Coffee-house comforts

No glowing tributes to Pete Seeger from me, I'm afraid: quite apart from his politics, the man just set my teeth on edge with his didactic Blue-Peter-style white-bread folksiness. The best I could say is that at least he acted as the father-to-be-rebelled-against for a young Bob Dylan, allowing Dylan to reach an artistic maturity.

Anyway (via Martin) this old piece from Jesse Larner on Seeger's 90th birthday sums it up nicely:

As someone on the left who loves folk music, I understand that I'm supposed to feel mystically uplifted by the dean of activist folkies. But for those very reasons -- because I believe in a humanist political order, and because authentic folk music speaks to me -- I never could stand Pete. I don't question his dedication or his energy. It's just that I think them unfortunate. His conception of "folk music" has done tremendous damage, and his politics have done tremendous damage, and these things are connected.

Seeger's been very influential. Most Americans, when they think of "folk music," think of the 50s and 60s "revival" of that form: the songs, and versions of songs, made popular by him, The Weavers, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio. This is a mistake. The songs these people became famous for singing are pretty, denatured coffee-house comforts that have little to do with the life that informed the originals...

That's just getting started...

A couple of days ago I posted about Paul Simon and his somewhat dubious copyright practices. Here, not unrelated, is part of a 2009 post of mine on Seeger - again going back to his 90th birthday - quoting Rian Malan:

[H]ow 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.

Comments

[XRay]

That last sentence, in the last quote... poverty and pig shit... perfect. I never did like that Seeger guy.

[grassmarket]

What has killed American "folk" music for me is that in the Internet age we can hear the originals just as easily as we can the fake stuff. Once you have heard the Carter Family, Leadbelly, Thomas Dorsey, The Evening Stars etc there is just no need to listen to Seeger and his likes anymore.

[John Meredith]

This is all bang on, and such a relief. It seemed like a peculiar madness had seized people who once knew better suddenly acting like 'If I had a Hammer' was anything more than an irritating jingle (what a good advertising man Seeger would have been). Surely the fact that he tried to silence Dylan tells you everything you need to know about him as a judge of music and as a man.

[TDK]

The one I hate is "Little Boxes". It's just a restatement of the old elitist disdain for those who live in the suburbs.

Curious how no one wrote a song of contempt about the people who live in Back-to-backs work at the local mill "and all look the same". Or come to that write for the Guardian "and they all sound the same".