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Related: About this forumPete Seeger Was No Saint
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/7598/pete_seeger_was_no_saint/February 16, 2014
By GWYNNE WATKINS
Gwynne Watkins is a Christian, but not the kind that sucks. Visit www.gwynnewatkins.com or tweet @gwynnesanity.
Last Sunday, I saw a few new faces at my church in Beacon, New York. They came not because of a sudden call to Presbyterianism, but to mourn the death of Pete Seeger, the town's most beloved resident.
As you may have read in every single obituary, the revolutionary folk singer lived in this Hudson Valley town for forty years, on the side of a mountain, in a home he built himself. Everyone in Beacon is indebted to him for one reason or another, be it the cleanliness of the Hudson River, the opening of the town's first live music venue, or the grant in his name that gives us free entry to the local museum. In the two years I've lived here, I've seen the way that Seeger shaped this place: not single-handedly, but by inspiring others to join hands. He made us feel like change was both possible and necessary.
And now that he's gone, the people of Beacon must figure out how to carry on his legacy. One peculiar thing I've noticed is that people struggle not to beatify the singer. It may be a losing battle; the phrase "patron saint of Beacon" has commonly come to describe him. But it's not who Pete was.
Seeger was, first and foremost, a man of the people. His songs were his message, and they were intended to bring people togethernot so he could lead them, but so they could lift each other up. He did not discriminate between different kinds of people. He wanted all of us to sing together. Even in his final years, he'd play Carnegie Hall one week, then sing with local schoolchildren the next. As he told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, prior to being blacklisted:
"I am saying voluntarily that I have sung for almost every religious group in the country, from Jewish and Catholic, and Presbyterian and Holy Rollers and Revival Churches, and I do this voluntarily. I have sung for many, many different groupsand it is hard for perhaps one person to believe, I was looking back over the twenty years or so that I have sung around these forty-eight states, that I have sung in so many different places."
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Pete Seeger Was No Saint (Original Post)
cbayer
Feb 2014
OP
BeyondGeography
(39,377 posts)1. Not to nitpick
But he lived there over 60 years.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)2. Agree. Everything I read says they bought the land and moved there in 1949.
rug
(82,333 posts)3. He spent a lot of time at the Beacon Sloop Club.
It has a tree growing through the roof.
http://www.beaconsloop.org/
At the end of every monthly meeting there's a pot luck dinner and a singalong. They're always open to anyone who wants to attend.