Musical development Despite being classical musicians, Peter's parents did not press him to play an instrument. On his own, the otherwise bookish and withdrawn boy gravitated to the
ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Overtime, Seeger developed a talent for singing and whistling, using both in much of his music. At thirteen, he enrolled in the
Avon Old Farms School in
Avon, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1936. During the summer of 1935, while traveling with his father and stepmother, Pete heard the five-string
banjo for the first time at the
Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western
North Carolina near
Asheville, as he related in an April 1963 interview on Folk Music Worldwide. The festival was organized by local
folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer
Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom Charles had hired for
Farm Resettlement music projects. The festival took place in a covered baseball field. There the Seegers: watched square-dance teams from
Bear Wallow, Happy Hollow, Cane Creek, Spooks Branch, Cheoah Valley, Bull Creek, and
Soco Gap; heard the five-string banjo player
Samantha Bumgarner; and family string bands, including a group of Indians from the
Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads. They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field, hearing music being made there as well. As Lunsford's daughter would later recall, those country people "held the riches that Dad had discovered. They could sing, fiddle, pick the banjos, and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains. I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park." For the Seegers, experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a "conversion experience". Pete was deeply affected and, after learning basic plucking technique from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo. The teenage Seeger also sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the
Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher
Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita. Benton, a lover of Americana, played "
Cindy" and "
Old Joe Clark" with his students
Charlie and
Jackson Pollock; friends from the "
hillbilly" recording industry; and
avant-garde composers
Carl Ruggles and
Henry Cowell. It was at one of Benton's parties that Pete heard "
John Henry" for the first time. Seeger enrolled at
Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938. He dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art as well. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the
Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. He polished his performance skills during a summer stint of touring New York state with the Vagabond Puppeteers (Jerry Oberwager, 22; Mary Wallace, 22; and Harriet Holtzman, 23), a traveling
puppet theater "inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico". One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers. The group reprised its act in October in New York City. An October 2, 1939
Daily Worker article reported on the Puppeteers' six-week tour this way: That fall, Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting
Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the
Archive of American Folk Song of the
Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to help Lomax sift through commercial "
race" and "
hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the
Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938–1953). Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk-singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and
Nicholas Ray's weekly
Columbia Broadcasting show
Back Where I Come From (1940–41) alongside
Josh White,
Burl Ives,
Lead Belly, and
Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at
Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for
migrant workers on March 3, 1940).
Back Where I Come From was unique in having a
racially integrated cast. The show was a success, but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast. (center), honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine's Day party marking the opening of the United Federal Labor Canteen,
CIO, in then-segregated Washington, D.C., 1944 From 1942 to 1945, Seeger served in the
U.S. Army as an Entertainment Specialist, eventually attaining the rank of corporal. He had been initially trained as an airplane mechanic, but was reassigned to entertain American troops with music, including in the
South Pacific. During the war, he also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by
Norman Corwin. In 1949, Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive
City and Country School in
Greenwich Village, New York.
Early activism In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the
Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its influence. In 1942, he joined the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA), but left in 1949. In early 1941, while still only 21, Seeger started performing as a member of the
Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell,
Cisco Houston,
Woody Guthrie, Butch Hawes and
Bess Lomax Hawes, and Lee Hays. Seeger and the Almanacs cut several albums of
78s on
Keynote and other labels:
Songs for John Doe (recorded in late February or March and released in May 1941),
Talking Union, and an album each of sea shanties and pioneer songs. Written by Millard Lampell,
Songs for John Doe was performed by Lampell, Seeger, and Hays, joined by Josh White and Sam Gary. It contained lines, such as "It wouldn't be much thrill to die for Du Pont in Brazil," that were sharply critical of
Roosevelt's unprecedented peacetime draft (enacted in September 1940). This "anti-war" anti-draft tone reflected the Communist Party USA line after the 1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and in particular after the Soviet invasion of Poland on the 17th of September that year which maintained that the greatest threat was 'militarism', ostensibly as hostile to the Soviet Union- a shift from the 'anti-fascist', pro-engagement preceding line. Seeger has said he believed this line of argument at the time, as did many fellow members of the Young Communist League (YCL). Though nominally members of the
Popular Front, which was allied with Roosevelt and more moderate liberals, the YCL's members still smarted from Roosevelt's
arms embargo on
Loyalist Spain (which Roosevelt later called a mistake), and the alliance frayed in the confusing welter of events. A June 16, 1941, review in
Time magazine, which, under its owner,
Henry Luce, had become very interventionist, denounced the Almanacs'
Songs for John Doe album, accusing it of scrupulously echoing "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war". Eleanor Roosevelt, a fan of folk music, reportedly found the album "in bad taste", though President Roosevelt, when the album was shown to him, merely observed (correctly, as it turned out) that few people would ever hear it. More alarmed was the reaction of eminent German-born Harvard Professor of Government
Carl Joachim Friedrich, an adviser on domestic propaganda to the United States military. In a review in the June 1941
Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Poison in Our System", he pronounced
Songs for John Doe "strictly subversive and illegal", "whether Communist or Nazi financed", and "a matter for the attorney general", observing further that "mere legal suppression" would not be sufficient to counteract this type of 'poison', the poison being folk music and the ease with which it could be spread. While the U.S. had not declared war on the Axis powers in mid-1941 (and would not do so until the Pearl Harbor attack that December), the country was energetically producing arms and ammunition for its allies overseas. Despite the boom in manufacturing this concerted rearming effort brought, African-Americans were barred from working in defense plants. Racial tensions rose as Black labor leaders (such as
A. Philip Randolph and
Bayard Rustin) and their white allies began organizing protests and marches. To combat this social unrest, President Roosevelt issued
Executive Order 8802 (the Fair Employment Act) on 25 June 1941. The order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, at which time the Communist Party quickly directed its members to get behind the draft and forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war—angering some leftists (in particular, Trotskyist groups). Copies of
Songs for John Doe were removed from sale, and the remaining inventory destroyed, though a few copies may exist in the hands of private collectors. The Almanac Singers'
Talking Union album, on the other hand, was reissued as an LP by
Folkways (FH 5285A) in 1955 and is still available. The following year, the Almanacs issued
Dear Mr. President, an album in support of Roosevelt and the war effort. The title song, "Dear Mr. President", was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his lifelong credo: Seeger's critics later continued to bring up the Almanacs' repudiated
Songs for John Doe. In 1942, a year after the
John Doe album's brief appearance (and disappearance), the FBI decided that the now-pro-war Almanacs were still endangering the war effort by subverting recruitment. According to the New York
World Telegram (February 14, 1942), Carl Friedrich's 1941 article "The Poison in Our System" was printed up as a pamphlet and distributed by the Council for Democracy (an organization that Friedrich and
Henry Luce's right-hand man,
C. D. Jackson, Vice President of
Time magazine, had founded "to combat all the Nazi, fascist, communist, pacifist" antiwar groups in the United States). After returning from WWII service, Seeger and others established
People's Songs, conceived as a nationwide organization with branches on both coasts and designed to "create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People". With Pete Seeger as its director, People's Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt's former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President,
Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on the
Progressive Party ticket. Despite attracting enormous crowds nationwide, Wallace did not win any electoral votes. Following the election, he was excoriated by many for accepting campaign help from Communists and their 'fellow travelers' such as Seeger and singer
Paul Robeson.
Spanish Civil War songs Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the republican forces in the
Spanish Civil War. In 1943, with
Tom Glazer and Bess and Baldwin Hawes, he recorded an album of 78s called
Songs of the Lincoln Battalion on Moe Asch's Stinson label. This included such songs as "
There's a Valley in Spain Called Jarama" and "
Viva la Quince Brigada". In 1960, this collection was re-issued by Moe Asch as one side of a Folkways LP called
Songs of the Lincoln and International Brigades. On the other side was a reissue of the legendary
Six Songs for Democracy (originally recorded in Barcelona in 1938 while bombs were falling), performed by
Ernst Busch and a chorus of members of the
Thälmann Battalion, made up of volunteers from Germany. The songs were "Moorsoldaten" ("
Peat Bog Soldiers", composed by political prisoners of German concentration camps); "
Die Thaelmann-Kolonne", "Hans Beimler", "Das Lied von der Einheitsfront" ("Song of the United Front" by
Hanns Eisler and
Bertolt Brecht), "Lied der Internationalen Brigaden" ("Song of the International Brigades"), and "Los cuatro generales" ("The Four Generals", known in English as "The Four Insurgent Generals").
Group recordings As a self-described "split tenor" (between a tenor and a countertenor), racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie,
Bess Lomax Hawes,
Sis Cunningham,
Josh White, and
Sam Gary. As a controversial Almanac singer, the 21-year-old Seeger performed under the stage name "Pete Bowers" to avoid compromising his father's government career. In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as the Weavers, named after the title of an 1892 play by
Gerhart Hauptmann, about a workers' strike (which contained the lines "We'll stand it no more, come what may!"). They did benefits for strikers, at which they sang songs such as "Talking Union", about the struggles for unionisation of industrial workers such as miners and automobile workers. Besides Pete Seeger (performing under his own name), members of the Weavers included charter Almanac member Lee Hays,
Ronnie Gilbert, and
Fred Hellerman; later
Frank Hamilton,
Erik Darling, and
Bernie Krause serially took Seeger's place. In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare, the Weavers' repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language. The Weavers on occasion performed in tuxedos (unlike the Almanacs, who had dressed informally) and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues. The Weavers' string of major
hits began with "
On Top of Old Smoky" and an arrangement of
Lead Belly's signature waltz, "
Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950, and is credited as teaching folk musicians such as Jerry Gray of
The Travellers to play the instrument. Seeger also recorded an instructional album alongside the manual. Both are available for free via
Smithsonian Folkways, a nonprofit record label of the
Smithsonian Institution. He went on to invent the
long-neck or
Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo. Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region, the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Seeger's championing of and improvements to it. According to an unnamed musician quoted in
David King Dunaway's biography, "by nesting a resonant chord between two precise notes, a melody note and a chiming note on the fifth string", Pete Seeger "gentrified" the more percussive traditional
Appalachian "frailing" style, "with its vigorous hammering of the forearm and its percussive rapping of the fingernail on the banjo head". Inspired by his mentor Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled "
This machine kills fascists", Seeger emblazoned his banjo head in 1952 with the slogan "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender", writing those words on every subsequent banjo he owned. From the late 1950s on, Seeger also accompanied himself on the
12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin that had been associated with
Lead Belly, who had styled himself "the King of the 12-String Guitar". Seeger's distinctive custom-made guitars had a triangular soundhole. He combined the long scale length (approximately 28") and
capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of
drop-D (DADGBE) tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks.
Interest in steelpan In 1956, Seeger and his wife, Toshi, traveled to
Port of Spain,
Trinidad, to seek out information on the
steel drum. The two searched out a local panyard director, Kim Loy Wong, and proceeded to film the construction, tuning and playing of the then-new national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago. He was attempting to include the unique flavor of the instrument in American folk music.
McCarthy era In the 1950s, and indeed consistently throughout his life, Seeger continued his support of civil and labor rights, racial equality, international understanding, and anti-militarism (all of which had characterized the Henry Wallace campaign), and he continued to believe that songs could help people achieve these goals. However, with the ever-growing revelations of
Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it. On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the
House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the
Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, Seeger refused to plead the
Fifth Amendment (which would have suggested to many that his testimony might be self-incriminating). Instead, as the Hollywood Ten had done, he declined to name personal and political associations on the grounds that this would violate his
First Amendment rights: "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. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this."
Folk music revival To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger worked gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps, and traveled the college campus circuit. He also recorded as many as five albums a year for
Moe Asch's
Folkways Records label. As the nuclear disarmament movement picked up steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger's anti-war songs, such as "
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (co-written with
Joe Hickerson), "
Turn! Turn! Turn!" adapted from the
Book of Ecclesiastes, gained wide currency. Seeger was the first person to make a studio recording of "
Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" in 1956. Seeger also was closely associated with the
Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark
Carnegie Hall concert, featuring the youthful
Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the
Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This event, and
Martin Luther King Jr.'s
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August of that same year, brought the civil rights anthem "
We Shall Overcome" to wide audiences. He sang it on the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, along with 1,000 other marchers. By this time, Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in
Greenwich Village, as a longtime columnist in
Sing Out!, the successor to the People's Songs
Bulletin, and as a founder of the topical
Broadside magazine. To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers, he coined the phrase "Woody's children", alluding to his associate and traveling companion, Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. This urban folk-revival movement, a continuation of the activist tradition of the 1930s and 1940s and of
People's Songs, used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics to effect social change, a practice that goes back to the
Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies'
Little Red Song Book, compiled by Swedish-born union organizer
Joe Hill (1879–1915) (the
Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie, who was known to carry it around). Seeger toured Australia in the fall of 1963. He helped spark a folk boom throughout the country at a time when popular music tastes competed between folk, the
surfing craze, and the British rock invasion that gave the world
The Beatles and
The Rolling Stones, among others. Seeger's single "
Little Boxes", written by Malvina Reynolds, peaked at No. 24 on the
Australian record charts in February 1964. Folk clubs sprang up all over the nation; folk performers were accepted in established venues; Australian performers singing Australian folk songs—many of their own composing—emerged in concerts and festivals, on television, and on recordings; and folk-music performers from overseas were encouraged to tour Australia. The long television blacklist of Seeger began to ease in the mid-1960s when he hosted a regionally broadcast educational folk-music television show,
Rainbow Quest. Among his guests were
Johnny Cash,
June Carter,
Reverend Gary Davis,
Mississippi John Hurt,
Doc Watson,
the Stanley Brothers,
Elizabeth Cotten,
Patrick Sky,
Buffy Sainte-Marie,
Tom Paxton,
Judy Collins,
Hedy West,
Donovan,
The Clancy Brothers,
Richard Fariña and
Mimi Fariña,
Sonny Terry and
Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band,
Bernice Johnson Reagon, the Beers Family,
Roscoe Holcomb,
Malvina Reynolds, Sonia Malkine, and
Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine In November 1976, Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song "Delbert Tibbs", about the death-row inmate
Delbert Tibbs, who was later
exonerated. Seeger wrote the music and selected the words from poems written by Tibbs. '' (Summer 2005), a magazine he helped found in 1950 Seeger also supported the Jewish Camping Movement. He came to
Surprise Lake Camp in
Cold Spring, New York, over the summer many times. He sang and inspired countless campers.
Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan Pete Seeger was one of the earliest backers of
Bob Dylan; he was responsible for urging A&R man
John Hammond to produce Dylan's first LP on
Columbia, and for inviting him to perform at the
Newport Folk Festival, of which Seeger was a board member. There was a widely repeated story that Seeger was so upset over the extremely loud amplified sound that Dylan, backed by members of the
Butterfield Blues Band, brought into the 1965
Newport Folk Festival that Seeger threatened to disconnect the equipment. There are multiple versions of what went on, some fanciful. What is certain is that tensions had been running high between Dylan's manager
Albert Grossman and Festival board members (who besides Seeger also included
Theodore Bikel,
Bruce Jackson,
Alan Lomax, festival MC
Peter Yarrow, and
George Wein) over the scheduling of performers and other matters. Two days earlier, there had been a scuffle and a brief exchange of blows between Grossman and Alan Lomax. The festival's board, in an emergency session, had voted to ban Grossman from the grounds, but then backed off when George Wein pointed out that Grossman also managed highly popular draws
Odetta and
Peter, Paul and Mary. Although Seeger has been portrayed as a folk purist who opposed Dylan's "
going electric", when asked in 2001 about how he recalled his "objections" to the electric style, Seeger said: I couldn't understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, "
Maggie's Farm", and the sound was distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, "Fix the sound so you can hear the words." He hollered back, "This is the way they want it." I said "Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now." But I was at fault. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, "you didn't boo
Howlin' Wolf yesterday. He was electric!" Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term. One version of the Newport Festival controversy, as well as a positive depiction of Seeger's early 1960s efforts to boost an unknown Bob Dylan, is dramatized in the 2024 film
A Complete Unknown, where
Edward Norton plays Seeger.
Vietnam War era and beyond A longstanding opponent of the arms race and of the
Vietnam War, Seeger
satirically attacked then-President
Lyndon Johnson with his 1966 recording, on the album
Dangerous Songs!?, of
Len Chandler's children's song "
Beans in My Ears". Beyond Chandler's lyrics, Seeger said that "Mrs. Jay's little son Alby" had "beans in his ears", implying that "Alby Jay" (a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ") was deaf to war protesters' concerns. During 1966, Seeger and
Malvina Reynolds took part in environmental activism. The album
God Bless the Grass was released in January of that year and became the first album in history wholly dedicated to songs about environmental issues. Their politics were informed by the same ideologies of nationalism, populism, and criticism of big business. Seeger attracted wider attention starting in 1967 with his song "
Waist Deep in the Big Muddy", about a
captain—referred to in the lyrics as "the big fool"—who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in
Louisiana during World War II. With its lyrics about a platoon being led into danger by an ignorant captain, the song's anti-war message was obvious—the line "the big fool said to push on" is repeated several times. In the face of arguments with the management of
CBS about whether the song's political weight was in keeping with the usually light-hearted entertainment of the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the final lines were "Every time I read the paper/those old feelings come on/We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on." The lyrics could be interpreted as an allegory of Johnson as the "big fool" and the
Vietnam War as the foreseeable danger. Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show, after wide publicity, it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers' Brothers show on February 25, 1968. At the November 15, 1969,
Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington, DC, Seeger led 500,000 protesters in singing
John Lennon's song "
Give Peace a Chance" as they rallied across from the White House. Seeger's voice carried over the crowd, interspersing phrases like "Are you listening,
Nixon?" between the
choruses of protesters singing, "All we are saying ... is give peace a chance." In the documentary film
The Power of Song, Seeger mentions that he and his family visited the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1972.
Phạm Tuyên composed "Let me hear your guitar, my U.S. friend" ("Gảy đàn lên hỡi người bạn Mỹ") as a tribute to Seeger's support for the DRV. When Seeger and his wife arrived at the airport, Phạm Tuyên greeted them and they sang the song together. Being a supporter of progressive labor unions, Seeger had supported
Ed Sadlowski in his bid for the presidency of the
United Steelworkers of America. In 1977, Seeger appeared at a fundraiser in
Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1978, Seeger joined American folk, blues, and jazz singer
Barbara Dane at a rally in New York for striking coal miners. He also headlined a benefit concert—with bluegrass artist
Hazel Dickens—for the striking coal miners of Stearns, Kentucky, at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 1979. Also in 1979, he was honored with the
Eugene V. Debs Award for Social Justice by the
Eugene V. Debs Foundation, in
Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1980, Pete Seeger performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The performance was later released by Smithsonian Folkways as the album
Singalong Sanders Theater, 1980.
Hudson River sloop Clearwater sailing up the
Hudson River In 1966, Seeger and his wife Toshi founded the
Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a nonprofit organization based in
Beacon, New York, that sought to protect the
Hudson River and surrounding wetlands and waterways through advocacy and public education. It constructed a floating ambassador for this environmental mission, the sloop
Clearwater, and began an annual music and environmental festival, today known as the
Great Hudson River Revival.
Reflection on support for Soviet communism In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the
1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government. His biographer
David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form. In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change and that "the most lasting revolutions are those that take place over a period of time". In his autobiography
Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997, reissued in 2009), Seeger wrote, "Should I apologize for all this? I think so." He went on to put his thinking in context: How could
Hitler have been stopped?
Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the
League of Nations in '36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist
Dave Dellinger's book,
From Yale to Jail ... At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader". I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the
Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by
Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for
stealing land from Native Americans and
enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for
Genghis Khan. And supporters of
Roosevelt could apologize for his support of
Somoza, of
Southern White Democrats, of
Franco Spain, for putting
Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She's part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let's look ahead. In later years, as the aging Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism, he also found himself criticized once again for his opinions and associations of the 1930s and 1940s. In 2006,
David Boaz—
Voice of America and
NPR commentator and president of the
libertarian Cato Institute—wrote an opinion piece in
The Guardian, entitled "Stalin's Songbird", in which he excoriated
The New Yorker and
The New York Times for lauding Seeger. He characterized Seeger as "someone with a longtime habit of following the party line" who had only "eventually" parted ways with the CPUSA. In support of this view, he quoted lines from the
Almanac Singers' May 1941
Songs for John Doe, contrasting them darkly with lines supporting the war from
Dear Mr. President, issued in 1942, after the United States and the Soviet Union had entered the war. In 2007, in response to criticism from historian
Ron Radosh, a former
Trotskyist who now writes for the conservative
National Review, Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin, "Big Joe Blues": I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams Of so many in every land. He had a chance to make A brand new start for the human race. Instead he set it back Right in the same nasty place. I got the Big Joe Blues. Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast. I got the Big Joe Blues. Do this job, no questions asked. I got the Big Joe Blues. The song was accompanied by a letter to Radosh, in which Seeger stated, "I think you're right, I should have asked to see the
gulags when I was in U.S.S.R. [in 1965]."
Later work at
Kolkata in 1996 in June 2007 Seeger appears in the 1997 documentary film
An Act of Conscience, which was filmed between 1988 and 1995. In the film, Seeger joins a group of demonstrators protesting in support of
war tax resisters
Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, whose home was seized by the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) after the couple openly refused to pay their federal income taxes as a protest against war and military spending. In 2003, Pete Seeger was a participant in an anti-Iraq war protest. On March 16, 2007, Pete Seeger, his sister
Peggy, his brothers
Mike and John, his wife Toshi, and other family members spoke and performed at a symposium and concert sponsored by the
American Folklife Center in honor of the
Seeger family, held at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where Pete Seeger had been employed by the Archive of American Folk Song 67 years earlier. In September 2008,
Appleseed Recordings released
At 89, Seeger's first studio album in 12 years. On September 29, 2008, the 89-year-old singer-activist, once banned from commercial TV, made a rare national TV appearance on the
Late Show with David Letterman, singing "Take It From Dr. King". On January 18, 2009, Seeger and his grandson
Tao Rodríguez-Seeger joined
Bruce Springsteen and the crowd in singing Woody Guthrie's "
This Land Is Your Land" in the finale of Barack Obama's inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of
two verses not often included in the song, one about a "private property" sign the narrator cheerfully ignores, and the other making a passing reference to a
Depression-era relief office. The former's final line, however, "This land was made for you and me", is modified to "That side was made for you and me". Over the years, he lent his fame to support numerous environmental organizations, including South Jersey's Bayshore Center, the home of New Jersey's tall ship, the oyster schooner
A.J. Meerwald. Seeger's benefit concerts helped raise funds for groups so they could continue to educate and spread environmental awareness. On May 3, 2009, at the Clearwater Concert, dozens of musicians gathered in New York at
Madison Square Garden to celebrate Seeger's 90th birthday (which was later televised on
PBS during the summer), ranging from
Dave Matthews,
John Mellencamp,
Billy Bragg,
Bruce Springsteen,
Tom Morello,
Eric Weissberg,
Ani DiFranco and
Roger McGuinn to
Joan Baez,
Richie Havens,
Joanne Shenandoah,
R. Carlos Nakai,
Bill Miller,
Joseph Fire Crow, Margo Thunderbird,
Tom Paxton,
Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and
Arlo Guthrie. Cuban singer-songwriter
Silvio Rodríguez was also invited to appear, but his visa was not approved in time by the United States government. Consistent with Seeger's longtime advocacy for environmental concerns, the proceeds from the event benefited the
Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a non-profit organization founded by Seeger in 1966, to defend and restore the
Hudson River. Seeger's 90th birthday was also celebrated at
The College of Staten Island on May 4. On September 19, 2009, Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival, which was particularly notable because the festival does not normally feature folk artists. In 2010, still active at the age of 91, Seeger co-wrote and performed the song
"God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" with Lorre Wyatt, commenting on the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A performance of the song by Seeger, Wyatt, and friends was recorded and filmed aboard the sloop
Clearwater in August for a single and video produced by
Richard Barone and Matthew Billy, released on election day, November 6, 2012. On October 21, 2011, at age 92, Pete Seeger was part of a solidarity march with
Occupy Wall Street to Columbus Circle in New York City. The march began with Seeger and fellow musicians exiting Symphony Space (95th and Broadway), where they had performed as part of a benefit for Seeger's Clearwater organization. Thousands of people crowded Pete Seeger by the time they reached Columbus Circle, where he performed with his grandson,
Tao Rodríguez-Seeger,
Arlo Guthrie,
David Amram, and other celebrated musicians. The event, promoted under the name OccupyTheCircle, was livestreamed, and was dubbed by some "the Pete Seeger March". In January 2012, Seeger joined the Rivertown Kids in paying tribute to his friend Bob Dylan, performing Dylan's "
Forever Young" on the
Amnesty International album
Chimes of Freedom. This song, Seeger's last single, marked Seeger's only music video, which went viral in the wake of his death two years later. On December 14, 2012, Seeger performed, along with
Harry Belafonte,
Jackson Browne,
Common, and others, at a concert to bring awareness to the 37-year-long ordeal of Native American activist
Leonard Peltier. The concert was held at the
Beacon Theatre in New York City. On April 9, 2013, Hachette Audio Books issued an audiobook entitled
Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems. This two-CD spoken-word work was conceived of and produced by noted percussionist Jeff Haynes and presents Pete Seeger telling the stories of his life against a background of music performed by more than 40 musicians of varied genres. The launch of the audiobook was held at the
Dia:Beacon on April 11, 2013, to an enthusiastic audience of around two hundred people, and featured many of the musicians from the project (among them
Samite,
Dar Williams,
Dave Eggar, and Richie Stearns of
the Horse Flies and
Natalie Merchant) performing live under the direction of producer and percussionist Haynes. On August 9, 2013, one month widowed, Seeger was in New York City for the 400-year commemoration of the
Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Iroquois and the Dutch. On an interview he gave that day to
Democracy Now!, Seeger sang "I Come and Stand at Every Door", as it was also the 68th anniversary of the
bombing of Nagasaki. On September 21, 2013, Seeger performed at
Farm Aid at the
Saratoga Performing Arts Center in
Saratoga Springs, New York. Joined by Wille Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews, he sang "This Land Is Your Land", and included a verse he said he had written specifically for the Farm Aid concert. ==Personal life==