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AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 11:37 AM
RIP Pete Seeger - An American Treasure
 
http://ww1.hdnux.com/photos/26/04/27.../3/628x471.jpg
This Sept. 21, 2013, file photo shows Pete Seeger performing on stage during the Farm Aid 2013 concert at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The American troubadour, folk singer and activist Seeger died Monday Jan. 27, 2014, at age 94.

Quote:
NEW YORK (AP) ? Buoyed by his characteristically soaring spirit, the surging crowd around him and a pair of canes, Pete Seeger walked through the streets of Manhattan leading an Occupy Movement protest in 2011.

Though he would later admit the attention embarrassed him, the moment brought back so many feelings and memories as he instructed yet another generation of young people how to effect change through song and determination ? as he had done over the last seven decades as a history-sifting singer and ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser.

"Be wary of great leaders," he told The Associated Press two days after the march. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders."

The banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage died Monday at the age of 94. Seeger's grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days. Family members were with him.

"He was chopping wood 10 days ago," Cahill-Jackson recalled.

With his lanky frame, use-worn banjo and full white beard, Seeger was an iconic figure in folk music who outlived his peers. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and wrote or co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," ''Turn, Turn, Turn," ''Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his fingers poised over the strings of his banjo.

When a policeman approached, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger said at the time he feared his grandfather would be hassled.

"He reached out and shook my hand and said, 'Thank you, thank you, this is beautiful,'" Rodriguez-Seeger said. "That really did it for me. The cops recognized what we were about. They wanted to help our march. They actually wanted to protect our march because they saw something beautiful. It's very hard to be anti-something beautiful."

That was a message Seeger spread his entire life.

Seeger also was credited with popularizing "We Shall Overcome," which he printed in his publication "People's Song" in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from "will" to "shall," which he said "opens up the mouth better."

"Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger," Arlo Guthrie once said.

His musical career was always braided tightly with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
Quote:
He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Repeatedly pressed by the committee to reveal whether he had sung for Communists, Seeger responded sharply:

"I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this 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, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American."

He was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal.

"The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones," he told The Associated Press in 2006. " ... And I showed the kids there's a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio."

His scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and Seeger accused the network of censorship.

Seeger's output included dozens of albums and single records for adults and children.

He appeared in the movies "To Hear My Banjo Play" in 1946 and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in 1970. A reunion concert of the original Weavers in 1980 was filmed as a documentary titled "Wasn't That a Time."

By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honors.

Official Washington sang along ? the audience must sing was the rule at a Seeger concert ? when it lionized him at the Kennedy Center in 1994. President Bill Clinton hailed him as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them."

Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honored him with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger.

Seeger was a 2014 Grammy Awards nominee in the Best Spoken Word category.

Seeger's sometimes ambivalent relationship with rock was most famously on display when Dylan "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Witnesses say Seeger became furious backstage as the amped-up band played, though just how furious is debated. Seeger dismissed the legendary tale that he looked for an ax to cut Dylan's sound cable, and said his objection was not to the type of music but only that the guitar mix was so loud you couldn't hear Dylan's words.

Seeger maintained his reedy 6-foot-2 frame into old age, though he wore a hearing aid and conceded that his voice was pretty much shot. He relied on his audiences to make up for his diminished voice, feeding his listeners the lines and letting them sing out.

"I can't sing much," he said. "I used to sing high and low. Now I have a growl somewhere in between."

Nonetheless, in 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album, "Pete."
Quote:
Seeger was born in New York City on May 3, 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to religious dissenters of colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin and taught; his father, Charles, a musicologist, was a consultant to the Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression. His uncle Alan Seeger, the poet, wrote "I Have a Rendezvous With Death."

Pete Seeger said he fell in love with folk music when he was 16, at a music festival in North Carolina in 1935. His half-brother, Mike Seeger, and half-sister, Peggy Seeger, also became noted performers.

He learned the five-string banjo, an instrument he rescued from obscurity and played the rest of his life in a long-necked version of his own design. On the skin of Seeger's banjo was the phrase, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" ? a nod to his old pal Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with "This machine kills fascists."

Dropping out of Harvard in 1938 after two years as a disillusioned sociology major, he hit the road, picking up folk tunes as he hitchhiked or hopped freights.

"The sociology professor said, 'Don't think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it,'" Seeger said in October 2011.

In 1940, with Guthrie and others, he was part of the Almanac Singers and performed benefits for disaster relief and other causes.

He and Guthrie also toured migrant camps and union halls. He sang on overseas radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information early in World War II. In the Army, he spent 3˝ years in Special Services, entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific, and made corporal.

He married Toshi Seeger on July 20, 1943. The couple built their cabin in Beacon after World War II and stayed on the high spot of land by the Hudson River for the rest of their lives together. The couple raised three children. Toshi Seeger died in July at age 91.

The Hudson River was a particular concern of Seeger's. He took the sloop Clearwater, built by volunteers in 1969, up and down the Hudson, singing to raise money to clean the water and fight polluters.

He also offered his voice in opposition to racism and the death penalty. He continued to take part in peace protests during the war in Iraq, and he continued to lend his name to causes.

"Can't prove a damn thing, but I look upon myself as old grandpa," Seeger told the AP in 2008 when asked to reflect on his legacy. "There's not dozens of people now doing what I try to do, not hundreds, but literally thousands. ... The idea of using music to try to get the world together is now all over the place."








Last year at Farm Aid:



I saw Pete Seeger perform several times, and had the opportunity to even have a few conversations with him. One of the most pure and honest individuals I have ever met, without an ounce of pretentiousness.

Pete Seeger, THANK YOU for being such an inspiration...RIP :)

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo.../526474765.jpg





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_Richard_ 01-28-2014 11:46 AM
sorry to hear :(

topsiteking 01-28-2014 12:08 PM
One of the greats for sure!

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 12:16 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by _Richard_ (Post 19960987)

sorry to hear :(
http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads...EAw4rPnAjx.jpg

After his wife of nearly 70 years, Toshi, passed away last year, I figured Pete would follow not long behind, as they were practically inseparable in life...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/ima...r-edit-018.JPG

http://mackenziesdragonsnest.files.w...D529%26h%3D818

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~Ray 01-28-2014 12:47 PM
I like his songs

Sarah_Jayne 01-28-2014 01:06 PM
It is really hard to explain how important the album he did with Arlo Guthrie called Precious Friend was to the development of my musical tastes. I'm not sure if I would have come to enjoy politically laden folk music had my dad not put it on heavy rotation as a kid. That made my mind make an easy jump to political punk.

Sigh.

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 01:08 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ~Ray (Post 19961074)

I like his songs






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AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 01:20 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarah_Jayne (Post 19961095)

It is really hard to explain how important the album he did with Arlo Guthrie called Precious Friend was to the development of my musical tastes. I'm not sure if I would have come to enjoy politically laden folk music had my dad not put it on heavy rotation as a kid. That made my mind make an easy jump to political punk.

Sigh.








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seeandsee 01-28-2014 01:22 PM
Rip :( ...

Barry-xlovecam 01-28-2014 01:35 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by topsiteking (Post 19961035)
One of the greats for sure!
Sure was -- RIP 1+

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 01:44 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by seeandsee (Post 19961135)

Rip :( ...
Celebrate... :)











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Forest 01-28-2014 04:07 PM
I had lunch with him after a concert he played at a small school i went to on the Hudson. I must have been 11 or 12

Really cool guy

RIP

the Shemp 01-28-2014 04:13 PM
an inspiration to me in my teenage years, RIP Pete
damn, now i don't feel like working today ...

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 04:50 PM
http://images.nymag.com/arts/popmusi...090504_250.jpg

One of the first folk songs I learned to play on guitar...



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JockoHomo 01-28-2014 06:22 PM
Listening to a true musician like this really make the Grammys and the "artists" there seem like a fucking joke!

Rmagnus 01-28-2014 07:44 PM
RIP Pete Seeger!

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-28-2014 08:12 PM












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John-ACWM 01-29-2014 01:57 AM
Sad news. RIP.

INever 01-29-2014 02:24 AM
In homage:

This land is my land
This land ain't your land
If you don't get off
I'll shoot your head off
I've got a shotgun
And you don't got one
This land was made for only me?.

Manfap 01-29-2014 02:38 AM
RIP Pete Seeger - An American Treasure

the way that man was treated for years.. and he was 'An American Treasure'
You sure about that?

Sarah_Jayne 01-29-2014 03:09 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Manfap (Post 19961598)
RIP Pete Seeger - An American Treasure

the way that man was treated for years.. and he was 'An American Treasure'
You sure about that?
You know what they say about one man's treasure?


He was a national treasure whether or not there were those who wished to tarnish his worth. Between him and Woody Guthrie, they wrote so many American folk songs that most people around today think have pretty much always been around.

He wrote Where Have All The Flowers Gone, If I Had A Hammer and Turn! Turn! Turn! . All of which I was taught to sing in either school, girl scouts or church as a child as if they were American standards.

So, screw the blacklisters, he was treasure.

michael.kickass 01-29-2014 04:51 AM
RIP Peter.

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-29-2014 07:53 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarah_Jayne (Post 19961600)

You know what they say about one man's treasure?

He was a national treasure whether or not there were those who wished to tarnish his worth. Between him and Woody Guthrie, they wrote so many American folk songs that most people around today think have pretty much always been around.

He wrote Where Have All The Flowers Gone, If I Had A Hammer and Turn! Turn! Turn! . All of which I was taught to sing in either school, girl scouts or church as a child as if they were American standards.

So, screw the blacklisters, he was treasure.
http://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/l...8b37af17-1.jpg

I based my statement on the contributions Pete Seeger made to American culture.

Quote:
Seeger has been the recipient of many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including:

Induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1972)
The Eugene V. Debs Award (1979)
The Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award (1986)
The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1993)
The National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994)
Kennedy Center Honor (1994)
The Harvard Arts Medal (1996)
The James Smithson Bicentennial Medal (1996)[109]
Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1996)
Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 1996 for his record Pete (1997)
The Felix Varela Medal, Cuba's highest honor for "his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism" (1999)
The Schneider Family Book Award for his children's picture book The Deaf Musicians. (2007)
The Mid-Hudson Civic Center Hall of Fame (2008)- Seeger and Arlo Guthrie performed the first public concert at the Poughkeepsie, New York not-for-profit family entertainment venue, close to Seeger's home, in 1976. Grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger accepted the Hall of Fame plaque on behalf of his grandfather.
Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 2008 for his record At 89 (2009)
The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award for his commitment to peace and social justice as a musician, songwriter, activist, and environmentalist that spans over sixty years. (2008)
A proposal to name the Walkway Over the Hudson in his honor.
The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2009)
Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children of 2010 for his record Tomorrow's Children, Pete Seeger and the Rivertown Kids and Friends (2011)
George Peabody Medal (2013)
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album of 2013 nomination for Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems (2014)
An article from 20 years ago:

Quote:
America?s best-loved commie; Even a radical can become a national treasure. Just ask Pete Seeger.

Here, in Pete Seeger?s warm nest deep in the woods above the Hudson River, you can find the Seeger you require.

If you grew up on Woody Guthrie, sang along with and without Mitch Miller, subjected your kids to ?Tzena, Tzena? till they sought sanctuary in the Rolling Stones, here?s your Pete:

Lanky and strong at 75, he bounds up a muddy hillside, splits logs, tells tales about cleaning up his river. He looks up from his Granny Smith apple and suddenly those clear, rich pipes open up: ?You know, there?s a song about that ... .?

Or: Pete could be your kindly grandfather. He?s a scratchy voice joyfully singing children?s songs, ?The Foolish Frog? and ?Creepy Crawly Little Mousie,? ?One Grain of Sand? and ?Abiyoyo.? The phone rings and it?s Tao, Seeger?s grandson and partner in song. The old man lights up. Tao is Pete?s disciple and successor, satisfying the old storyteller?s craving for an audience that will remember and recite.

Or: You can?t stand this man, once the subject of a New York Times story under the headline ?Seeger Sings Anti-American Song in Moscow.? That he could be seen as an American hero galls you. The man is a pinko. Comforted the enemy. Sowed the seeds of social discord. Undermined authority, belittled respect. Here in the upstairs corner he calls his office, Seeger?s still doing it, sifting through the ?little socialist newsletters? he depends on for ideas and insights.

A few days before the president of the United States is to honor him with a toast and a medal, Pete Seeger is at his kitchen table, eating good brown bread made in his wife?s new computerized breadmaker, sitting under light provided by the profitmongers at Con Edison, and the man proudly says, ?I am still a communist.?

Whatever you think of Seeger, you?d be hard pressed to imagine him in a tuxedo, wearing a Kennedy Center Honors medal, chatting up Bill Clinton in the Presidential Box of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, bowing to an audience of swells who shelled out up to $5,000 a ticket for tonight?s show.

Back home, Seeger wears what you?d expect: a floral print shirt over a political T-shirt, brown boots and jeans so blue you remember that once upon a time you had to fade them yourself. A red bandanna peeks out his back pocket, and he uses it to wipe an apple seed from his chin.

?I use my father?s tuxedo,? Seeger says, ?which was made in 1922. I only had to let it out a couple of inches.?

Seeger doesn?t like all these accolades that arrive in the twilight of a life well spent. No, scratch that: The accolades are okay, he just doesn?t like being singled out for praise. He?s given to saying ?I?m not important? or ?I?m nobody, just a cog in a wheel.?

?I?m ambivalent about almost everything in the world,? he says. Fame perhaps most of all. Seeger has known fame; he is the first folk singer to be honored by the Kennedy Center, in part because many years ago, his songs sat atop the charts. Hard to believe: a Top 40 folkie.

But fame has been warped by technology, Seeger says. Once, well-known and known could mean the same thing. A storyteller was known, and known well, in his own village. Now, a musician with a hit achieves celebrity across the land, but he is known as a person only by those close to him.

Toshi, Seeger?s wife of 51 years, can listen to only so much of this. She rolls her eyes and zings Pete. ?He loves the attention,? she says. ?And he used to own three tuxedos. The Weavers sang in tuxedos? back in the early ?50s, when Seeger and Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman became the unlikeliest of pop stars. Their ?Goodnight Irene? - a waltz sung by lefty folkies - was inescapable in the summer of 1950.
Cont'd...

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AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-29-2014 07:59 AM
http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/14012...t_16x9_992.jpg

Quote:
His songs will long outlive him.

It was Seeger who changed an old spiritual from ?We Will Overcome? to ?We Shall Overcome? and sang it for Martin Luther King Jr. It was Seeger who wrote ?Turn, Turn, Turn? and ?Where Have All the Flowers Gone.? His manual on playing the five-string banjo still sells by the thousands nearly half a century after he wrote it.

Seeger and the Weavers sold 4 million records before McCarthyism and the blacklist smothered their celebrity. Seeger retreated into a series of subcultures, devoting himself to causes, using his music to promote his politics. Or was it the other way around?

He has picketed the White House far more often than he has been inside it. In 1970 he wrote a charming number called ?Teacher Uncle Ho,? about Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese revolutionary Seeger called ?one of my all-time heroes.?

He educated all the people

He demonstrated to the world:

If a man will stand for his own land,

He?s got the strength of ten.

A generation later, Seeger is wary of the American penchant for co-opting its renegades. The great American fame machine shears off the hard edges and turns even the coarsest of rebels into mainstream fodder. Tom Paine, John Brown, Norman Thomas, King - no matter how radical their thoughts, how seditious their slogans, history bulldozed them into the center.

?There?s an ancient Arab proverb,? says Seeger, one of the last of the great aphorists. ?When the king puts the poet on the payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet.?

This is nothing new. At the height of the Weavers? success, their manager wouldn?t let the quartet sing ?If I Had a Hammer? by Seeger and Lee Hays. It was too political.

And as much as Seeger wishes he could stay ornery to the end, he is, to his everlasting credit, a sweet man who long ago recognized that music, left to its own designs, seeks to soften edges.

He made his political reputation by standing up to power, by singing of the individual, the resister. But his music was always inclusive (sometimes infuriatingly so, to concertgoers who paid to hear Seeger and not the cheery, but painfully off-key, couple in Row S).

There was never anything Seeger liked better than singing with a hall full of union members. Song as salve, inspiration to rebellion, political gunpowder. And song as a connection to some mystical folk, to ?the people,? almost in the German sense of Volk.

That?s what lured the young Seeger, what made him turn from his past and devote himself to this kind of music. The tuxedo Seeger inherited from his father is a Brooks Brothers model, and despite the ?ain?ts? and dropped g?s at the end of his words, Seeger comes from a privileged clan of pacifist intellectuals.

He prepped at a boarding school in Connecticut, went to Harvard and then - pivoting away from the classical music on which his parents had raised him, rejecting the classical education they had in mind for him - he dropped out of college, hitchhiked across the country and discovered America?s folk music. He visited country fiddlers and blues shouters. He met people who knew nothing of his parents? world of universities and chamber music.

His journey from patrician intellectual to popularizer of America?s traditional songs - black and white, North and South - was a rebellion. But rebellion was a longstanding family tradition. In a house where the adults argued the merits of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound at the dinner table, Pete was reading socialist books at 11. He had a boy?s passion for Lincoln Steffens?s autobiography.

When Pete was still a toddler, his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist, was sacked from the University of California at Berkeley faculty after he denounced World War I as an imperialist adventure. Pete?s parents packed the three kids into a Model T Ford and a trailer and started out across America to bring ?good? music to the simple folk.

?It was a complete disaster financially,? Seeger says. ?My poor mother with her violinist fingers, having to wash diapers in an iron kettle night after night. It didn?t work.? One night the elder Seegers took their classical concert to a farmer?s house, and after a sonata or two the farmer took out his fiddle and showed the Seegers a thing or two about country song.

?My father said he finally realized that these people had a lot of good music of their own,? and the Seegers returned to the big city.

Pete teeters on the hind legs of a kitchen chair and strokes his beard, the last bit of red remaining on a face hardened by weather and time. He never retreated, but neither did he spurn the mainstream. Seeger suggests the following as the lesson of his life: ?You don?t have to keep your mouth shut, and you can still work with the Establishment.?

It?s easier to say that when you?re 75 and looking out over the Hudson, shining an apple and getting ready for a trip to the White House. In 1961, when Seeger was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to tell the Committee on Un-American Activities about his friends and associates in radical organizations, the defendant took pride in confrontation.

?Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over 300 years ago,? Seeger testified. ?Others more recently were abolitionists in New England in the 1840s and ?50s, and I believe that in choosing my present course, I do no dishonor to either them or the people who may follow me.?

And then Seeger asked the judge for permission to sing ?Wasn?t That a Time,? a song of fathers who bled at Valley Forge and brave men who died at Gettysburg. The judge said no, and sentenced Seeger to a year in prison. An appeals court reversed the conviction.

Forty years later, Seeger sticks to his politics - with a but or two. ?I apologize for once believing Stalin was just a hard driver, not a supremely cruel dictator. I ask people to broaden their definition of socialism. Our ancestors were all socialists: You killed a deer and maybe you got the best cut, but you wouldn?t let it rot, you shared it. Similarly, I tell socialists, every society has a post office and none of them is efficient. No post office anywhere invented Federal Express.?

The book on Seeger is that he is a radical. But like so many radicals before him, Seeger seeks to conserve the past in a way that most conservatives would find familiar. He clings to an America that savored its plain folk, a country that took pride in its simplicity: ?Three times, I?ve written to Reader?s Digest asking why they discontinued that great feature they had, `The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met,? wonderful stories about rank-and-file people. They never respond.?

Pete Seeger celebrates the individual in a way he says would ?shock poor old Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who said politics begins with millions of people.? Seeger quotes William James, who once wrote in a letter: ?I am for all those tiny molecular forces that creep from individual to individual ... {forces that} if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man?s pride.? Those words are painted on the side of Seeger?s barn.


He still sings, still appears up and down the Hudson at river festivals and political and environmental fund-raisers. He and Arlo Guthrie did two nights at Carnegie Hall last week, and next week he?s got a concert in Pennsylvania.

But Seeger is, above all, a storyteller, a reminder that America still has an oral tradition, even if it is being crushed into silence by television. ?The purpose of life is to live, not to watch other people living,? Seeger says, reaching into his bottomless supply of folk wisdom.

?Judge the musicality of a nation not by the number of virtuosos it produces, but by the music everyone knows,? he says. Apply that test to America today, and even an old communist turns longingly toward the past, toward what has been lost.

?People say, Don?t you ever give up, Pete? Well, I give up every night about 9 o?clock, I say the hell with it, and go to sleep.?

He still varies the songs in his concert repertoire, and lately he?s been singing ?Satisfied Mind.?

How many times have you heard someone say

If I had his money, I?d do things my way.

But little they know that it?s so hard to find

One rich man in a hundred with a satisfied mind.

?There?s a million things I wish I?d done,? Seeger says, ?books I wish I?d read, places to go. But I?ve got a satisfied mind. And I even laugh.?
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Spunky 01-29-2014 08:06 AM
RIP Pete Seeger

sperbonzo 01-29-2014 08:17 AM
Wow, what a wonderful life. Do what you love for your whole life, stay married for 60 years living in your little cabin that you love above a river, raise three kids, then your wife passes away at 91 years old, and you join her 6 months later, still healthy and active.


He scored a win in the good life lottery.





.

JockoHomo 01-29-2014 08:55 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by sperbonzo (Post 19961786)
Wow, what a wonderful life. Do what you love for your whole life, stay married for 60 years living in your little cabin that you love above a river, raise three kids, then your wife passes away at 91 years old, and you join her 6 months later, still healthy and active.


He scored a win in the good life lottery.

.
Indeed and he lived a life doing what he had a passion for...truly loved...and I am sure he could sleep quite soundly at night knowing that that he was true to himself and did not compromise his integrity for material success. He shared that life with someone who he respected and loved until death. Amazing

A true inspiration and the sort of person that is extremely rare in today's fast paced, shallow, and superficial world with fake reality shows and very few things with any sort of quality and integrity or genuine value.

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-29-2014 09:01 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by sperbonzo (Post 19961786)

Wow, what a wonderful life. Do what you love for your whole life, stay married for 60 years living in your little cabin that you love above a river, raise three kids, then your wife passes away at 91 years old, and you join her 6 months later, still healthy and active.


He scored a win in the good life lottery.





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QFT! :thumbsup

http://cdn.news12.com/polopoly_fs/1...._768/image.jpg





http://i2.wp.com/24.media.tumblr.com...i4pyo1_400.jpg

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AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-29-2014 01:38 PM






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Sarah_Jayne 01-29-2014 02:52 PM
Billy Bragg is one of my favorite artists. There clearly would not have been a Bragg without a Seeger. When I heard he died I knew Bragg would be the BBC's 'go to' for a tribute.



His version of If I Had a Hammer has been one I have enjoyed in the past.

AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-29-2014 04:20 PM
https://store.yesmagazine.org/images...ace-poster.jpg

A beautiful video shot in and around the home that Pete Seeger built himself above the Hudson River in 1949 - a fitting memorial:



Nice interview from the last year's of Pete's life:

Quote:
Pete Seeger an American Folk Icon

As my car approached the long dirt road which leads to the Seeger home in Beacon, New York, I focused on the smell of breaded tilapia, rice pilaf, mixed vegetables, bread, zucchini and banana bread that was packed next to me in the shopping bag and hoped that Pete and his wife Toshi would find my choices for lunch palatable.

Remembering my visit two years before, I was anticipating a day of great conversation and hospitality and expecting a generous and captivating interview with Pete. I looked forward to hearing him weave memories about family, his social activism, the country?s struggles past and present, his personal challenges, his music and his hope for the future.

Pete loves to give detailed and thought provoking answers to questions. I understand why he has earned the reputation as America?s greatest folksinger/storyteller.

I parked the car and walked towards the rustic, rough-hewed home built by Pete in 1949.
The view of the Hudson River was breathtaking. The house is still heated by one wood burning stove in the master bedroom and a fireplace in the living room, with wood split by Pete three times a week.

Toshi and Pete greeted me warmly at the door. The two cats and daughter, Tinya?s dog welcomed me with purrs and kisses. We sat in the living room area and within a few minutes we began to chat.

Pete was turning 90 on May 3rd and there would be a celebration at Madison Square Garden featuring Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Emmylou Harris, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Roger McGuinn and scores of others. The phone began to ring with inquiries from friends and family. It was 10am. At 10:45am, a call came in that the concert was sold out.

Pete announced that he would be picked up at three o?clock to be taken to a rehearsal with the third graders at the elementary schools in Beacon. He held my tape recorder close to his mouth and began, ?This is Pete Seeger. It is March 2009.? He told wonderful stories for hours and hours and even though at times his voice would weaken, he continued through lunch, tea and dessert. We went into a storage closet where he climbed a ladder and looked through books, CDs, letters and photos, handing them to me to look at. His enthusiasm never waned. He would speak, ruminate and begin to sing.

It was hard to imagine that this gentle, poetic, kind and generous man had weathered so many years of personal struggle as gracefully as he had. He is hopeful for the future and continues to believe that music can change the world. He is the Pied Piper, but instead of leading the children away from the village, Pete is leading them to the village to become community-minded because, at 90, it is the most important work of his life.

Pete expressed his delight hearing that this interview will reach families with young children. He is happy that they will be introduced to traditional songs and the process of folk singing, which encourages singers to adapt the songs to become relevant to the times. He noted how Woody Guthrie?s tune, ?This Land is Your Land,? written in 1944, is still relevant today, which is why he and Bruce Springsteen sang it together at the Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th 2009.

The song has been inspiring artists to use its message for decades. It was brought back to life in the 1960s during the folk movement and then again when Bruce Springsteen sang it in support of Barack Obama, adding ?Yes We Can? to its lyrics. At Pete?s request, the song was restored to its original lyrics for the Inaugural performance.

He hopes families will be inspired to learn about how they can become more involved locally, believing that taking care of your own community is a way to create a better world for our children. It is this belief that gives him hope for the future.

At 90, Pete is still very active in his community of Beacon, New York. On this afternoon he will participate in a rehearsal for a local production called ?The Calico Ball,? with 200 third graders from the local elementary schools.

Pete talked about his experiences, singing to family audiences and encouraging their participation in sing-a-longs. His eyes lit up as he spoke and it was clear to me that his passion for this continues.
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sarettah 01-29-2014 04:51 PM




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AsianDivaGirlsWebDude 01-30-2014 11:56 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarah_Jayne (Post 19961095)

It is really hard to explain how important the album he did with Arlo Guthrie called Precious Friend was to the development of my musical tastes. I'm not sure if I would have come to enjoy politically laden folk music had my dad not put it on heavy rotation as a kid. That made my mind make an easy jump to political punk.

Sigh.


Quote:
Arlo Guthrie Remembers Pete Seeger (excerpts)

When Pete Seeger died on Jan. 27 at the age of 94, the world lost more than a folksinger, more than a songwriter, more than a moral leader who gave a soundtrack to social causes for three generations.

We lost an artist who was uniquely American, the product of a musical tradition that was passed down by hand. Seeger took the torch from musical greats like Woody Guthrie and passed them down to a new generation of musical legends, including Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp and Woody?s son Arlo, with whom Seeger played for 50 years.

Arlo Guthrie, a folk legend in his own right, spoke with TIME about his friend and music partner who inspired generations with his music and activism.

TIME: Can you tell us about the first time you met Pete Seeger?

Guthrie: I could if I could remember, but I was just a little kid, probably about 3 or 4 years old. I really have no actual date or time in my mind I can go back to and say, ?This is when I actually met him.?

When I thought about this later on in life, I realized that Pete and my father and that crowd of people that included Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee ? all of these guys had grown up before recorded music. The songs that they knew circulated by word of mouth, not by radio or by records or any electronic media.

They were handed down from one person to another, from generation to generation. It was not the kind of music you could take a course on; you couldn?t get a degree in it. Nobody went to school for it. It was the kind of music you heard around the campfire or hanging out with friends. It was very different from the music we were hearing on the radio.

What was it like to play with him?

Probably around 1968, when I was around 18, we did a concert together at Carnegie Hall. That is a tradition we continued, pretty much up until last November. Every year for about 30 years Pete and I had a regularly scheduled show the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving. We took over that tradition about a decade ago without Pete, but every once in a while he said that he wanted to come and play.

I remember watching how he handled the audience. I wouldn?t have used the words master in those days, but he had an authority over the audience that allowed them to relax and sing along with him. My eyes just opened up and I couldn?t believe what was happening in front of me. He would just wave his hand, and you could hear people singing.

Anyone who has ever seen him knows what I?m saying, and someone who has not will find it hard to believe. It was almost as if he had some extra sense that allowed that kind of response. There?s no one else I have ever seen in my life that has had that, on any country, on any continent or in any city. Nobody came close.

He was well known for his banjo playing, but he also played the guitar very well. Did he have a favorite instrument?

It was whatever allowed the accompaniment to sound in the way he wanted. He also was a wonderful player of the recorder. There were moments in the concerts we did where he would play some Native American tune or an Irish tune, and you could hear a pin drop in a crowd that would fill some of these larger venues. You couldn?t hear a thing but this wafting air from that flute-like instrument, and it was just magic.

In later years he began to have difficulty singing. About 10 years ago, he must have been in his 80s, he said to me, ?Arlo, I can?t do those big shows with you anymore. I can?t sing like I used to sing. I can?t play like I used to play.?

I just looked at him and I said, ?Pete, look at our audience. They can?t hear like they used to hear. It shouldn?t be a problem.? And he laughed and he said, ?Maybe you?re right.? And every once in a while he would keep coming out, and that?s where he would transfer his own voice and say, ?I can?t sing anymore, but you can sing.? And he would lead everybody in these songs. Those were wonderful times.

How did Pete approach writing songs?

He was the kind of songwriter who could remember a tune or a song that he?d heard somewhere in life, and he had a catalogue of hundreds of thousands of songs. I don?t know where the ones that he wrote came from, but I know that he had an awful lot to draw on that was part of his knowledge.

He was quite a music scholar. Whenever I wanted information on a song, Pete was the first guy to go to: ?where did this tune come from?? or ?what about these lyrics?? and he?d say, ?You know back in 1782, there was a guy?? and he?d know the names of the people who wrote the songs and where the songs originated. He was fascinated by it and it was natural for him. Every once in a while, as the occasion permitted or demanded, he would just come up with lyrics, write something and try it out.

He has been noted for his heroism, standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, especially when we look back on that episode with some distance. But at the time, it must have been a frightening experience to be hauled before Congress, refuse to testify and be held in contempt and nearly imprisoned. Did he ever talk about that time?

Not really to me personally. I was with him on occasions when reporters would bring that up. I have to tell you, though, just two days ago, somebody posted a release from the Kennedy Library of a letter I had written to President Kennedy about Pete. I have no memory of it; I must have been 13 or 14 years old. I said something like, ?Dear Mr. President, do what you can for my buddy Pete.? So I was aware of it at the time, but I don?t remember him really talking about it very much.

I?m sure he didn?t look forward to those kinds of confrontations because he wasn?t a confrontational guy. But he would not back down, either. He wasn?t looking for trouble, but he wasn?t purposely avoiding it.

What do you think drove his lifelong effort for his many causes and convictions?

Pete had a real vision of what the country was about. He came from a long line of Puritan stock. His family had been in the country a very, very long time, and he had a sense of history. He wasn?t just a scholar of music; he was also a political scholar and a historical scholar. He loved the idealism of a nation founded on the principles he thought were important, and he spread that wherever he went.

I think to be asked about his religion, or about his beliefs, or about his political thoughts, was such an insult to him, because it was insulting to every American. He had a way of taking these personal events in his life and moving them forward so that they included everyone. If it had just affected him, he wouldn?t have said anything; he wouldn?t have written about it; he wouldn?t have made a big deal. But because it affected everyone, he was involved.

I think that?s one of the things that motivated him about the environment, the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong, but he was right most of the time. And he set out to make the country in what he imagined it was meant to be, what it could be. Whatever was going on, he was there because he had a sense of how it impacted everyone. It was not just personal. It was America.

He said something wonderful a few years ago: ?My job is to show folks there?s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.? That seems to perfectly capture what he did with his life.

He really believed that the more people do things together, the quicker you can get things done. That is not a concept he invented; that?s a concept the United States invented.

That?s why it?s called the United States. These commonwealths or provinces didn?t stand a chance against the big economies of the world. But together, they could do incredible things. Of course that?s history, but you have to apply that. So his fight for unions did not arise from some ideology. He saw that as being American.

A lot of people ascribe political reasons to his becoming involved in different causes, but they were bigger than that. They were not an ideology; they were part of his soul, and part of the American soul.

What will be the lasting legacy of Pete Seeger?

I think it?s too soon to tell, but I think for me personally it is the incredible feelings that can change a moment in time when people sing. When people voice their opinions together in song, or at a meeting, or in a congress, there are moments that change everything.

I remember walking down the street with Pete and half a million other people at the rallies in the 60s and the empowerment that people felt singing together, walking together, standing side-by-side.

It changed my life, and it changed everyone?s life who was there, whether they became singers or writers or insurance brokers. Whatever they did in life, those feelings remain an integral part of who they are. They know what?s possible because they were there to feel it. That is the legacy Pete leaves me personally.




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