A Small Tribute to Pete Seeger

Song 184: I posted the Peter Paul and Mary version of If I Had a Hammer as today's addition to the playlist because Pete Seeger died last Monday, so this is my small tribute to him. In the summer of 1963 the PPM version of The Hammer Song was all over the radio, and I couldn't get enough of it. Growing up in a conservative household, I didn't hear any sort of subversive message in this song, and I still don't -- it sounds like a very American point of view rolled up into a song. At the time that I began hearing the PPM hit version of the song, I didn't know Pete and Mr. Hayes had written it before I was born, and I also knew nothing about Mr. Seeger himself. I did take note of his name on the record label, but I didn't connect it with the guy who I started hearing about a few years later who was this subversive Communist. My religious Christian fundamentalist family had no interest in rock-and-roll, except for my younger brother and myself, and a few times I found myself attending presentations and short films about the evils of RnR. I heard about how RnR was actually a Communist plot derived from Pavlov's findings about dogs, and to prove the Commie connection, I heard all about 2 rockers who admitted being Commies -- Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. All my friends were listening to The Beatles, The Doors, Steppenwolf, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream, Hendrix and the like -- I didn't know anyone who had Baez or Seeger records, and I'm not sure who among my friends even knew who they were, but I heard a lot about them and their Commie connections at these church presentations. Then one day I happened to catch this guy on an episode of The Smothers Brothers, playing acoustic guitar and singing a song about The Big Muddy that had a very intense feel to it. Was this really the crazed Commie I was supposed to fear? He certainly didn't look subversive to me -- he looked like a very straight-ahead standup guy, and when I learned years later about the nature of his testimony before HUAC in the 1950s, it seemed very much like the guy I saw on The Smothers Brothers that day. Later, in the 1970s, I got to attend a TV show taping as an audience member, in a small crowd of a few hundred who all won free admission through a contest, for a show with Pete, Arlo Guthrie and Judy Collins, honoring Arlo's father Woody. Then when I returned to the East Coast in the late '80s, I volunteered at the Clearwater Festival for a few years, which was fun, and I got to meet a lot of good people and hear a lot of good music in the process, including a few performances by Pete. Both Pete and Woody, along with a few others, gave the following generations a living example of how to write and perform songs that speak the truth about the times you live through, and as Pete said not so long ago, there are now literally thousands of songwriters -- and I count myself among them -- who are actively following their example. If you only hear music from corporate channels, you won't hear very many of these songs, just as you didn't hear much of Pete or Woody during most of their lives, but if you really start looking, you will find lots of contemporary songs that have plenty to say about recent events, and most of the singer/songwriters who do them owe at least some of their inspiration to Pete Seeger and his circle of singer/songwriters.