Pete loved to tell stories, particularly to children. His book with Paul DuBois Jacobs, Pete Seeger’s Storytelling Book, included two dozen stories, some learned from his father, including “Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase,” “Abiyoyo,” “The Deaf Musicians,” and “Sam the Whaler.” “As a young man, I didn’t think of myself as a storyteller,” he wrote in the Introduction. “Then, at age twenty, I met Woody Guthrie, a balladeer from Oklahoma. Soon after that, I met Lee Hays, son of an Arkansas preacher. Both Woody and Lee were great storytellers, and I listened to them with admiration.” The story “Takashi Ohta Crosses the Ocean” was about Pete’s father-in-law, who had led an exciting and dangerous life. He left Japan in 1911, at the age of nineteen, to participate in the Chinese Revolution, next accompanied a group of Buddhist monks traveling in China, then joined a British merchant ship and traveled widely. He arrived in the United States in 1919, married an American, and remained until 1963, when he finally returned to Japan to visit his relatives. Warren Berger’s informative 2001 article in Book: The Magazine for the Reading Life, “American Story Teller,” covered Pete’s life as well as Pete Seeger’s Storytelling Book.*
Pete approached his ninth decade with somewhat flagging energy, but he continued to give concerts, make recordings, publish children’s books, and cooperate with numerous interviewers. Jim Brown finally completed his film portrait, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, which appeared in 2007. While his older recordings remained readily available on hundreds of CDs, new Appleseed albums appeared: At 89 in 2008, which received a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in 2009, and, two years later, Tomorrow’s Children with the Rivertown Kids, which captured a Grammy for the Best Musical Album For Children. In a 2002 interview in Acoustic Guitar with Jeffrey Rodgers, Pete surveyed his well known story, and when asked about his song writing, mentioned his initial influence: “But I met Woody [Guthrie] and got the idea you could write songs. I first tried putting new words to old tunes, which is what he did, and found that I was better at putting new tunes to old words.” As far as his song royalties: “All around the world, songs are being written that use old public domain material, and I think it’s only fair that some of the money from the songs go to the country or place of origin, even though the composer may be long dead or unknown.” For example, 50 percent of the “Abiyoyo” royalties went to South Africa. Occasionally a fresh take on Pete’s life appeared in print, such as David Hajdu’s 2004 piece in Mother Jones, “Pete Seeger’s Last War: The Grand Old Lion of the American Left Sings to Fight Another Day.” Studs Terkel followed in 2005 with a lyrical paean to his old friend, recalling their first meeting in 1941.*
In 2006 Bruce Springsteen, the popular rock singer/songwriter who had recognized his musical debt to Woody Guthrie with his album The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), issued his Sony recording We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Springsteen included fifteen songs, mostly traditional—”Old Dan Tucker,” “Erie Canal,” “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” as well as Sis Cunningham’s “My Oklahoma Home”—recorded but not written by Pete, and with his backing band toured in Europe and the U.S. for some months. The album was a major event that focused renewed attention on Pete. Sean O’Hagan’s article in the Guardian (London) reminded the readers about Pete’s seemingly negative reaction to Dylan going electric in 1965, but with Springsteen’s album “the balance of pop cultural history may finally tilt once again in favour of the grand old man of American folk music.” O’Hagan ended by artfully pointing out: “It is revealing that Springsteen has chosen to cover songs that Seeger covered and made his own, rather than the ones he wrote. Ultimately, it may be Seeger’s belief in the folk song as an agent of social change that may become his abiding legacy, rather than the songs themselves. Therein lies the essential dilemma at the heart of his calling, at the heart of his undoubted commitment.”†
While Springsteen’s European tours attracted large crowds, this was not particularly the case in the United States. In the Chicago Tribune, music critic Greg Kot covered his appearance at a large outdoor venue near Chicago on June 13, 2006, which drew a relatively small audience. Kot believed the concert should have been in a smaller auditorium, with a reduced ticket price, but otherwise posted a rave review. Springsteen covered songs from the album, with some fascinating additions, such as Pete’s antiwar “Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)” and the civil rights song “Eyes on the Prize.” Kot ended by combining praise for Springsteen as well as Seeger: “By invoking Seeger, he’s not dusting off a sepia-tinged photograph of a nearly forgotten past. Instead, like the master, he sees folk music as a rocking and rolling commentary on who we are now and where we’re going next.”
Had this been one of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band tours, the place would’ve been packed to bursting.
But with his rock persona on temporary hiatus, Springsteen faced a sea of empty seats Tuesday at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater in Tinley Park. The 11,000-seat pavilion was barely half full, and the 17,000-capacity lawn was barren.
It was less a commentary on Springsteen’s still-considerable magnetism than on his recent artistic choices. On the current tour, he’s focusing on music from his latest album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, an acoustic outing covering songs associated with 87-year-old folk laureate Pete Seeger.
Sure, the idea of a rock icon dusting off tunes that your grandfather’s generation chanted at union rallies might sound a bit suspect. Combine that with the prospect of seeing a bunch of folkies playing in what Springsteen described as “a big black box outside of Chicago,” and no wonder the majority of the singer’s fans said, “No, thanks.” Clearly, the choice of venue was a major deterrent to a show more suited to an intimate theater. Memo to the Boss: How about multiple nights at the Auditorium Theatre or even the Charter One Pavilion on Northerly Island? And, while you’re rethinking things, what’s with the gaudy $92 ticket for a show ostensibly all about folk populism and the working man?
But take it from one skeptic who harbored many of the same doubts: The no-show Springsteen faithful missed a good one.
The graying but still boyishly energetic singer took the Seeger Sessions songs to a deeper place, and brought a zeal to this performance that stamped it as a keeper. Like last year’s solo tour, in which he took huge chances in reinventing many of his songs, the new show finds Springsteen in high spirits, his joy infectious as he explored the various strands of American music that preceded rock ‘n’ roll. With a 16-piece band that combined accordion, banjo, fiddles, guitars, piano, pedal steel, brass, voices and percussion, he blended Dixieland and Appalachia, swing and gospel, Celtic jigs and Tex-Mex two-steps.
Hurricane Katrina and the fate of New Orleans were fresh on Springsteen’s mind. Only seven weeks ago, he had launched this tour at the city’s Jazz and Heritage festival, and witnessed the storm’s devastation firsthand. “We owe the city a debt,” he said. “We need to bear witness.” And then he joined a time-honored folk tradition by updating Blind Alfred Reed’s Depression-era blues “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” with three newly written verses very much of the moment.
SOURCE Chicago Tribune, June 16, 2006.
“Them who’s got, got out of town,” Springsteen sang of the Katrina disaster. “And them who ain’t got left to drown.”
He read “When the Saints Go Marching In” not as jaunty celebration but as an elegy. He zeroed in on words that we have probably heard dozens, if not hundreds, of times, but never quite appreciated for the horror they contain. In its images of blood-red moons and a sun that refuses to shine, here was a redemption song like no other.
The relevance of Seeger’s “Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)” and the civil rights anthem “Eyes on the Prize” couldn’t be missed. The more subtle but no less urgent message about broken promises in “Pay Me My Money Down” was just as stirring, even as it was refashioned into a wild-eyed zydeco whirl.
For relief and release, there were hootenanny-style bashers such as “Old Dan Tucker.” “O Mary Don’t You Weep” and “Jesse James.” Springsteen also had a blast recasting his own songs: “Ramrod” drove south of the border with accordion pumping, “Johnny 99” became a polyrhythmic Creole swoon, and “Open All Night” was reincarnated as swinging big-band boogie. This was music meant to be shared and sung over drinks and on the dance floor, with horns blaring and guitars thrashing.
Springsteen turned a bunch of enthusiastic strangers in his audience into an impromptu choir and a community of co-conspirators, much as Pete Seeger had done at his historic 1963 Carnegie Hall concert. Even as war loomed abroad and racist skirmishes flourished at home, Seeger understood the value not just of protest songs, but also of nursery rhymes, singalongs, melodies and tall tales.
Back then, Seeger marveled at how folk artists such as Malvina Reynolds, Tom Paxton, and a new kid named Bob Dylan were following in the footsteps of his peer Woody Guthrie and writing “songs about everything that happens … every imaginable subject.” These were singers who turned the political into the personal, and the personal into the universal. Seeger sang their songs as if they were news bulletins from the front lines of the human experience.
That’s the impulse that turned Springsteen, a pretty decent chronicler of the human condition in his own right, into a born-again folkie. By invoking Seeger, he’s not dusting off a sepia-tinged photograph of a nearly forgotten past. Instead, like the master, he sees folk music as a rocking and rolling commentary on who we are now and where we’re going next.