A Hammer of Justice

Pete Seeger Week, Part One:

There's not much salacious gossip to be had in a biography of Pete Seeger, whose only vice seems to be an at-times overbearing earnestness. He's not one for wine and women -- just the song, thanks.

Like many a 20th or 21st century self-identified progressive, I hold Pete Seeger (who turns 90 on May 3rd) as a hero. He stood up for unions and brotherhood in the thirties, signed up for Army service in World War II, campaigned for Wallace '47, brought to the masses the songs of Leadbelly and Guthrie as well as songs from South Africa and dissident Germany, stood up to HUAC over his association with the Communist Party and -- largely -- for co-writing the lyrics to Wasn't That A Time?, put the Old New England "Shall" in "We Shall Overcome," struggled back from the black list to sing out against the Vietnam War on national television (and essentially get himself blacklisted again), was an early adopter of conservation, and, in all of this, acted both locally and globally. Both literally and figuratively, Pete Seeger is a real live nephew of your Uncle Sam, a man who can trace his roots back to the Mayflower and an American patriot in the service of our better angels.

He has two chief talents, employed in all of the above: he finds songs and he teaches people to sing them. Perhaps my favorite Seeger performance is this version of "If I Had a Hammer," recorded live in Sanders Theatre on the Harvard Campus in 1980, where he does not so much sing the song as facilitate (and harmonize with) the audience of bookish students and reserved Cantabridgians.

After recording more than 150 records and countless concerts, Pete Seeger has rarely accepted payment for a performance over the last 25 years, though he continues -- at 89 -- to show up with his banjo at benefits and demonstrations and inaugurations.

David King Dunaway's How Can I Keep From Singing?: The Ballad of Pete Seeger is an effective and suitable biography of Seeger, one which couples the man with his times and confronts his character. Seeger was a child of privilege who devoted his life to folk in the broadest sense of the term, and Dunaway makes clear the further contradictions that lie within that larger one. Seeger is both a pacifist and a man capabale of great temper (though the rumor that he took an axe to the electric cords at Bob Dylan's 1963 electric debut at Newport is not true -- he only threatened to do so). Within his selfless approach to worthy causes and people, there lies a kind of selfishness, a patriarchal reliance upon his wife Toshi for all the details and organizing and washing-up. And yet, Seeger can carry these faults on his sleeve and, brandishing them, is still probably a better man and a better American than you or I can reasonably hope to be.

I highly recommend the film Pete Seeger: Power of Song which ran as an episode of PBS' American Masters last year but which is now available on DVD. At the end of that film, as you get a sense of Seeger readying himself for mortality, there's is a moving final portrait of Seeger with his children and his grandchildren, a family as large and as rainbow-hued as the America he surely hope to leave behind.

More Pete Seeger stuff throughout the week...