Homer Simpson? No, I think he means the other one. Here's Richard Silverstein in hagiographic mood at CiF:
Pete Seeger, the American troubadour and balladeer of the common man, will be 90 years young this weekend.
Seeger is America's Homer. He travelled from town to town through the heartland for decades telling the nation's story. At times he sang of the America that was. At times he dreamed what America could be. He was never happy with the status quo and always envisioned a country that realised the American dream of equality and justice for rich and poor alike.
The list of Seeger's songs is the envy of any songwriter who ever put pen to paper: We Shall Overcome, Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season), Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Wimoweh, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Abiyoyo, Bells of Rhymney, Bring Bring 'Em Home, Guantanamera and Oh Had I a Golden Thread. You would have to go all the way back in American popular music, to Stephen Foster, to find his like.
But how many of those songs did he actually write? Not We Shall Overcome. Certainly not Guantanamera - possibly Cuba's most famous anthem. Nor Wimoweh, which was a straight steal from Solomon Linda's Mbube. Here's Rian Malan [pdf] on Seeger and Wimoweh:
Came a knock on the door, and, lo, there stood his friend Alan Lomax, later to be hailed as the father of world music. Alan and his dad, John,were already famous for their song-collecting forays into the parallel universe of rural black America, where they’d discovered giants like Muddy Waters and Leadbelly. Alan was presently working for Decca, where he’d just rescued a package of 78s sent from Africa by a record company in the vain hope that someone might want to release them in America. They were about to be thrown away when Lomax intervened, thinking, “God, Pete’s the man for these.”
And here they were: ten shellac 78s, one of which said “Mbube” on its label. Pete put it on his old Victrola and sat back. He was fascinated – there was something catchy about the underlying chant, and that wild, skirling falsetto was amazing.
“Golly,” he said, “I can sing that.” So he got out pen and paper and started transcribing the song, but he couldn’t catch the words through all the hissing on the disk. The Zulus were chanting, “Uyimbube, uyimbube,” but it to Pete it sounded like, awimboowee or maybe awimoweh, so that’s how he wrote it down. Later he taught “Wimoweh” to the rest of his band, the Weavers, and it became, he says, “just about my favorite song to sing for the next forty years.”
This was no great achievement, given that the Weavers’ repertoire was full of dreck like “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Greensleeves.” Pete will admit no such thing, but one senses he was growing tired of cold-water flats and wanted a proper career, as befitting a thirtysomething father of two. He toned down his politics, excised references to dark sexual lusts from Leadbelly standards, and threw some hokey cowboy songs into the mix. He even allowed his wife to outfit the band in matching corduroy jackets, a hitherto-unimaginable concession to showbiz, when they landed a gig at the Village Vanguard.
The pay was $200 a week plus free hamburgers, and the booking was for two weeks only, but something unexpected happened: Crowds started coming. The gig was extended for a month, and then another. The Weavers’ appeal was inexplicable to folk purists, who noted that most of their songs had been around forever, in obscure versions by blacks and rednecks who never had hits anywhere.What they failed to grasp was that Seeger and his comrades had managed to filter the stench of poverty and pig shit out of the proletarian music and make it wholesome and fun for Eisenhower-era squares.
Nicely put.
Then there's the Dylan connection, and Seeger's reputed fury when the man went electric at Newport in 1965.
At the first sound of the amplified instruments, Pete Seeger had turned a bright purple and begun kicking his feet and flailing his arms. (A festival official said later: "I had never seen any trace of violence in Pete, except at that moment. He was furious with Dylan!") Reportedly, one festival board member--probably Seeger--was so upset that he threatened to pull out the entire electrical wiring system.
Or get an axe to the cables:
Seeger has also said, however, that he only wanted to cut the cables because he wanted the audience to hear Dylan's lyrics properly, because he thought they were important. Rumors that Seeger actually had an axe, or that a festival board member wanted to pull out the entire electrical wiring system, remain unsubstantiated.
Whatever the truth, he was on the wrong side of history on that one. And on other issues:
In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its popularity and influence. In 1942 he became a member of the Communist Party itself.... He drifted away from the Party in the 1950's, but remained an unrepentant Stalinist.
It's a fairly familiar criticism - see David Boaz in the Guardian a couple of years back on Stalins's songbird - if perhaps a little unfair. Seeger has distanced himself from his Communist past. But none of this would really matter if he had more of a claim to greatness. Woody Guthrie could probably with more justice be labelled a Stalinist, but there's no doubt that Guthrie was a superb songwriter and performer who'll deservedly be remembered as one of the greats of 20th Century American music. The anodyne Seeger is just not in the same class.
The words of Bells of Rhymney were written by the Welsh poet Idris Davies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_Davies
Seeger just wrote the music. Probably the best version is by Oysterband.
Posted by: Bob-B | May 03, 2009 at 08:56 PM
And the Turn! Turn! Turn! lyrics are from Ecclesiastes.
Sanctimonious. That's a word I should have used in there somewhere.
Posted by: Mick H | May 03, 2009 at 11:27 PM
In Scorcese's No Direction Home, I think Seeger himself claims that he wanted to pull the plug at Newport because he was concerned for his elderly father who was distressed at all the noise. This is a creepy form of dishonesty - the excuse of a person unable to take responsibility for his own anger & who conceals his aggression behind "concern" for others. I for one have always found Seeger's voice as sinister as his niceness.
Posted by: Gordon | May 04, 2009 at 12:24 AM
The Lomax recordings of Jelly Roll Morton are interesting stuff, though. Morton, of course, was an actual musician - God alone knows what category Seeger should be assigned to. Jackanapes Pursuivant? Primary School Teacher in Waiting?
I can remember seeing a few bits of Folk Music shows on the telly when I was young. They were remarkable mainly for assembling audiences who couldn't clap in time.
Posted by: dearieme | May 04, 2009 at 01:44 AM
In fairness, I seem to recall Seeger repudiated Stalin a few years ago.
I mean, OK. Lots of people got around to it earlier. Sure, you could say a more farsighted and perceptive thinker might've started having some doubts about Stalin -- some questions in his mind, if you will -- as early as the mid-90s. But the fact remains, and you have to give him credit for this, he ultimately did take a not altogether ambiguous stand against Josef Stalin.
Has Chomsky?
Posted by: Froward | May 04, 2009 at 04:11 AM
er... most self respecting Marxist/Leninists had more than questions in their mind about Stalin (& the Soviet Union for that matter) as far back as 1939 when Uncle Joe signed a pact with Hitler. There were doubts about him before that but there was never a valid reason for being a Stalinist after he cuddled up with the Nazis never mind the subsequent revelations of his penchant for mass murder - which were a surprise to nobody surely?
It does seem unfair to pick on dimwits like Seeger who was, after all, only a naff folky with no political power. Yes very Primary School Teacher but not the kind I would feel comfortable leaving my kids with - far too nice/passive-aggressive.
This aside there does seem to be an anti-liberal revisionism abroad in blogdom that appears intent on demolishing American post-war left-wing idealism. Seeger is a very very soft target and condemning him as a Stalinist seems a bit hysterical. Gives me a queasy McCarthy kind of feeling.
Posted by: Gordon | May 04, 2009 at 06:23 PM
And Little Boxes. I was allways troubled by this song, what did it mean? Was it a cheap snear at the Hyacinth Buckles of this world or Stalinist approval of social engineering and the nova hutas.
Posted by: Sheddie | May 04, 2009 at 07:06 PM
Re politics in the Blogdom.
http://gordon-hon.tumblr.com/
Posted by: Gordon | May 05, 2009 at 03:12 PM
I always disliked Little Boxes as a child - it was, I think, played of Children's Choice (Children's Favourites?) on the BBC on weekend mornings alongside Tubby the Tuba and The Ugly Duckling and all that stuff.
Now I think of it and look at the lyrics as an adult, I'm inclined to think it's a Left-wing satire of the conformity of the American middle class: law abiding, productive, and optimistic. You know - civilized. Unlike Seeger's Stalinist friends who of course were all rugged individualists and a bit untidy in the countries they ruled - at least until the trenches were filled in and grassed over, or snowed over.
Posted by: North Northwester | September 24, 2009 at 08:36 PM