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Pete’s current cultural moment has been coming for some time. After the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan went electric and Pete allegedly threatened to take an axe to the sound cables, Pete retreated somewhat from the national stage. He chose instead for the next thirty-odd years to focus his activism and energies locally, successfully founding and spearheading the Clearwater campaign to clean up the Hudson River. About the Newport debacle, and trying to explain the musical schism that heralded the ascendency of Dylan and the backlash against the folk revival, the music journalist Paul Nelson wrote in Sing Out! “Was it to be marshmallows and cotton candy or meat and potatoes? Rose-colored glasses or a magnifying glass? A nice guy who has subjugated his art though constant insistence on a world that never was and never can be; or an angry, passionate poet who demands his art to be all, who demands not to be owned, not to be restricted or predicted?”
This either-or scenario missed the point that Pete was just as adamant as Dylan about not being owned, that the standoff was one of two equally and fiercely independent minds. Pete’s is the hallmark of his life. His (as it is for many of us) greatest strength—that steadfastness and staunch New England independence, especially in relation to appearances versus harsh realities—is closely tied to his greatest weakness. He has been widely criticized—rightly so—for the fact that, although he left the Communist Party in 1950, he did not publicly address his support of it or make amends for his silence about Stalin’s crimes until 1995; that year, in a New York Times Magazine article he apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.” Pete is very much his father’s son and it was through Charles Seeger that Pete first came to Communism. It must have been difficult for the son to publicly renounce his past sympathies for very private reasons. Because of these political associations, Pete was blacklisted from television and radio from 1950 to 1968.
And yet, his unwavering belief in the ideals of economic and racial equality theoretically promoted by the Communist Party at the time were matched by the intensity of his belief in what the United States claimed to represent on paper. In 1955, when called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Communist sympathies, he chose the protections of the First Amendment over those of the Fifth. His testimony to HUAC revealed a faith in the First Amendment and a man who believed, first and foremost, in his country, and the freedom it allowed him to have political beliefs at all.
“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs,” he told HUAC. “I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this…. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical…make me any less of an American.” Pete is an individual who stands up to authority, a very American archetype. He is far less hippie-romantic than he is throwback to a 19th-century—almost puritanical, fundamentally conservative—agrarian American ethos. He has far more in common with Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, or Jefferson even, than he does with Peter, Paul, or Mary. In fact, Pete is nothing if not an American Man. When President Obama asked Pete how he stayed so fit, Pete replied that he did so by living out in the woods, wielding an axe, and chopping the firewood for his woodstove. While it may have taken him too long to give up on the Soviet Union, he has never given up on the United States.
In 1994, President Clinton honored him with a National Medal of Arts. Arlo Guthrie took the stage that evening and introduced “This Land Is Your Land,” by addressing Pete. “Years ago,” Guthrie said, “when some well-intentioned folks suggested we replace the national anthem with ‘This Land,’ you said that was a bad idea because the worst thing you could do to a song was make it official. Well, I wonder what we’re going to do with you now that you’ve become official.” Pete has only become more official since then, the most recent—and most official—statement of his status as an American institution being his government-sanctioned invitation to perform our unofficial national anthem on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Obama’s pre-inaugural celebrations.
The first true indication, however, that the Kennedy Center honor was not an old man’s final pat on the head came seven years after he received it. Each year the Kennedy Center invites a past recipient of the National Medal of Arts to give a performance as part of the celebrations for the current year’s honorees. Pete was invited to return in 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, in that brief span of time during which the country felt united in its confusion and grief and was looking for a way to begin processing its new situation.
“Albert Einstein,” said Pete introducing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” to the crowd that night, “said the most important thing and the most difficult thing is to find the right questions to ask, but then at least we’re pointed in the direction to find a solution. And in this astonishing and terrible time for our country, this song is mostly just questions.” He then explained that he didn’t write the verses, but instead took the words from a 19th century song Cossack soldiers would sing before galloping off to battle, rearranged the words, then set them to a traditional Irish tune. By offering this simple context that spanned time, geography, politics, and nationality, what might have sounded like a few sentimental verses dredged up from a romanticized recent past became modern and immediately applicable.
That same month Annie Leibovitz photographed him wearing orange waders and a sea captain’s hat on the banks of the Hudson, gazing to the other side, for a spread in Vanity Fair. If there were any further doubt about Pete’s return to the cultural mainstream, in 2006 Bruce Springsteen released a studio album entitled “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” which covered songs popularized by Pete (“Shenandoah,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” “We Shall Overcome,” etc.) on one of the 115 albums he has appeared on since 1940. The record prompted a flurry of renewed interest in Pete, including a lengthy profile in The New Yorker by Alec Wilkinson.
As Pete was still garnering attention for the “Seeger Sessions,” The Power of Song came out in theaters and later on PBS. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bernice Johnson Reagon (whose daughter is named Toshi), Springsteen, Julian Bond, and former New York Governor George Pataki among others, were all interviewed for the film, which is something of a thank you and a farewell to Pete, with half those interviewed speaking about him in the past tense (“Pete stood for justice.” “He had a very full idea of what music could do.” “The banjo was his tool, his weapon.” “Pete was a master at finding common cause with people.”). The past tense on screen contrasted sharply with the reviews and public response. Moreover, the reviews themselves seemed less to review the film itself than the man to which it was paying homage. If interest in Pete had been increasing steadily before the film, it became an outpouring in the wake of the film’s release. The response made clear that Pete’s relevance was not to be documented in the past tense, but in the present.
“He is an institution and a monument,” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, “but also a living presence whose best songs grow less quaint and more urgent every day.” “When he is gone people are going to wonder if a man like that ever did really exist,” wrote Joel Selvin in the San Francisco Chronicle. “I don’t know if Pete Seeger believes in saints,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, “but I believe he is one. He’s the one in front as they go marching in.” “Hail Pete,” wrote Studs Terkel in The Nation, “at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain’t no one like him.”
It was getting increasingly difficult not to read Pete’s HUAC testimony, or examine beliefs he had championed nearly half a century earlier and not appreciate his knack for prescience. In 2007 Pete—joined by Ani DiFranco, Billy Bragg, and Steve Earle—updated the lyrics to his 1965 Vietnam song “Bring ’Em Home” for Iraq to equally powerful effects as the original. Pete’s stance on copyright is summed up in Woody Guthrie’s introduction to “This Land Is Your Land” in the book Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People which Pete and Guthrie co-wrote: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ’cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” This attitude anticipated Creative Commons by decades. What Pete refers to as “the folk process,” and defines as the natural, continual process songs undergo as people add to and alter them, could be what some artists today call “sampling.” The words of “To My Old Brown Earth” (“And this our home/Keep pure and sweet and green/For now I’m yours/And you are also mine”), advocated green living in 1958, four years prior to the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring, and just over 100 years after the publication of Leaves of Grass. When performing “Guantanamera” as he has been doing since 1949, Pete often translates the Cuban poet José Martí’s verses into English before singing them in their original Spanish. This small gesture encourages the idea of a bilingual country. In the wake of the torture revelations at Guantanamo Bay, even the song’s title seems prophetic. It translates as “Girl from Guantánamo,” and the final verse reads: “With the poor people of this earth I want to cast my lot, The little streams of the mountains please me more than the sea.” Con los pobres de la tierra quiero yo mi suerte echar. El arroyo de la sierra me complace mas que el mar.
People were talking about Pete Seeger again just as recent and powerful images of ourselves as a country were being absorbed into our national consciousness, and deeply wounding our cultural ego: American soldiers in Iraq giving the thumbs-up sign next to a human pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners; some of our nation’s most destitute citizens waving red flags from their rooftops as the water rose. This was who we were. This was how we treated each other. Pete offered an alternative image. There he was with his banjo and his axe and his log cabin and his blue jeans and his Sloop Clearwater and his can-do attitude and Everyman demeanor and his folk songs and his multi-racial Mayflower family and his HUAC testimony, right when we needed him most. The way we eagerly re-embraced this man implied that maybe we needed to remember the good for which we stood in order to face the horror and wreckage we wrought. He is the other side of our coin.
Many of the songs Pete sings harken back to a time before the United States knew how long and hard the road would be to live up to its own ideals. Even the cover of the Springsteen album features a sepia-toned shot of the band stylized to suit a supposedly simpler time when the country was still pregnant with possibility, a time that was maybe easier for us to own given the luxury and distance of time. This Johnny Appleseed of folk music offered reassurance that “to every thing there is a season,” and that the season we were then living through would pass. It became clear that, for countless Americans, an attachment to Pete Seeger was, more than ever, both deeply political and deeply personal. Carl Sandburg famously referred to Pete as “America’s tuning fork.” As Pete was approaching 90, we were again looking to him to strike that “A” note and let it ring, bright and clear.
