***
Pete can’t really sing anymore. His voice isn’t strong enough to reach the notes, so he mostly talks the songs. But his own voice has never been his focus, his priority has been to get other people singing, to fill a room with voices singing together in harmony, and he can still do that. He has always said that singing is as fundamental to the human condition as religion or storytelling, so that by encouraging people to sing, he is simply encouraging our natural desire to do so. As Dylan says in the film, “[Pete] could make an orchestration out of a simple little song with everybody in the audience singing. Whether you wanted to or not, you would find yourself singing a part and it would be beautiful.”
His style used to be to stand, commanding, in the center of the stage facing the audience like a choral director, and then to give the words to the next verse in the beats before the verse began so everyone knew what was coming. He would then join in and sing too—his chin raised, his posture stick-straight, his eyes open—every now and then telling the crowd, “I can’t hear you!” or “Everyone, sing!”
The most recent concert I saw him play was the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2008. Arlo Guthrie has hosted an annual Thanksgiving concert at Carnegie Hall for decades and Pete has often joined him. That year was especially poignant. It was widely acknowledged to be Pete’s final time up on the stage where he and the Weavers defied the blacklist, recorded a hit record, and played to a full house on Christmas Eve in 1955. The atmosphere in the hall was warm and familial. Obama had been elected three weeks earlier, and throughout his campaign the president-elect had gathered both momentum with and criticism for his idealistic rhetoric. “Peace,” “justice,” “change,” and, of course, “hope,” were all words and ideas that figured prominently in Obama’s persona, much as they figured in Pete’s. The collective unspoken sentiment of the crowd that night could have been summarized as, “Things are looking up.”
As Pete strode out onto the Carnegie Hall stage that night in the same sneakers I’d seen him wearing just days earlier, but dressed up in stiff dark jeans in honor of the night, the entire hall rose to its feet and cheered and whistled and shouted his name. Raising his banjo by way of greeting, he took his place, then swung it down, plucked a few recognizable notes, and began encouraging the room to sing, “Yonder come Miss Rosie, how in the world do you know?/Well, I knows by her apron, and the dress she wore…” The song was “Midnight Special,” first made famous by Leadbelly in the mid-thirties when the legendary twelve-string guitarist recorded a version of it for the Lomaxes at the Louisiana State Penitentiary; the song was further popularized (with credit to Leadbelly) by the Weavers in the late-forties. The song is about seeing, through the window of your cell, the light of the train that will one day take you away from prison; it is a song about maintaining hope even in the darkest hours.
The musicians onstage were all Seegers or Guthries and had known each other and been playing music together all their lives. Tall and thin, Pete stood to the far right. Even though he only lead on about every fourth song, the other performers—Arlo, Pete’s grandson, Tao Rodriguez Seeger, Arlo’s daughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie, and Sarah Lee’s husband, Johnny Irion—deferred to him constantly, looking for cues or a smile when a joke was made. Pete appeared completely unaware of the close attention being paid. He bent over his banjo and sometimes his hand dropped away from the instrument and he would stop playing altogether, as if he had lost track of where the band was in the progression. In these moments, he smiled at the people around him even though it was unclear what it was he was smiling at or about.
Each time his turn to lead came around, however, he stepped up to his microphone, straightened himself up, lifted his chin, and squinted his eyes a bit as if he wanted to see who he was facing through the glare of the spotlight. The music would start and he would begin, as always, giving the words in the beats before the verses. It is bittersweet that at a time when people are again listening to him, the choirmaster cannot join in with the choir, but he clearly relishes those things he can still do. Throughout the concert, he would cup his ears and tell us from time to time, “I can’t hear you!” or “Everyone, sing!” Irene goodnight, Irene, goodnight. Goodnight, Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams…
Pete’s singing has always been distinctive in its diction. His voice is unique in its insistent lack of pretension, its New England flatness, but it’s his diction that makes his voice instantly recognizable. No “r” or “g” or “v” or “t” has ever been lost in a Pete Seeger lyric. The diction is as clear through the static of a 1942 recording of “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” as it is on the early November 2008 recording of his voice on my cell phone’s voicemail: “Hello, Nell, this is Pete Seeger,” he said as if there had been a period between each word. I saved that message for weeks and played it constantly to myself and to anyone who would listen, my hand shaking with anticipation each time I dialed my own phone number and waited for the recorded voice—a voice that had diction as clear as Pete’s but lacked everything else—to tell me that I had “one saved message.”
His diction is such that even the songs he sings in other languages can be sung to a reasonable degree of accuracy by people who don’t speak the language he is singing in. His diction is such that even a small child can understand exactly what he is saying or singing. He has frequently commented, in fact, on how his favorite audiences are students in America’s grade schools, and he has recorded 17 albums for children.
There is a black and white photograph from the mid-fifties of Pete playing in a school to a roomful of children who look about five or six. There is not one face in that room that looks less than rapt at the performance the gangly middle-aged man with a banjo in front of them is giving. They are leaning forward in their metal folding chairs, their many little legs suspended in the air above the floor; half are beaming, the other half have their mouths open in wide “O’s” of delight. Gazing around Carnegie Hall the night of the annual Thanksgiving concert, the expressions on the faces of all ages weren’t far from the expressions frozen in that photograph from more than fifty years ago.
