***
Occasionally during our meetings a name would come up that jogged his memory and elicited a story. At his kitchen table the day after Odetta died, I noticed her name in the text. “Do you remember the first time you met Odetta?” I asked.
He paused and pushed his chair back. He scratched at his black cap and lifted his chin just as he does when he sings, then looked at some spot on the wall, as if on it were projected a silent film he could narrate.
“Yes,” he said. “It must have been about 1950. I was at someone’s house just outside of Santa Monica, California. There were only about 20 of us and we were sitting around sharing songs with each other. Woody Guthrie was there. It was the last night I ever heard him sing. The brain disease that was going to kill him was showing. He wasn’t doing so well. But Odetta, Odetta and someone else…I forget his name…what was his name? …were singing this song…I can’t remember the song…She would sing one verse and the other guy would sing the next verse, each verse would be louder than the next, as if they were in competition with each other, trying to out-sing each other, trading verses back and forth, but by the end you realized they weren’t in competition at all. They had gotten up and were standing nose to nose, staring each other down, but singing together, harmonizing. I remember thinking then that she was going to be big. She came up here to sing with me at the Sloop Club, oh, about six months ago. I guess that that was the last time I saw her…”
He trailed off, pausing for a moment before pulling himself back up to the table and bending once again over the pile of manuscript papers, ready to get back to work. Two and a half months later, at Odetta’s memorial service at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I watched from my pew on the mezzanine as Pete related this story to the thousands who had come to pay their respects to that grand dame of American folk music, then stepped down, resumed his seat beside Toshi, and bowed his head.
During other spontaneous breaks from the index, he talked about the working class history of Beacon and Cold Spring, naming the different industries that had come and gone and the precise number of jobs they had taken with them when they left, and about a community of freed slaves that used to live near their property. He mentioned a woman who, when the area was first colonized, developed land plots, striking a deal with the local Native Americans that would forever ensure them land of their own. But her son, he said, reneged on the deal after his mother’s death in the late eighteenth century. Pete mentioned being fitted for a new hearing aid that would allow him, during performances, to hear the music from the audience’s perspective, not from the perspective of the musicians on stage, and he talked about how Abraham Lincoln had maneuvered a raft over a dam on his way down the Mississippi. Once, he broke out into song, singing Marlene Dietrich’s German version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” His father, Charles Seeger, came up often. He talked about the Model T Ford his father drove as the family traveled the countryside performing classical music in 1921 and about how he learned his favorite aphorisms from his father. His father’s list of the “Purposes of Music,” was a guiding force to his life, he said. One of those purposes is, “Music, as any art, is not an ends in itself, but is a means for achieving larger ends.” Another is, “Music as a group activity is more important than music as an individual accomplishment.”
His mind moved quickly, and he was constantly shifting in his chair or getting up to answer the phone or flipping through his Rolodex in search of a name or pushing the cat off the table. He remains boyish in some way, unbowed by the life that gradually teaches the rest of us to buckle down, pay bills and get practical, not chase causes and save the world.
When Pete dropped me off at the train station to return home the night after Odetta’s death, it was pitch black outside and raining steadily. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since he had picked me up that afternoon. I told him to wait in the car as I went to check the train schedule since he was worried, momentarily confused, thinking he was mistaken and that instead of just making the train, we had just missed it. I saw its lights approaching, but Pete had already jumped out and was standing in the parking lot without his hat or jacket on.
“Come back and wait in the car!” he yelled. “I think we’ve got it wrong! It’s not coming for another hour!”
“No, no!” I yelled back from the platform. “It’s coming! I can see it! It’s almost here!” As I said this, I saw a young man approach Pete from the darkness. He held out his hand to shake Pete’s and introduce himself. Pete nodded and smiled and shook the young man’s hand. The young man then put his free hand on Pete’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze as the train pulled into the station. As young man lingered a moment, Pete turned away, squinting in my direction, waving goodbye.
