life and art of our country's greatest folk singer and musical activist.
I urge you to consider clicking on the URL, just below, for not only the
full essay, but many interesting click-on additions to this fascinating
history of America's underground to mainstream musical culture.
Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090806_richard_flacks_on_pete_seeger/
Richard Flacks on Pete Seeger
By Richard Flacks
Truthdig: August 7, 2009
Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, providing the occasion for a huge Madison
Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular
musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the two years
prior to this event, Seeger had gotten more mainstream attention than he'd
received in his previous 70 years of performing. Bruce Springsteen recorded
several CDs called "The Seeger Sessions" and simultaneously went on an
international tour featuring material drawn from Seeger's folksong
repertory. There was a documentary film bio, released on public TV and
theatrically, called "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song." There's an ongoing
campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A long adulatory essay on Seeger appeared in The New Yorker and an extended
version with the same main title-"The Protest Singer"-is now out as one of
three recently published biographies. In addition to the book by Alec
Wilkinson, there is a biographical narrative by historian Allan M. Winkler,
"To Everything There Is a Season," and a major updating of David King
Dunaway's "official" biography, "How Can I Keep From Singing," originally
published in 1981.
The attention Pete Seeger is now getting is certainly deserved, given his
influence on American music and the nature of his life story. Yet, one
feature of that story is that he is one of the least well-known famous
persons in America. I use protest music a lot in my teaching about social
movements; over the years, I've found that fewer than 5 percent of my
students at UC Santa Barbara can identify Seeger (and this is probably a
higher proportion than one would find in a sample of the wider public). Of
course, the attention he's gotten in recent years has undoubtedly enabled
many more to identify him, but he remains paradoxically shadowy, given his
importance.
Yet this paradox goes to the heart of what his life has been about.
One obvious reason for Seeger's marginalization has been his lifelong
commitment to the left. His father, the noted composer and musicologist
Charles Seeger, was an important leader of the cultural front fostered by
the Communist Party during the 1930s. Charles Seeger helped form a
composers'
collective (whose membership included Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland and
other young radical musicians) seeking to create a new music for
revolutionary workers, and eventually working to preserve and reinvigorate
folk and vernacular music as an alternative to commodified mass culture. His
son Pete grew up immersed in the left, joined the Young Communist League
during his brief time at Harvard, and was a Communist Party member
(according to his biographers) during most of the 1940s. Although he stopped
being a formal member of the party in the late '40s, he was one of the star
cultural figures of the communist-oriented left for many years after that.
Teenagers like me and my wife (who both had been "Red diaper" babies) were
proud that Pete Seeger was "ours"; there he was at benefits, and
hootenannies, summer camps and rallies that defined much of our cultural
lives during the '50s when kids of our background felt pretty isolated from
the political and cultural mainstream. Seeger's allegiances made him the
prototype of the blacklisted entertainer, and it was the blacklist which
excluded him from TV and blanked him out of the awareness of mainstream
America.
But that exclusion was not a tragedy for Pete's life project. On the
contrary, it compelled him to fulfill that project rather than succumb to
temptations to modify it that might have come from more conventional
commercial success.
Alec Wilkinson's portrait of Seeger defines him as the epitome of the rugged
individualist. We see him in very old age, living in a house he has built on
the banks of New York state's Hudson River. He, his wife Toshi and their
small children moved there in the '40s, and their lives for a time were
indeed rugged-without electricity and running water for a while, chopping
wood, growing food in a clearing in the forest. Of course, they added modern
amenities, but they remained close to the land. Near the end of the book, we
see Seeger and members of his clan collecting sap and making maple syrup.
Wilkinson appreciates the seeming contradiction that this man, long reviled
as a communist, has tried to live the American ideal of the self-made,
self-sufficient man.
But Seeger was, in fact, a Communist, and continues to describe himself as a
"communist with a small c." His biographers suggest that when he was a party
member, he was sometimes at odds with party discipline. In the '30s, many
CPers from comfortable backgrounds felt the need to demonstrate their
revolutionary bona fides by slavish conformity to party lines and party
demands. Seeger is described, by Dunaway, as restless with such demands,
avoiding boring meetings, alienated by abstract theorizing. Indeed, his
dedication to the promotion of folk music was not particularly appreciated
by party cultural commissars. But alongside these deviations, he has had to
live down the fact that the Almanac Singers, which he helped to found, began
in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact by recording a group of anti-war
songs condemning the start of conscription and FDR's military buildup. As
soon as the Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler, the American Communist
Party became a leading advocate of war against the Nazis; the Almanacs put
out an album supporting the war effort, and their producer pulled the
earlier "pacifist" album from the market. It's a tale often used to
demonstrate that the CPUSA was Stalin's tool, and how its members were
unable to think and act in principled ways. There are some who still can't
forgive Seeger for this episode.
But Pete Seeger was raised by his father to live a principled life. You can
get a flavor of Charles Seeger's moral perspective by looking at his list of
"The Purposes of Music" printed as an appendix to Wilkinson's book. "Music,
as any art, is not an end in itself, but is a means for achieving larger
ends. . " These principles emphasize that music as group activity is more
important than individual accomplishment, that "musical culture" of a nation
depends on the people's participation in it rather than on the virtuosity of
a few, that "vernacular" music is the foundation from which all other kinds
of music derive, that music should "aid in the welding of the people into
more independent, capable, and democratic action." We can read in these
lines the foundation for Pete Seeger's 70 years as an artist and political
being. They are a primary source for the life project he began to formulate
and implement when he was in his early 20s.
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