We Workers Do Not Understand Modern Art

Pete Seeger Week Part Two

Within the tradition of the Meyers-Briggs test, Carl Jung, and Facebook quizes, there stands William Irwin Thompson's four achetypes of man: the Chief, the Shaman, the Hunter, and the Fool. The best use of these archetypes, as far as I can see, is to use the rubric as a way to think about and essentialize any group of four: the Beatles, the cast of Seinfeld, the four Ghostbusters. It's an especially good way to use up five or six years' worth of college -- was John Lennon the Chief or the Shaman? If your Dad is Shaman and Mom is Chief, and your brother clearly the Hunter, what's left to describe yourself?

Anyway, I want to develop a similar (and probably just as reductive-slash-useless) rubric for the dissemination of ideas, utilizing key figures from the folk music revivals of the 1930s and late 1950s/early '60s as avatars. As a kind of thought experiment, or perhaps to explain why certain people are secretly awesome.

The Woody Guthrie: A rough-hewn original, kind of shaky and odd and not entirely palatable. It's palatable enough for Pete Seeger or Ramblin' Jack Elliott or Alan Lomax to see as something valuable and worth distributing, but would need some commodification to appeal to the public. Often more noteable for those they influenced or their historical import than for their effectiveness within their own lifetime. Examples of Guthries: the Xerox Alto or the Apple Newton, Galileo Galilei, early abolitionists, Walt Whitman, the Velvet Underground.

(NOTE: Woody Guthries, of course, is not entirely original, as he adapted much of his shtick from earlier folk or country stars and is beholden himself to people like Huddie Ledbetter and countless, nameless Appalachian song purveyors, but I said above I aimed to be reductive and so here -- like a French sauce that's been on the stove since morning -- is your thick and syrupy reduction.)

The Pete Seeger: Like Johnny Appleseed or a garage band with an account at Kinko's, the Seeger takes an original idea (The Guthrie) and disperses it among the populace. This requires some gestures towards the mainstream, a smoothing of some but certainly not all rough edges. For Seeger, his involvement with pro-Union organizations and the Communist Party of the 1930s and 40s got in the way of his post-WWII mission to bring folk music back to the folks, but it's equally clear that he would not have done one without having first done the other. Examples of Seegers: the Macintosh SE, Martin Luther King, William Carlos Williams, the Clash, Ralph Nader, Julia Child, Jim Henson, Dave Eggers, the Milwaukee County Parks System. (It strikes me that most of my heroes are Seegers.)

The Burl Ives: (I'm going to pick on Burl Ives here, though there are other names that might be equally or even more appropriate. But the guy's name was Burl, so likely he can take it. Plus, he was a HUAC rat.) This is the point in the progression where a once revolutionary movement or idea is allowed a bright wool sweater and a seat by the fire. The teeth are dulled, and the sound homogenized and made safe. But just because something is milquetoast and market-ready doesn't necessarily mean it's bad -- the Police, for example, may be punk rock's fury and pose made acceptable for pop audiences, but I still kind of like their records. Other Ives: Will & Grace, David Sedaris, Billy Collins, Microsoft Windows, the Milwaukee County Public Transit System.

The Bob Dylan: Almost a new Woody Guthrie, the Bob Dylan takes an established, Seeger-ed idea that is heading for (or already mired in) Ives-ishness and turns it into something altogether new. While Dylan's move from acoustic folk into electric rock may be an aspect of this, I'd argue that it's Dylan's surrealist bent that makes him unique within the folk form. (He's also strangely without form himself-- while he has a mystique, this comes from a kind of invisibility. Compared to what is publicly known about Guthrie and Seeger, we know astonishingly little about Bob Dylan. While you know what you expect from a Bob Dylan song, we don't get a list of causes to support or clear emotional or intellectual stances that are common to other songwriters. Whatever you imagine of him, for example, Bob Dylan never wrote a song that overtly opposed the Vietnam War.) Other Dylans: Alan Moore, maybe Andy Warhol, and I'm going to claim Donald Barthelme. Also Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. And to illustrate the way that the line blurs between the Guthrie and the Dylan: Ezra Pound is both Guthrie and Dylan.

Of all of these, I'd argue that the Seegers are the workhorses, the under-appreciated, the University Academic Staff, those who knowingly sacrifice for little personal gain or at risk to themselves. They teach, they read, they march, they write, they -- like Pete Seeger -- sing out.

Pete Seeger week continues tomorrow...