movement and the Democratic Party’s primary elections, announced his decision not to run for reelection. In early February, however, Pete had also appeared on NBC’s The Tonight Show, when Harry Belafonte filled in for Johnny Carson as a guest host.
In 1983 Pete wrote a letter reprising the Smothers Brothers controversy. “Most of my life I have assumed that the kind of songs I sing would not normally get played on the airwaves,” he explained. “I pointed to examples like Woody Guthrie’s song, ‘This Land Is Your Land’ to show that they don’t have to get played on the airwaves. If it’s a real good song, it will get spread around anyway. But in 1967 I wrote what I thought was a real good song, and I knew there wasn’t time for it to get around the country. People were being killed every day in Viet Nam. I had a recording contract with Columbia Records at that time, and my friends there even agreed to put out a record of it; but the sales department just laughed at us both. The records stayed on the shelves and weren’t even sent to the stores.” He next recounted the role of the Smothers Brothers and their attempts to get the song heard. “Did the song do any good?” he wondered. “No one can prove a damned thing. It took tens of millions of people speaking out before the Viet Nam war was over. A defeat for the Pentagon, but a victory for the American people.” Curiously, in 1970 Columbia also pressed a 45 single of Pete recording Country Joe McDonald’s scorching antiwar anthem “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag,” but it was only distributed to radio disk jockeys and quickly died.†
Pete’s TV career would long continue, often on children’s shows, such as Captain Kangaroo on CBS, with an appearance in January 1974, and numerous appearances on Sesame Street. The album Pete Seeger & Brother Kirk [the Rev. Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick] Visit Sesame Street (1974), where they are accompanied by Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and the children, was the first by Sesame Street Records to include completely new material.
Pete Seeger has long had a sad song to sing. For seventeen years, network television kept the talented folk singer on the blacklist, first for his strident opposition to McCarthyism, then for his refusal to answer questions in a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of alleged Communism in entertainment. Thus, when CBS announced that Seeger had been signed for last week’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the network was widely applauded for its courage in breaking the ban.
The liberal glow on CBS’s corporate cheek, however, was almost immediately replaced by a blush of embarrassment. For while lifting the ban on Seeger, it saw fit to snip one of his songs from the show’s tape—a decision that earned as much criticism as the earlier move won praise. “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” written by Seeger himself, is a largely innocent lament about a training platoon whose men risk death crossing a swollen stream in Louisiana. But the last four lines—aimed unmistakably at President Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam war—were too much for CBS brass. The offending refrain: “Now every time I read the papers / that old feeling comes on / We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy / and the big fool says to push on.”
“We felt,” said a network spokesman, “that other music would make a better contribution to the show.” It seemed a somewhat muddy decision. For one thing, Seeger sang the same song last fall on the nationally syndicated David Susskind Show. Furthermore, the CBS record division touts the song on the cover of a Seeger album.
To Seeger, who keeps pace with the New Left through his musical leadership at peace rallies and civil-rights demonstrations, the song’s censorship was cause for more sorrow than anger. “It’s important for people to realize,” said the 41-year-old singer, “that what they see on TV is screened not just for good taste but for ideas. We have to open the networks to the rich diversity that is in America.”
If Seeger’s protest was somewhat mild, the Smothers Brothers—who had battled the network and suffered two weeks of hate mail to get him on the air—were plain furious. “It seems we have come to the time when a dissenting voice just can’t be heard,” snapped brother Tommy. “We definitely plan to have Seeger back and he’s probably gonna want to sing ‘Big Muddy’ again. Maybe we’ll sing it with him.”
SOURCE Newsweek, September 25, 1967, 118.