#412: Pete Seeger: Forever Young

We have lost one of America’s great prophetic voices—a sort of secular saint.

When I was a kid my father belonged to the Colombian Record Club.  It had begun in the mid 1950s with the advent of LP vinyl records, and offered a new record each month.  If a member did not reject that offer, the record would arrive automatically two weeks later.  Sometimes, we just didn’t reply fast enough, or the offer got lost in the shuffle.  In such cases we would get a record we knew nothing about, or at least had no interest in.

In 1960, one of those records was “Children’s Concert at Town Hall,” featuring a banjo-playing singer named Pete Seeger.

   
 We had no idea who he was, and he played what I had always thought of as “hillbilly music.” At first, listening evoked images of the Appalachian back country.  But before long his clear voice, his compelling songs and even his plinking banjo had seduced me.  Little did I know that Pete Seeger had primed me for the folk revival about to explode upon me and most of America.

My first Pete Seeger concert was in 1962 at the old Boston Arts Festival, held outdoors in a makeshift fenced-in theater on Boston’s Public Garden.  The singer had just returned from a voyage in search of music in Africa, and shared many songs with us that today would qualify as “world music.” I remember being struck, at age 13, by several things: the immediacy of his stage presence, the rapt attention of his listeners, and his ability to engage us and the performance by getting us to sing along.

Over the next 50 years I would see Pete Seeger several more times: at Fenway Park in 1968, in the Victory Gardens on Boston’s Fenway in the 1970s, and a union-benefit concert in 1982 in Athol, Massachusetts.  By that time I would be grown, married, with two kids, and by that time Pete Seeger’s legacy would already be part of my life in more ways than one.

BOB DYLAN WITH PETE

The most obvious way was folk music itself.  My adolescence and early adulthood were profoundly enriched by the recordings and concert performances of Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Band, Jim Kweskin, Tom Rush, and Arlo Guthrie--all inspired by Pete Seeger’s work.

SPRINGSTEEN

CABREL

 Part of that enrichment, of course, included a socially significant subset of folk music: protest songs.   That tradition, linking music with social justice, extended to other prominent artists from the 1960s (Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs), and beyond that to the 21st century (Bruce Springsteen) and even abroad (France’s Francis Cabrel).

This link between music, art, and social awareness crystallized at the 1963 march on Washington, where folkies Peter, Paul, and Mary grafted urban folk onto the civil rights movement, and where Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome” (which he first performed for Martin Luther King in 1957) became the movement’s national anthem.

And that song, more than any other, certifies Seeger’s status as the greatest song leader in American memory.  Pete was simultaneously so controlled and so charismatic that he could teach a song’s lyrics, leave the main tune to the crowd, and accompany them with two harmony lines--all it once, and with no accompaniment but his thundering 12 string guitar.  To hear Pete in action is to witness breathtaking genius paired with fervent conviction. I know no more powerful example of song leading than Pete Seeger's profoundly moving AND mobilizing, absolutely inimitable rendition of this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b24Ewk934g

Audiences were simultaneously galvanized and mesmerized. I recall the story from the Newport Folk Festival, back in the 1960s days when crowd control often broke down and rioting sometimes ensued. One night, in the middle of his concert, the lights went out in the stadium, but Pete kept them rapt and safe for more than 30 minutes in the dark.

And Pete Seeger’s skill as song leader did more than inspire audiences and social activists.  It also inspired an entire generation of sacred musicians, who launched the popular form we came to call “Folk Mass.” In parishes across America, song leaders playing guitars replaced choirs, or organ music, or no music at all.  Few of them possessed Seeger’s gifts, and many played faddish music that no one remembers, but it nonetheless marked a dramatic, even profound shift in Catholic worship.  In the best cases (of which they were thousands), it led to a substantial increase in participation in the Mass by Catholic congregations who were previously accustomed to mere passive observance.

My college years were deeply marked by this shift.  Each night at 11:00 PM, 100 or so students would gather for Mass in the campus chapel to sing along with Paul Quinlan, S.J. and his small ensemble.  Quinlan had set dozens of the Psalms to music in folk style, and the mimeographed lyrics served as our prime musical resource night after night.

 Less than five years after my first sight of Pete Seeger (which came just weeks before the opening of Vatican II in October 1962), Catholic liturgy was already transformed from a silence-bound, hidden, “sotto-voce” ceremony into a vibrant community celebration.  This was, of course, exactly what Pete hoped for his music in general, though he never had any direct involvement with church music:

At our college baccalaureate, Quinlan led the gathered graduates and families in singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”—Seeger’s poignant lament for war’s waste of life.  The selection was neither random nor political.  It was pastoral: we sang it in memory of the 17 alumni already killed in Vietnam as of 1970, with--we assumed rightly--more to follow.

Years later, as a parent, I was pleased to raise my kids in the “folk-mass” environment provided by Ken Meltz and Boston’s downtown Paulist Center.  For them, the first post-Vatican II generation, Mass was from the very start a communal exercise in active participation.

Seeger did not, of course, write much sacred music, yet ironically his two most famous works had sacred roots.  The Los Angeles rock group The Byrds scored a #1 hit by recording Pete’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” which was based on the book of Ecclesiastes.  And Pete’s version of “We Shall Overcome” was adapted from a traditional gospel song, which itself was probably based on the old Latin (and Catholic) hymn “O Sanctissima.”

But as powerful as Seeger’s musical influence was, his cultural impact was far wider.  Whenever I struggled in my role as a father, I could hear Pete remind me that “parents have the most difficult and important job in the world.  But they also get the best pay: hugs and kisses.”

Beyond that, Pete taught me a number of valuable life-lessons. 

He taught me the value of participation--in public life, in liturgy, and in collaborative leadership.

He taught me the value of authenticity, displaying the same kind of natural humility that has made Pope Francis so instantly popular.

He taught me the value of healthy discontent--not as an ideological posture, but as an antidote to hide-bound conformity.  Here is how he introduces a final new verse of “We Shall Overcome”:

The best verse is the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama: “We are not afraid.”And the young people taught everybody a lesson—all the older people that had learned how to compromise, learned how to take it easy, and be polite, and get along, and leave things as they were. The young people taught us all a lesson.

He taught me hope, if only because he chose a life of fearless struggle and was unrelenting well into his 90s.

He taught me the value of irreverence--how not to idolize authority.  In a real way, he was the wisdom figure behind the iconic 1960s bumper sticker “Question authority.” 

 Finally, Pete Seeger taught me the value of preserving one’s youth well into old age.  Against the old adage “youth is wasted on the young,” Pete refused to lament as he aged.  Instead, he recycled his own inner youth all through his life.  Even at 93, with his singing voice gone, his youth had not yet been wasted, as he proved in this “ageless” version of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezyd40kJFq0

“You’re never too old to change the world”

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014