Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise - By Charles P. Pierce

[kpete]

........... Seeger spent his life in the most honorable way possible -- he tried to teach America about itself. First, he helped teach it about itself through all the music it had forgotten, a darker and infinitely more fascinating place than the America that was selling itself Brylcreem on the TV, an America of murder ballads, and of the pain wrought in music of all its lost promises, and of the hope that the music itself could redeem those llost promises. There was a through line in the music from "Oh, I Had A Golden Thread" to "Ballad of a Thin Man," even though the story about Seeger's going after the cables with an ax when Dylan plugged in at Newport is arguably apocryphal, just as there was a through line in history line from the Dust Bowl to "We Shall Overcome," and it wound through some very interesting -- and some very scary -- places. Music is the way America always has talked to itself, even on those occasions on which it was whispering because what it was saying was dangerous to say out loud. Music is the way to say things in this country you might otherwise wish not to be overheard. That was the language Pete Seeger spoke, year after year, demonstration after demonstration, cause after cause, war after war, for most of his 94 years, and that was the language he spoke in 2008, when he shared a stage with Bruce Springsteen and insisted -- with Springsteen's full and enthusiastic approval -- that every verse of "This Land Is Your Land" be sung, including these:


As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?


Then he tried to teach it by his example, by being a gentle presence in the issues of the day, from Civil Rights to Vietnam to nuclear power to environmentalism, to adventurism in Central America, to the Occupy movement, which, as he saw clearly, was an attempt to sing those forgotten verses to a new melody. And he did it with a smile. He loved the wide sky and the blue of the Hudson River. He loved the land and the water and the air. How could anything be more American than that? He loved the country and its people and the idea of it that outlasted so many attempts to hijack it for other purposes. Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise. That is the only real qualification. It gets more dear as the years go by.


Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/pete-seeger-obit-012814?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1456_41969175

[DreamGypsy]

1. Pete (1995): I still call myself a Communist...

"I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it."

Some interesting background information from this article: Pete Seeger: death of.. America's 'conscience':

Seeger was 17 when he joined the Young Communist League and he became a member of the Communist Party of America six years later. In the 1940s, his political affiliations saw him blacklisted and later indicted for contempt of Congress. While he "backed away" from organized politics in the 50s and 60s and eventually denounced Stalin, his world view remained essentially unchanged.

and this one: Seeger Speaks — and Sings — Against Stalin:

Pete Seeger, America's best-known and most influential folksinger, wrote me a letter a few days ago. I did not expect to hear from him. Last June, I wrote in these pages about the new documentary on his life. The article ran under the headline "Time for Pete Seeger To Repent."

My complaint was that the film, good as it is, did not give a completely honest account of Mr. Seeger's politics. The filmmaker, Jim Brown, interviewed me on camera, but he did not include any of my critical remarks in the final version. In my interview, I pointed out that Mr. Seeger had been a lifelong follower of the Communist Party, changing his songs and his positions to be in accord with the ever-changing party line. He attacked the blacklist of the 1950s, which kept him off the air, but never seems to have said anything about Stalin's death list. As Martin Edlund has written in The New York Sun, Mr. Seeger has always been inseparable from his social mission. Much of it deserves praise - he was at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights - but much of it must be condemned and not hidden from sight.

In particular, I said that Mr. Seeger had supported Stalin's tyranny for so many years yet had never written a song about the Gulag. Yet some acknowledgment of his former support would have been appropriate, especially considering the songs he has sung about the Nazi death camps, which he often introduces by saying, "We must never forget."

<snip>

I almost fell off the chair when I read Mr. Seeger's words: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR." For years, Mr. Seeger continued, he had been trying to get people to realize that any social change had to be nonviolent, in the fashion sought by Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Seeger had hoped, he explained, that both Khrushchev and later Gorbachev would "open things up." He acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence."

Asked to describe his music, he once said: "I call them all love songs. They tell of love of man and woman, and parents and children, love of country, freedom, beauty, mankind, the world, love of searching for truth and other unknowns. But, of course, love alone is not enough."

Pete was, is, and always will be a national treasure.