One was a PBS American Masters presentation called “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” a 2007 documentary that apparently got at least some theatrical screenings (it’s listed on imdb.com and a user commentary indicates this person had seen a public screening at which some audience members started singing along with Seeger). Directed by Jim Brown and featuring interviews with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Seeger collaborators Ronnie Gilbert and Arlo Guthrie (who interestingly did not talk about his dad’s work with Seeger but focused on his own relationship with him) and his family (there was a marvelous clip towards the end showing a recent Seeger concert at Carnegie Hall with Arlo Guthrie and Seeger’s grandson, Tio Seeger Rodriguez — and I couldn’t help but reflect on this man’s multi-racial background: a Latino father and white and Japanese grandparents!). It basically hit the high points of Seeger’s career, from his radicalization as a student at Harvard in the 1930’s (and before that his interesting encounter with folk music — his parents, musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance Seeger, built their own trailer and decided to tour backwoods America playing classical recitals in small towns that had never before heard “good” music, and Charles Seeger heard the music of the mountain people in Appalachia and the South and decided it was as “good” as any of the classical pieces he and his wife had rather patronizingly sought to bring them) through his involvement in just about every Leftist political and social cause ever since. Though it didn’t show us Seeger singing any one song start-to-finish (a perpetual annoyance with me and music documentaries), that bothered me less than usual because it was as much a cultural history as a musical one — since for Seeger the two are inseparable — and the film paid tribute to Seeger’s knack not only to get his audiences to sing along with him (I couldn’t help but recall Rick Burkhardt’s joke that the most frightening words you can hear at a folk-music concert was, “And now we’d like you to sing along with us”) but actually to get them to sound good doing it.
The film covered the history of the Weavers and their brief foray on top of the charts with “Goodnight, Irene” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” (when Charles and I had watched the documentary on the Weavers, Wasn’t That a Time!, I had noted the irony of seeing “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and being flashed back to a time when Leftists liked Israel) before the blacklist did them in. It showed Seeger facing the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing either to renounce his past in the Communist Party and name names or to take the Fifth Amendment (though his skill at evading the are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been question would have done a mainstream politician proud!), and the only part of the documentary that I thought was a whitewash was its failure to mention that in the 1939-1941 period, during the Soviet Union’s short-lived alliance with Nazi Germany, Seeger and Woody Guthrie both obediently went along with the Communist Party line and wrote and sang songs urging against any American involvement in the war, then abruptly changed course as the Party did when Hitler invaded Russia. (The American Masters program on Guthrie faced up to this one honestly, but that’s easier to do when you’re profiling someone long since dead than when your subject is still alive and you’re counting on his cooperation.) Aside from that defect, this was a fascinating show and particularly amusing in that the FBI actively enforced the blacklist against Seeger but allowed him to perform unmolested in camps where his audience would be children, figuring he couldn’t do any political harm to people whose ages were still in single digits. What they didn’t realize, of course, was that those kids would eventually grow up — and many of the kids who attended Seeger’s workshops in the 1950’s and learned the rudiments of banjo and guitar from him were teenagers and young adults in the 1960’s and started radical folk ensembles (including the New Lost City Ramblers) of their own. — 3/3/08
•••••
I watched the rerun of PBS’s American
Masters documentary “Pete Seeger: The
Power of Song,” originally made in 2007 and presented in 2008 but now
repurposed as a memorial to this extraordinary singer, activist and human being
since his death January 27, 2014 at the age of 94. I’d reviewed my previous
notes on the film the night before and I reacted to it pretty similarly, but a
bit differently, this time around. I’m still upset at the whitewashing of the one point in
Seeger’s career at which he compromised in a way I find morally offensive — the
two years during which, as an American Communist (he was a CPUSA member from
1933 to 1949, something he courageously refused to talk about before the House
Un-American Activities Committee but did speak publicly about years later, when it really didn’t matter to his
career or his reputation one way or the other), he backed away from his
principled opposition to fascism and went along with the CPUSA’s “line” during
the two years of the Soviet Union’s uncertain alliance with Nazi Germany that
the war was an imperialist conspiracy and the U.S. should stay out of it. I’m
not as upset at that one lapse in
Seeger’s principles as I was the first time I watched this program — not after
I’ve heard the album Songs for John Doe, Seeger’s recording debut, the pacifist and isolationist album the
Almanac Singers, Seeger’s first group, recorded in May 1941 (just before Hitler
stabbed his erstwhile ally in the back and invaded the Soviet Union, propelling
the U.S.S.R. onto the other side of the war). Despite the uncomfortable (to say
the least!) motivation of this album, its central critique — that wars, all wars, are ways for the ruling class to profit and
everyone else to shed their blood to make the 1 percent richer — is right-on,
and the songs themselves (especially the incendiary “Plow Under,” which I
suspect is the edgiest and nastiest
political song ever written until the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” 36
years later) stand up as honest and emotionally intense attacks on war,
imperialism, capitalism and the nexus between them. At the same time the
Almanacs’ last album, Dear
Mr. President (recorded in 1942, not only
after the German attack on the Soviet Union but also after Pearl Harbor and the
CIO’s controversial decision to order its unions not to strike “for the duration”), almost seems like an
apology for Songs for John Doe —
particularly the direct attacks on both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the
song “Ballad of October 16” (the date is October 16, 1940, the day FDR signed
America’s first peacetime draft law). This time around the final song really
did seem like an elegy, and the most powerful aspect of the movie was the way
it seemed like the struggles keep repeating themselves — not only the political
struggles (the film included a brief interview with Natalie Maines of the Dixie
Chicks — whose career wasn’t quite as thoroughly destroyed as the Weavers’ had
been a half-century earlier when she made her famous comment about how she was
embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush, but her records got
pulled from radio stations and many of her fans turned against her) but the
musical ones.
After having researched Seeger’s life and the career of the
Almanac Singers for a couple of radio programs, and having read that one of the
Almanacs’ biggest departures from showbiz orthodoxy of the day was performing
in street clothes instead of tailored suits for the men and fancy gowns for the
women, it was startling indeed to see a TV clip of the Weavers, Seeger’s second
group, in full cry doing “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” with Seeger and the other male
members of the group, Lee Hays (co-writer with Seeger of the anthemic “If I Had
a Hammer” — and a huge man, built like a football player — we tend to think of
all male folksingers as either scrawny tall guys like Seeger or scrawny short
guys like Bob Dylan) and Fred Hellerman, in tailored suits and the one woman,
Ronnie Gilbert, in a fancy gown. (Also, is it heresy or can I get away with saying
that, purely as a voice, Gilbert
outsang the rest of the Weavers, including Seeger? Had the Weavers’ career not
been interrupted by the blacklist, one could readily imagine Ronnie Gilbert
becoming a major solo star in the 1950’s much the way Janis Joplin did at the
end of the 1960’s after leaving the group she started with but within which she could not be
contained.) As I’ve noted elsewhere, the “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” clip (which
features Seeger singing a chorus in Hebrew) is also a souvenir of the long-ago
days when Leftists liked Israel —
this was the time when the Labor Party was ruling and the kibbutzim were being organized, and a lot of Leftists in the
U.S. and western Europe were hoping Israel would be the place where all the
people persecuted for both being
Jewish and being Left would come together and build the democratic socialist
paradise that would answer the evils of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was interesting to
see Seeger in various live clips at different times of his career — I remember
when I saw him at the 1966 Berkeley Folk Festival he was already considered an elder statesman of folk music, and
politically aware folk music in particular, and I’d have been flabbergasted if
anyone had told me he still had another 48 years to live (and sing) and he’d
outlast some of the major talents who came along in his wake, including Tim
Buckley and the brilliant Phil Ochs.
Charles said one of the things he most admired about Seeger was his ability to get his
audiences to sing along as he performed — a point made in this movie (they even
show a clip showing him joke about the few members of his audience who weren’t joining in as a way of putting peer pressure on them
to get with the program), which argues that Seeger saw singing as a participatory
sport, something you actually did yourself as you worked and went about the
daily business of life instead of something you paid other people (either
through concert tickets, record purchases or buying a radio or TV) to do for
you. And though Seeger had access to enough of a network of small record
companies that he didn’t quite have to do the D.I.Y. thing to get his voice on
records the way the punks did later (the real pioneer of the artist-owned
D.I.Y. record label was avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra), he did do D.I.Y. songbooks and in some respects Seeger’s
entire life was D.I.Y. Unable to buy a home in New York City in the late 1940’s
for his wife and their kids (he had his family so quickly this documentary
suggests the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” was autobiographical), he scraped
together what cash he could, bought some farmland in upstate New York and built
his house himself. He used that home as his base of operations for the rest of
his life — and one reason he got as heavily into environmental issues as he did
(at a time when most of the Left regarded “conservation” as too safe and
mainstream an issue for them to worry about) was that his land sat on the bank
of the Hudson River and he watched in horror as every year the river got more
polluted until the federal government actually declared it, in essence, a toxic
free-fire zone. R.I.P., Pete Seeger, though he’s one of those people (like his
great predecessor and role model, Joe Hill) who will remain alive in spirit as
long as the human race survives and as long as there are people in it fighting
for justice, equal rights, a fair distribution of wealth and income, a livable
and thriving environment and an end to the scourge of war. — 2/2/14
