America has lost its Voice

I doubt I can actually count how many times I strummed my guitar and sang out “If I had a hammer”.  The man was a National Treasure and definitely the voice of every hard working American. Then, there’s “This Land” which I swear should be this country’s national anthem.

Pete Seeger, Songwriter and Champion of Folk Music, Dies at 94

Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.

Seeger saw the connection between poetry, music, life and social justice.  He was a voice for all of that and more.

Seeger gained fame as a member of The Weavers, the quartet formed in 1948 and had hits such as “Goodnight Irene.”

He continued performing and recording for six decades afterward and was still an activist as recently as October 2011 when he marched in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

He was onstage in January 2009 for a gala Washington concert two days before Barack Obama was inaugurated.

But in the 1950s, his leftist politics got him blacklisted and he was kept off commercial television for more than a decade.

I don’t know quite what to say about the passing of America’s Voice for Social Justice. I can’t even count how many times I’ve sung all his songs and strummed them out on my guitars. His PBS show inspired me in grade school. I think he’s more responsible for my intense activism and sense of social justice than anyone because he always framed with a tune you can sing too and a great sense of love and hope

Here’s a great tribute to the man from Mother Jones in a 2004 article.

Pete Seeger, who lives near Wappingers Falls, has been protesting the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq at these Saturday peace vigils, organized a few months before the invasion—and at dozens of other anti-war events of all sizes around the country—with the passion, if not the vigor, of a person one-fourth his age. Indeed, after an extended period of low-key concentration on local issues, during which Seeger was most visibly absorbed with cleaning up the Hudson River, the grand old lion of the American left has, in his 85th year, again taken to challenging the state of world affairs. This is the latest—and perhaps the last—of his great missions, a crusade with resonant echoes of his work in the eras of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Last year, Seeger led thousands in song at the New York City arm of the Global March for Peace. The veteran protest songwriter has since rewritten and rerecorded his Vietnam-era broadside, “Bring Them Home,” with three of his musical acolytes, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, and Steve Earle. (“Now we don’t want to fight for oil / Bring ’em home, bring ’em home / Underneath some foreign soil / Bring ’em home, bring ’em home.”) And in late June, as violence in Iraq erupted in anticipation of the formal transfer of authority to an interim Iraqi government, Seeger prepared to lead a performance of antiwar songs at the Clearwater Festival, the annual Hudson River event to raise social, political, and environmental consciousness (and funds) that he and his wife, Toshi, launched 35 years ago.

The effort strikes some of his critics as quixotic, the tragicomic vagary of a clinging, misguided anachronism. A lifelong Marxist blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Seeger has long been an easy target for conservatives. (Seeger’s early group, the Almanac Singers, released an album of songs against American involvement in World War II, but recalled it and replaced it with anti-Axis songs when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.) Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Seeger’s little-changed politics have proved vexing even to former fellow travelers, such as Ronald Radosh, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left. A red-diaper baby who took banjo lessons from Seeger and organized his first concert at the University of Wisconsin, Radosh says, “I have known Pete for most of my life, and I think he is a national treasure for his contribution to American music culture, for acquainting America with its own indigenous music. But Pete doesn’t understand that this is not the ’60s, and Iraq and the war against terrorism are not the war in Vietnam. He looks at things through his old lens, and that’s more than unfortunate. It’s sort of sad and silly.”

To those he still rallies to dissent and activism, however, Seeger remains an inspiration, the unwavering embodiment of progressive idealism. After all, he has been using music to stand up for the disenfranchised and to mobilize their sympathizers since the days of the original American folk-music revival in the 1930s.

I’m not sure you’ve ever read his testimony before HUAC when he was called up for being a Marxist but here it is for you!

. . . Mr. TAVENNER: The Committee has information obtained in part from the Daily Worker indicating that, over a period of time, especially since December of 1945, you took part in numerous entertainment features. I have before me a photostatic copy of the June 20, 1947, issue of the Daily Worker. In a column entitled “What’s On” appears this advertisement: “Tonight—Bronx, hear Peter Seeger and his guitar, at Allerton Section housewarming.” May I ask you whether or not the Allerton Section was a section of the Communist Party?

Mr. SEEGER: Sir, I refuse to answer that question whether it was a quote from the New York Times or the Vegetarian Journal.

Mr. TAVENNER: I don’t believe there is any more authoritative document in regard to the Communist Party than its official organ, theDaily Worker.

Mr. SCHERER: He hasn’t answered the question, and he merely said he wouldn’t answer whether the article appeared in the New York Times or some other magazine. I ask you to direct the witness to answer the question.

Chairman WALTER: I direct you to answer.

Mr. SEEGER: Sir, the whole line of questioning—

Chairman WALTER: You have only been asked one question, so far.

Mr. SEEGER: 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. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it.

Mr. TAVENNER: Has the witness declined to answer this specific question?

Chairman WALTER: He said that he is not going to answer any questions, any names or things.

Mr. SCHERER: He was directed to answer the question.

Mr. TAVENNER: I have before me a photostatic copy of the April 30, 1948, issue of the Daily Worker which carries under the same title of “What’s On,” an advertisement of a “May Day Rally: For Peace, Security and Democracy.” The advertisement states: “Are you in a fighting mood? Then attend the May Day rally.” Expert speakers are stated to be slated for the program, and then follows a statement, “Entertainment by Pete Seeger.” At the bottom appears this: “Auspices Essex County Communist Party,” and at the top, “Tonight, Newark, N.J.” Did you lend your talent to the Essex County Communist Party on the occasion indicated by this article from the Daily Worker?

Mr. SEEGER: Mr. Walter, I believe I have already answered this question, and the same answer.

Chairman WALTER: The same answer. In other words, you mean that you decline to answer because of the reasons stated before?

Mr. SEEGER: I gave my answer, sir.

Chairman WALTER: What is your answer?

Mr. SEEGER: You see, sir, I feel—

Chairman WALTER: What is your answer?

Mr. SEEGER: I will tell you what my answer is.

I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature and I resent very much and very deeply the implication of being called before this Committee that in some way because my opinions may be different from yours, or yours, Mr. Willis, or yours, Mr. Scherer, that I am any less of an American than anybody else. I love my country very deeply, sir.

Chairman WALTER: Why don’t you make a little contribution toward preserving its institutions?

Mr. SEEGER: I feel that my whole life is a contribution. That is why I would like to tell you about it.

Chairman WALTER: I don’t want to hear about it.

Fortunately, we still have his recordings and his legacy to pass forward.