Saturday, May 2, 2009

For Pete’s Sake, Sing!
A tribute to Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday





Seminal folk revivalist, labor organizer, five-string banjo master, and champion-of-community Pete Seeger turns ninety years old today, May 3. In his honor, folk venues across the country are hosting singalongs and fundraisers under the umbrella concept of For Pete’s Sake, Sing, with all profits to benefit Clearwater, the educational and environmental organization which Seeger founded a few decades ago to clean up the Hudson River north of New York City. Acoustic Music Scene has a relatively comprehensive list of local hootenannies and group sings participating in the global celebration.

The “big” event is in NYC, of course, at Madison Square Garden. If you’re lucky enough to live in or around the area, there may be a seat or two left at tonight’s primary tribute concert, which will feature a veritable who’s who of folk and rock musicians with a strong sense of social justice who look to Seeger as mentor and a muse, from Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, and Dave Matthews to Dar Williams, Ani DiFranco, and Bruce Cockburn (full list of the participating artists is available here). Seats are dear, but it’s for a good cause.

Even if you can’t make it out to celebrate in sing-along style, take a few minutes on Sunday to consider the great works and impact of this world-changing musician and activist. To get you started, Muruch has links to Buffalo Gals and Oh Mary Don’t You Weep, a pair of traditional American ballads from Seeger’s back catalog, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways, who just released American Favorite Ballads Vol. 1-5 — it’s all Seeger, and the track list is a veritable survey of his impact on the modern traditional folk canon.

The Spring 09 issue of Folkways Magazine offers a spotlight on Seeger’s career, too, from his long sufferance as a blacklisted pro-labor artist to his particpation in the civil rights movement of the sixties to his more recent environmental advocacy work.

And here? Why, we featured Pete way back in September 2008, just before Cover Lay Down moved to its own domain, and put up a few more Seeger covers and a video when he performed This Land Is Our Land at Obama’s inauguration. Rather than diminish the power of our original paean to this great revivalist of the old folkways, I’m reposting the first of those features below — but I’ve added a few more covers, just to keep regular readers happy.

Oh, and there’s no purchase links today; Seeger wouldn’t want it that way. Instead, if it moves you, why not donate to Clearwater?



Though I believe that folk, most especially in the way it functions as a channel of engagement and public discourse, is by definition an agency of cultural change, I have been reluctant to use this blog as a forum for advocating explicit change of any one type. Perpetuating the relevance of folk as an agenda in and of itself, it seems to me, precludes taking sides for any particular agenda which might be carried by folk, lest we alienate opposing values, and in doing so, diminish the potential of folk to remain dialogic.

But it’s pledge drive time at our local radio station, and the Nobel Prize selection committee does seem to have a set criteria for signatories and public outcry as an establishing principle for prize consideration. And it’s hard to imagine anyone genuinely untouched by the compassionate, tireless work in the name of human dignity, empowerment, and awareness which Pete Seeger continues to consider his life’s work after over sixty years as a recording artist and activist.

So when my mother, who once used Seeger’s songs as a vehicle for planting the seeds of peace and justice in both myself and in the inner city classrooms of New York City, became the most recent in a long series of folks to remind me of the recent petition to recognize Pete’s long-standing contribution to social, environmental, and political change, it seemed like the right time to use the soapbox to do some particular good.


Though there are parallels to be made between the community ownership of song upon which this blog is predicated, and the ways in which Pete Seeger’s work has bridged time and space to touch and affect the rest of us, one one level, honoring this particular life’s work is made more challenging by our focus on coversong. For, though there are certainly tunes that one can point to as written by Seeger during his long career, the question of coverage and song origin is complex and unclear in much of Seeger’s catalog.

Which is to say: the son of an ethnomusicologist and a true believer in folk as a mechanism for tying past to future, perhaps more than any artist in history, Seeger has lived folk song as if it truly did belong to the community for which it speaks. As such, Seeger’s contribution to folk was one of popularization as much as songcraft; many of the songs he is best known for have their origin in the past, and much of his better-known works, like Turn, Turn, Turn, use older components to create new works. Even Seeger’s own greatest hits album combines songs written by Pete Seeger with songs popularized by Seeger. And even the better tribute albums out there mix songs which Seeger actually wrote with songs which he made his own.

None of this precludes consideration from the Nobel folks, of course; indeed, it is Seeger’s deep sense of the social and folk environment as both purposeful and shared by all of us which is perhaps the most powerful case for his recognition. As such, first and foremost, the aim of today’s post is to ask all of you to take a moment and — in the name of folk itself — sign your name to the petition asking the Nobel Prize Committee to consider Pete Seeger for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his tireless work sowing the seeds of peace.


But of course, you also come here for the music. And there are some great tributes out there, most notably the three sets which the activist-founded, socially conscious folklabel Appleseed Recordings has released in a scant decade of existence; I’m especially enamored of double-disk first release Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger, which in addition to the Ani DiFranco and Bruce Cockburn covers below includes a veritable who’s who of big-name inheritors of the activist folkmantle, from Richie Havens and Odetta to Springsteen and Billy Bragg.

Someday, I aspire to the time and energy it would take to approach a proper post on the central influence Pete Seeger and his family — from father Charles (the ethnomusicologist) to half-siblings Peggy and Mike to half-nephew Neill MacColl and grandson Tao Rodriguez of the Mammals — have had in defining and continuing to define folk music as a social and political engine of change for almost a century. In the meanwhile, here’s a set of personal favorites with a much simpler organizing principle: songs which other folk artists of a certain political bent have learned from or associate with Pete Seeger himself, regardless of authorship, and have recorded in deliberate tribute to this long-standing folk icon.

Folk and social consciousness go hand in hand; to support one is to support the other. If you have ever been moved by folksong, sign the petition — technically, a petition “to persuade [the] American Friends Service Committee to enter Pete Seeger as their nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2008 ” — and in doing so help make the case for both Seeger and the folk process itself as an agency of peace. Then, head on over to Appleseed Recordings for the opportunity to purchase Seeger’s work, the aforementioned cover albums, and a whole host of other folksongs from a growing stable of socially aware artists actively engaged in using folk music to change the world for the better.

Want more? Today’s bonus coversongs offer a tiny, tiny taste of Seeger as political song interpreter, just in case you’re still young enough to have never really encountered his own continued celebration of his folkpeers and ancestors:



Cover Lay Down posts regular features every Wednesday and Sunday. Coming soon: yet another installment of our popular Kidfolk series, and a tribute to mothers everywhere.

Category: Uncategorized

16 Responses to “For Pete’s Sake, Sing!
A tribute to Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday”

  1. Chris
    May 2nd, 2009 at 10:45 pm

    Signed! This was a great post - thanks.
  2. monette
    May 2nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm

    great post, love these covers! Thanks for putting this together!

    (ps your coding-link on the Joan Baez song is a bit wonky, you have an extra extension in there)
  3. JoeG
    May 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 am

    Thanks for this - I am old enough and was fortunate enough to have a father who was a Pete Seeger fan, to have seen The Weavers when I was young. We had all the old Weavers and Pete Seeger Folkways albums around the house. My father took my mother, sister (who couldn’t have been more than 7 years old) and me to the first Philadelphia Folk Festival because Pete Seeger was the headliner and we sat there on the grass until some ungodly hour of the night, steadily freezing, while the Rev. Gary Davis, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and so many others preceded Pete. For all he’s done (and we’ll forgive that attempt to pull the plug on Dylan at Newport) he certainly deserves all the accolades he’s received and should have received already (the Nobel Prize being chief among them). And he’s still performing! I would have loved to see him at this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest.
  4. JoeG
    May 3rd, 2009 at 11:04 am

    P.S. I just invited about 50 of my friends to join me in signing the petition. I hope everyone who reads your blog will try to do the same!
  5. Susan
    May 4th, 2009 at 7:36 am

    Super write-up (yet again!) - I referenced you in my Pete post yesterday… :-)

    The reviews are starting to come in re: last night’s birthday celebration - here’s the first:

    http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2009/05/04/springsteen-mellencamp-morello-and-more-celebrate-pete-seegers-90th-birthday-with-sing-alongs/
  6. michiganDAN
    May 4th, 2009 at 8:38 am

    My parents were folkies who revered Pete. I picked up on this and had the good fortune to see Pete and Arlo during their tours together in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Only Harry Chapin came close to building the sense of community that Pete does during a concert performance.

    If you have not seen it, rent (or buy) the PBS special titled The Power of Song. It is hard to not come away from that believing that this humble man is one of the ten most important Americans of the last hundred years.
  7. Zach Maxwell
    May 5th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    This is a great post. I had no idea that Pete was 90 years old. He was around with Woody Guthrie and got mad at Bob Dylan when he went electric. He is an American legend. The lineup for his concert at MSG looks truly remarkable…some of the best singers (Bernice Johnson Reagon, Toshi Reagon) and songwriters around. Wish I could make it.
  8. Tor Hershman
    May 6th, 2009 at 3:26 am

    Indeed, I have Mr. Seeger, from YouTube, coverin’ “Dear Little Boy Of Mine” at moi’s blog not too long ago.
  9. Jack Cheng
    May 6th, 2009 at 9:11 am

    Great post. It’s worth noting that although “Overcome” is an old song Pete reworked, he made a significant change: he changed “We Will Overcome” to “We Shall Overcome.” A subtle difference but a powerful one that is less aggressive towards adversaries and, by invoking the language of the King James Bible, suggests an inevitable destiny.

    I wrote a little bit more on the song here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/08_washington.html (click on the Music tab)
  10. boyhowdy
    May 6th, 2009 at 9:38 am

    Thanks for the kudos and commentary, all, and the bonus materials where relevant. Jack: as noted, Pete’s “interpretation” is often this powerful, though I could swear that I had read that he actually changed the song from first person singular to first person plural, too — and in my book, changing the song from “I” to “we” is even more significant. .
  11. General Anaesthetic Taking the edge off.
    May 6th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    [...] at St Luke Old Street church. So I don’t know that much, however recommend you Check out the Cover Lay Me Down post, for some samples of Seeger covering other people and people covering [...]
  12. Paula
    May 6th, 2009 at 5:57 pm

    Thanks for the wonderful post and so many songs! Pete is a national treasure. I’m so glad that he is being honored while he still with us.
  13. Nosila
    May 7th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    I met Pete Seeger when I was volunteering at the Clearwater Festival about 20 years ago. Very quiet, unassuming guy. “Hey isn’t that guy sweeping up in the corner over there…………?” Yes, yes it was.

    Speaking of the Clearwater Festival, check out the great line-up this year–A.C. Newman, Old Crow Medicine Show, Allison Moorer, Elvis Perkins, Susan Tedeschi, etc.
  14. Chris Watson
    May 16th, 2009 at 7:16 am

    Look, I’ll pay respect to Pete Seeger’s talent as a songwriter. A number of the songs he actually wrote were very good. That’s saying a lot. Few people write more than a handful of really great songs.

    But I hate the adulation of Pete Seeger the ‘great man’. For goodness sake, he took works in the public domain and asserted his own copyright over them. That’s one of the most scandalous, money-grubbing things anyone can do! What a penny-grasping wretch!

    Talented, sure. Socialist, my a$$.
  15. boyhowdy
    May 16th, 2009 at 7:30 am

    Chris: I have mixed feelings about the copyright issue. I agree that the establishment of those rights is problematic — for example, it has led to a take-down notice for me for a previous song. Surely that wasn’t what Seeger planned for.

    However, “money-grubbing” and “penny-grasping” would only be at issue if Seeger actually SPENT that money — they have to do with how he USES and ADMINISTERS those rights, not whether theose rights exist. Instead, there is a HUGE body of evidence that Seeger (and his publishers at the time) had the original intent of protecting the songs FROM being used profitably. According to wikipedia, ALL Seeger’s profit on, say, We Shall Overcome…

    “go to the “We Shall Overcome” Fund, administered by Highlander under the trusteeship of the “writers” (i.e., the holders of the writers’ share of the copyright, who, strictly speaking, are the arrangers and adapters). Such funds are used to give small grants for cultural expression involving African Americans organizing in the U.S. South.”

    Money-grubbing? Do your homework, Chris. Adaptation IS copyrightable, sometimes; even in those cases where copyright is dubiously obtained, Seeger is giving the money away to protect public domain sources and their cultures.

    If anything, the labels, not Seeger, are to blame here, for ASSERTING their copyright in some cases where it should not be asserted — Seeger should have probably been clearer with them about what he was willing to do as rights holder, but that’s not criminal, nor is it evil. Seeger spreads the music, and deserves his meager existence for it.

    Shame on you for half-research, Chris. Go peddle your anger elsewhere.
  16. Nyack News and Views » Seeger, Chapin Headline Health Rally
    October 3rd, 2009 at 11:04 am

    [...] See Also:  Group to Rally for Health Care Reform in Nyack, Journal News 9/21/09 Photo Credit: CoverLayDown.com [...]

Leave a Reply