Pete bounces out on the stage, tall and skinny (he’s not really that skinny up close). He can, all alone, bring excitement and delight to a group of sophisticated collegians on a campus, to a group of black children in a small Mississippi town, to another group of black children in a kids’ camp in Kenya, to a handful of friends in a living room, to a roomful of longshoremen or hardhats, to an audience of “senior citizens,” or to general, mixed audiences in Nairobi, Moscow, New Delhi, London, Berkeley or Omaha.Ī few years ago in Moscow – standing by himself on the stage of the Tchaikowsky Concert Hall, with a piece of paper containing some conversational Russian words taped to a microphone stand (and ignoring the cautious interpreter who thought the word “hallelujah” had unsavory religious connotations) – Pete had an audience of 10,000 people who didn’t speak English singing four-part harmony to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” I doubt whether Barbra Streisand and Mick Jagger together could do that. What they can’t do is turn on any audience the way Pete can. Certainly many entertainers, from Barbra Streisand to Bob Hope to the Rolling Stones, can turn on an audience as well as Pete can. “He will move the audience,” Marty Muns wrote in 1961, “into a mood of such ‘reluctance’ to remain silent, that it follows that they join in the choruses.” It’s true. Look back at Pete Seeger’s remarkable life in photos
By now there must be 75 or 80 – not counting Weavers albums, one by the Almanac Singers, and a raft of brief appearances on Newport Folk Festival LPs and other anthologies.Ī lot of them are live concert appearances (his first “live” recording was a school assembly concert issued on two 10-inch LPs by Stinson in 1954), and the same song may appear a dozen times – but it is always different and almost always better. A July, 1964, ad for Folkways records listed 50 Seeger albums on that label alone – and he had already started to record for Columbia. Kronos Quartet Preview Pete Seeger Tribute Album With 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone'Ī very few artists in any branch of music may have as many records behind them as Pete Seeger – one thinks of Duke Ellington, who started in the Twenties and who is 20 years older than Pete – but trying to assemble a complete Seeger collection would be a lifetime undertaking. The only time one of his records ever made it that big was in 1964 with somebody else’s song: Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes.” It was so popular that Malvina has been cursed ever since with people telling her that she’s singing it wrong. None of these songs, alas, ever put a Pete Seeger record on the charts. And of course Pete has had a lot of songs on the charts, notably (twice) “The Hammer Song,” also known as “If I Had a Hammer,” which Pete wrote with Lee Hays in 1950. “Guantanamera,” however, is indeed a poem by the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, and “Turn, Turn, Turn” is indeed a lyric from Ecclesiastes, with a few additional lines by Pete himself. The quoted lines gave Pete the idea for his song, but there is no musical or other connection between one song and the other, and the circular point of Seeger’s lyric is not in the Russian song. There is a Russian folk song called “Koloda Duda,” some lyrics of which were quoted by Mikhail Sholokhov in his novel And Quiet Flows the Don. Actually, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is pure Pete Seeger, and did not, as a surprising number of people seem to believe, come from a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Pete Seeger,” a well-known critic pointed out somewhat whimsically, “is the only man who could ever put a Russian poet, a Cuban revolutionary poet and the Bible on the American hit parade.”