***
The first time I heard Pete Seeger’s voice I was three or four. My mother bought me a tape of Woody Guthrie songs sung by Guthrie fans—Joan Baez, Odetta, Arlo Guthrie, and Pete. There was “Lonesome Valley,” “Take Me Riding in Your Car,” “Deportee,” “Pastures of Plenty,” “Roll on Columbia,” and a live recording of “This Land Is Your Land.” Every night I would put the tape into my brown plastic Fisher Price tape recorder and drift off to sleep. During the day, it provided the soundtrack—side A, side B, side A again, side B again, side A…—to my playtime hours with PlayMobil farm animals. I would belt out verses at the dinner table. (“You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley, you’ve got to walk it by yourself…,” “I’ve worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes, I slept on the ground by the light of the moon…”)
Of all the songs, “This Land Is Your Land” sung by Pete was my favorite. I liked it because I knew all the words, because I thought I understood what it was saying, because the man singing it had such a friendly voice and sounded like he was having so much fun, because the people singing with him on the tape sounded like they were having so much fun, because I—singing with the man and the people singing with him—was having so much fun up there in my room by myself. I sometimes wonder how many of us knew the words to that song before we knew the words to the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance, before we were able to spell “Ronald Reagan” or “Richard Nixon” or “Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
In middle and high school, as my friends were buying the latest Pearl Jam and Nirvana CDs and experimenting with Manic Panic and dark eyeliner, I was spending my allowance on “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” and “Very Early Joan,” and practicing first the guitar, then the guitar and the banjo, then the guitar, the banjo, and the mandolin. I didn’t (and don’t) play any of these instruments well, but I learned to play well enough to accompany myself singing. To encourage my hobby, my parents bought me the famous group-singing songbook, Rise Up Singing, first published in 1988 and now a million-copy seller. The book is a spiral-bound volume of 1,200 songs alphabetized under earnest subject headings such as “America, “Hard Times and Blues,” “Rich & Poor,” and “Work,” printed in an antique font that could have been ripped straight from an apothecary’s sign circa 1905. It is illustrated with pen-and-ink line drawings of, for example, an interracial couple kissing each other over a white dove, or a young girl whose dress is actually a tree, or a pregnant mermaid with luxurious hair and a starfish covering her breasts.
Its corniness was lost on me. I felt as if I were uncovering America’s artifacts. The songs I gravitated towards were largely traditional American ones—songs from Appalachia and the Dust Bowl, gospel, and spirituals—and, in many cases, when I looked at the fine print beneath the verses, I would discover that Pete had been one of the original archeologists of the song’s unearthing.
As I was singing in my room, in school I was learning about the country’s foundational documents. By carrying the banner for folk music, I decided, Pete carried the banner for these admirable ideas the United States claimed to embody. Roger Ebert isn’t the only person to have called Pete a saint. Dylan, despite their differences, called him one too, and Alan Lomax dubbed him “folk music’s holy man.” If Pete is a secular saint, then the land—the world, really—he believes in is sacred, and books like Rise Up Singing are secular hymnals.
I have moved eleven times since the eighth grade and Rise Up Singing is the only book I have taken with me every place I have gone. Its cover is falling off, there are coffee stains on some pages, and chocolate stains on others, and all are a little crinkly from having fallen into the bathtub and the Ompompanoosuc River. While I have never left a copy of it in the bedside drawer of a roadside hotel, sometimes, proselytizing, I have given it to friends as a birthday or holiday gift. Right now it is by the side of my bed. I wonder if one day I will write out in a fountain pen the birth dates of my as-yet-unborn children on its inside cover the way people used to do in their Bibles.
