Friday November 21, 2008
By:
LARRY..CURTIS..SPURLOCK
What a wonderful character:
PETE SEEGER
And a great musician !
Pete Seeger was best known, early in his life, as a member of the Weavers. .
The Weavers were an influential American Folk Music Quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. They sang traditional Folk Songs from around the world, as well as Blues, Gospel Music, Children's Songs, Labor Songs and American Ballads, selling millions of records at the height of their popularity. They inspired the commercial ‘folk boom’ that followed them in the 1950s and 1960s, including such acts as The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.
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The Weavers group was formed in November 1948 by Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Pete Seeger.
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In the early 1960s, Martin Luther King was touring around the United States, preaching his vision of Peace & Humanity. At one venue where he gave a speech, there was music being played prior to his talk. One of the musicians was Pete Seeger. Pete’s final number was a Charles Tindley song entitled 'We Shall Overcome'.
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Later that night after Dr. King’s speech, he was being whisked away in a Car .. and sang out the words that he had heard earlier, 'We shall overcome'. He looked at one of his aides and said, “that’s a mighty catchy lyric”. Soonafter, King sent word to Pete Seeger asking if he could use the song in his rallies. Seeger’s return message was that he stole it from Charles Tindley – and he’d be proud if King used it. What is it they say about the rest is history …
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Seeger was a Musician, Singer, Songwriter, Folklorist, Labor Activist, Environmentalist, and Peace Advocate .. born in Patterson, New York, son of Charles and Constance Seeger, whose families traced their ancestry back to the Mayflower. Seeger grew up in an unusually politicized environment. His father, Charles, had been a music professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where his pacifism won him so many enemies that he quit teaching in the fall of 1918.
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At thirteen, Pete Seeger became a subscriber to the New Masses. His heroes were Lincoln Steffens and Mike Gold, and he aspired to a career in Journalism. In 1936 he heard the Five-String Banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and his life was changed forever.
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Seeger spent two unhappy years at Harvard and left before final exams in the spring of 1938. He made his way to New York, where he eventually landed a job with the Archives of American Folk Music. Seeger spent 1939 and 1940 seeking out legendary Folk-Song figures such as the blues singer Leadbelly and labor militant Aunt Molly Jackson. By 1940 he had become quite an accomplished musician, thanks in no small part to his enormous self-discipline and Puritan rectitude.
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On March 3, 1940, a date Folklorist Alan Lomax once said could be celebrated as the beginning of modern Folk Music, Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a "Grapes of Wrath" migrant-worker benefit concert. In 1940 the duo helped form the Almanac Singers, a loosely organized musical collective that included Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis Cunningham, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and others.
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By the time Seeger was drafted in 1942, however, critics had called attention to the Almanacs' ties (and Communism), and the FBI had already begun to fill what is no doubt a very fat file on the tall, skinny balladeer. While on his first leave from the Army, Seeger also married Tashi Ohta, who virtually all of their friends agree played a crucial role in organizing Seeger's career and managing his finances.
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Seeger was apparently not entangled in the sectarian squabbling that contributed to the Communist Party's weakness at the end of WW II. He had joined the Party in 1942 and would depart about 1950, but like many artists within the Party orbit, he was often viewed as unreliable. In 1955 Seeger was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and became one of the few witnesses called that year who didn't invoke the Fifth Amendment. In a dramatic appearance before the committee, Seeger claimed that to discuss his political views and associates violated his First Amendment rights.
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The following year, which saw Seeger compose Where Have All the Flowers Gone ? Seeger, Arthur Miller, and six others were indicted for contempt of Congress by an overwhelming vote in the House of Representatives. In 1961 he was found guilty of contempt and on April 2 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. The following year his ordeal ended when the case was dismissed on a technicality.
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Seeger had cultivated a Folk Music revival in the 1950s, and the movement gathered momentum from 1958 into the early 1960s. ABC decided to cash in on the craze with a weekly television show, ‘Hootenanny’, but enthusiasm for the program waned when it was discovered that Seeger had been blacklisted and would not be permitted to appear.
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The Vietnam War deeply and personally offended Seeger, who used his network television return on the ‘Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ to air a scathing attack on Lyndon Johnson's war policies, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. The song was cut by network censors, but Seeger made a second appearance on the program after being begged by Tom & Dick and he sang the song without interruption.
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When Pete Seeger and his friends launched the sloop Clearwater into the Hudson River in 1969, he was in effect fulfilling a lifelong love of the outdoors and a longstanding desire to do something to clean up the environment polluted by irresponsible corporate and public water usage. Pete Seeger has become a highly visible and much beloved figure in American life. He has issued some one hundred records, written and collaborated on numerous radical songbooks, articles, and technical manuals on playing the banjo. Fifty years after the Popular Front, Seeger is one of the last links with the optimistic and expansive culture of Depression-era America.
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