A musician and folk music journalist, Scott Alarik worked for the Boston Globe for two decades. He collected many of his interviews and articles in Deep Community, published in 2003. This piece on Pete was first published in the Boston Globe in 1996. Despite his world renown, Pete had never particularly sought fame, preferring instead to encourage others to perform, write their own songs, and in other ways become musically and politically involved. Besides receiving his National Medal of the Arts and Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Honor, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. As Pete admitted to Alarik, he was more impressed with receiving the Harvard Arts Medal in April, almost seventy years after his withdrawal from Harvard College. The article focused on his 1996 album Pete, which included the jazz musician Paul Winter, the instrumentalist Paul Prestopino, and the Union Baptist Church Singers.
Two years later Appleseed Recordings, recently launched by Jim Musselman, an attorney and social activist, produced the two-CD set Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (1998). Musselman gathered a wide range of performers—Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Ani DiFranco, Indigo Girls, Judy Collins, Roger McGuinn, Bruce Cockburn, Billy Bragg, Holly Near, Richie Havens, Tom Paxton, Nanci Griffith, Tim Robbins, Donovan, Sweet Honey in the Rock, John Stewart—to give their take on dozens of Pete’s songs, which had been gathered in Where Have All the Flowers Gone. For Musselman, “just as Pete’s songs have influenced others, so too, Pete has been influenced by the songs, ideas and people he has encountered. He gets his ideas from everywhere—snippets of songs, books and newspapers, and the Bible. He paints pictures with his pen, and his palette is the world.” Pete had written scores of songs, some popular, such as “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and “If I Had a Hammer,” while many others were known only through his own recordings. Three years later Musselman organized another stellar musical group—Steve Earle, Dar Williams, John McCutcheon, Eric Andersen, Kate and Anne McGarrigle—in a sequel CD, The Songs of Pete Seeger (2001), which was followed in 2003 by volume 3, SEEDS: The Songs of Pete Seeger—Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle, Anne Hills, Janis Ian, Tony Trischka, Peggy Seeger, Carolyn Hester. In his review of Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Sandy Carter stressed its timely release: “At the end of the 20th century with historical amnesia rampant, no popular political rebellion on the horizon, and so many of the songs of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly circulating in the mainstream of American cultural life, it is difficult to recall a time when folksingers or folk music could be considered subversive or worthy of repression.” But with the release of these CDs, “the music of one of the great torch bearers of alternative music making renews the spirit of radical song.”*
“Too many awards,” Pete Seeger said a little glumly. “After this, if somebody wants to give out awards, they can give them to somebody else. If they want me to come and sing for them, I’ll come sing.”
The legendary American folk singer has always been a most iconoclastic icon, and the awards heaped on him recently are heady fare indeed: the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Honor, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
As uncomfortable as he is with this kind of attention, he was genuinely pleased and honored when asked to accept the second Harvard Arts Medal (Jack Lemmon received the first in 1995): “My wife, Toshi, and I decided years ago that I would refuse any honorary degrees, since I’m not really part of academia, but that we would make an exception if Harvard asked.”
An arts award seems to sit better with the 76-year-old Seeger than an honorary degree, since he spent less than two years at Harvard, dropping out in 1938.
“Well, I guess I did take Fine Arts 1-A,” he said cheerfully, as if trying to help bolster Harvard’s case for the award. “Learned that the name for the curve on a Greek pillar is entasis. Gives a sense of weight, they said. Fine Arts 1-A.”
His brief Harvard career actually revealed much of the man he would become. He recalled attending classes with what is perhaps best described as a defining sense of independence, spending much more time working with the student union than with his studies, starting an underground paper called The Harvard Progressive, and becoming furious with a professor who always used the biggest, densest words possible; what Seeger has ever since called “scholar-gawk.”
SOURCE Deep Community: Adventures in the Modern Folk Underground (Cambridge, MA: Black Wolf Press, 2003), 18, 20–21 (originally published April 26, 1996, in the Boston Globe).
Musically, he was not admitted to the jazz band because he couldn’t sight-read quickly enough (“I’ve been strictly an ear musician all my life”). He did join the Banjo Club, but its policy of learning just one tune at a time, practicing it exclusively until it was performed—and wearing tuxedos while performing—greatly abbreviated their association.
This month, Seeger is also celebrating a new printing of his wonderfully vivid, anecdote-rich and properly song-filled memoir Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (Sing Out), and his first studio recording in 17 years: the deliciously Seeger-esque Pete on Paul Winter’s Living Music label. He said the project was Winter’s idea, since many of his more recent songs had not been recorded. Seeger’s fame as crowd-pleasing folksinger, human rights advocate and environmental activist often eclipses his songwriting. He has penned some of the most memorable tunes in the American songbag: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “If I Had a Hammer” (with fellow Weaver Lee Hays), “Turn, Turn, Turn” (lyrics from Ecclesiastes).
His voice has suffered from what he calls “a wobble” for some years, but sounds great here, rich in texture and personality. Pete-purists may find it a bit overproduced, laced with Winter’s sax, Joanie Madden’s tin whistle and three separate vocal choruses. But it feels like a Seeger show, with lovely choral work and Pete joyfully urging the singing along.
Many of his best-loved anthems are here: “Well May the World Go,” “My Rainbow Race” and “All Mixed Up,” along with standards such as “Water Is Wide,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” and “How Can I Keep from Singing?” It is always pretty and, though sometimes heavy on the choral arranging, all the more quintessentially Seeger for including so many voices.
“My main purpose in life is not to put songs in people’s ears but to put them on their lips,” he said. “I think singing together is important whether it’s a mother singing to a child or a family singing together or a choir. Because it’s a way people can relate to each other besides talking. Now, talking is good, but it has its limitations. My father called it the lingo-centric predicament The world is full of people who say. Aw, you can’t talk to them, they don’t make any sense.’ Or, ‘The only language they understand is guns.’
“I think we’re less human beings when we don’t participate, and this nation is being turned into a nation of spectators. For years I’ve joked about it, that people don’t bother participating in sports, they just watch a professional athlete. They don’t tell jokes to each other, they just watch a professional jokester. I’ve been on a campaign recently to get the papers to pay more attention to participation sports. They’re part of the problem, not the solution, if all they talk about are stars. And the supreme stupidity is a husband and wife sitting there watching a professional lover pretend to kiss a professional lover on TV. Is that what living is all about? No, you want to do something in this world, not just watch other people doing things. And singing, well, singing can lead to other things.”