“I feel that my whole life is a contribution.”

Pete Seeger

May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014

    On the day Pete Seeger was born to musicologist Dr. Charles Seeger and concert violinist Constance Edson Seeger, the first American passenger flight lifted off from NYC.

    Now we all know that Pete Seeger was a champion of the common people, that he wrote some of the greatest ballads of our time, and that he was a man of peace and protest, but there are many cool factoids about Mr. Seeger that prove he was a great contribution to us all.

   Pete dropped out of Harvard College (classmate of JFK) and in 1940, he met, traveled and performed with the great topical folksong writer Woody Guthrie. He was inspired to write his own songs, dedicated to “the music of the people.” With this, he lifted our nation to a new consciousness.

“Being generous of spirit 
is a wonderful way to live.”

    In 1942, he was drafted by the army, and served in the Pacific. Upon his return, Pete formed the Weavers. They turned Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” into an American standard, and its version of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene” topped the charts for six months. They were blacklisted during the McCarthy era for alleged Communist sympathies and for Seeger’s refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee:

“I love my country very dearly, 
and I greatly resent the implication 
that some of the places that I have sung 
and some of the people that I have known, 
and some of my opinions, 
whether they are religious or philosophical, 
make me less of an American.”

    During the ’60s, Pete participated in the Freedom Marches in Selma, Alabama, and Washington, DC, with Dr. Martin Luther King and helped bring an adapted version of the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” to the civil rights movement, where it became an anthem of hope and determination.

 “I have sung in hobo jungles, 
and I have sung for the Rockefellers, 
and I am proud that I have 
never refused to sing for anybody.”

    When the folk boom of the early 1960s exploded, performers such as the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Limelighters actually had hits with Seeger compositions “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” As folk turned to rock in the mid-’60s, The Byrds brought Pete’s songs to a young, electrified audience with their version of his “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

In 1963, he wrote in Seventeen Magazine:

DEAR FELLOW HUMANS:  I usually mistrust older people’s giving advice to younger, because while often their advice is very good, they forget that younger people usually know one of the most important things of all: the value of enthusiasm and enjoyment of life.  
See the rest of his enlightened commentary here:  Seventeen Magazine - May 1963

Watch this: Little Birdie - 1965

    Pete and his wife of 60 years, Toshi, based in Beacon, NY, in the cabin they built using instructions from library books. He chopped wood, he recorded some songs, and, like Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, “Wherever little children go hungry and cry / Wherever people aren’t free / Where working people are fighting for their rights,” that’s where Pete would be – on the front line. Rare is the person whose life and art are seamless, who has the strength of his convictions and the courage to admit it when he’s wrong, who never stops trying to better the world. Pete Seeger was such a man.

"Singing with children in the schools has been the 
most rewarding experience of my life."

And watch this: 2012 - Forever Young

He will be forever young...

~ text from www.peteseegermusic.com ~
~ all quotes: the words of Pete Seeger ~