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MY first lesson in the American civil rights movement came courtesy of an album I picked out of my mother’s collection of LPs some 40 years ago. It was titled We Shall Overcome: Pete Seeger Recorded Live at His Historic Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8, 1963.
The recording conveyed boundless enthusiasm, passion and compassion, introducing me to the work of songwriters from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan to Tom Paxton and Malvina Reynolds. It was hard not to be moved by the universality of ‘Oh Freedom!’ or the determined optimism of ‘We Shall Overcome’.
Pete — who died last week, three months or so short of his 95th birthday, serenaded on his deathbed by family members and friends — became an inspiring presence in my life, encapsulating much that was admirable about the American experience while never hesitating to take a stand against what he felt was wrong.
Seeger was already something of virtuoso on the five-string banjo at 20 when he first ran into Woody Guthrie at a 1940 benefit concert in New York. Woody’s songs enriched Pete’s repertoire, and he learned many others at the feet of Huddie Ledbetter.
In the 1940s, Seeger joined the army, married Toshi Ohta during a furlough — when she died last July, the devoted couple were within cooee of their 70th wedding anniversary — and returned to civilian life determined to do whatever he could to contribute to the power of song as a vehicle for raising social and political consciousness.
By 1949, he was part of a quartet called The Weavers, which was spotted during a Greenwich Village engagement by the band leader Gordon Jenkins. The consequence was a spurt of phenomenal success. But then the blacklist intervened. Outed as communist sympathisers, The Weavers lost their recording contract, were denied airplay and no longer welcome at mainstream concert venues.
Hauled up before the infamous House Un-American Affairs Committee in 1955, Pete doggedly refused to name names or answer any “improper” questions about his associations or beliefs. Cited for contempt, he was eventually sentenced to a year in jail, but, on appeal, the charge was dismissed on a technicality.
Seeger was wary of success, though. He spent much of the later 1950s as a cultural guerrilla, turning up unannounced at colleges up and down the country, offering to be interviewed by the campus radio station, performing for students and travelling on before the local branch of the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan got wind of his activities. He thereby effectively sowed the seeds for the 1960s folk revival.
Many of the stalwarts of that phenomenon first picked up a guitar or a banjo after attending a concert by Seeger or The Weavers. Pete was determined to put songs on people’s lips, not just in their ears. The extent to which that mission has been accomplished can be gauged by the innumerable songs that Pete championed which have weaved their way into the American consciousness.
And he never shied away from being physically present to further the causes he believed in. He performed at Paul Robeson’s Peekskill concert in 1949, strode side by side with Martin Luther King, got half a million Americans singing “All we are saying is give peace a chance” at a 1969 Vietnam moratorium in Washington DC and, last decade, maintained a vigil against the war in Iraq.
Pete’s presence at Barack Obama’s inauguration concert in 2009 came a decade and a half after he had received the National Medal of the Arts from Bill Clinton, who called him “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them”.
Last week, Barack Obama extolled Seeger’s belief “in the power of community — to stand up for what’s right, speak out against what’s wrong, and move his country closer to the America we knew it could be”.
Pete’s nature, however, simply did not allow him to wallow in the blaze of autumn sunshine. He could scarcely walk when he joined a march for Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
Seeger has always had plenty of detractors in the US, mostly on the far right. There’s abiding cause for hope, though, in the realisation that so many Americans think otherwise. At a Madison Square Garden concert marking Seeger’s 90th birthday in 2009, Bruce Springsteen declared: “He remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself.”
Pete liked to see himself as a link in a chain, but he was much more than that, and memories of him, alongside his hundreds of recordings, will hopefully endure as a reflection of America’s better nature and a pointer to the possibilities of what kind of nation it could one day become.
