Al Giordano+Pete Seeger

Life Inside of the Song of History with Pete Seeger
Posted by Al Giordano - February 9, 2014 at 7:02 pm
By Al Giordano

(exerpt)
It is said that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes.

For a great many people, that was also the case when Pete Seeger died last month.

Almost everybody I know has a Pete Seeger story as compelling as any I could tell. The guy handed out meaningful exchanges like candy. That’s how he rolled.

I confess that I didn’t always love Pete, and was skeptical about him until I got to see and hear him up close. His music was force-fed on me, and others my age, as children. “Go to church on Sunday, eat your vegetables, wash behind your ears, and listen to your Pete Seeger, because it’s good for you!” His most popular recorded tunes were either children’s songs or what, as an emerging adolescent in the seventies, I considered “lite” odes to hippie slogans which had already become over-baked, like “peace,” or “freedom.” Some had been popularized by more saccharine acts (we don’t need to name them, everybody knows who they are).

I figured this Seeger fellow was just a slightly older sixties hippie with a professorial salt-and-pepper beard. Hippies were a dime a dozen back then. Like the police officers and military men they professed to dislike, they sure tended to don the same clothing and hairstyles as each other. They were old news already. Similar to many of my own, younger, generation, I was on the prowl for something more original and authentic.

See, that was the media image of Pete, the aging folksinger with a banjo, washed clean of his radical backstory. The entire population in the 1970s seemed to be suffering a hangover and nobody really wanted to talk about whatever it was that happened the night before. All society was doing the walk of shame. My high school pal Philip Shelley’s father, I had learned, an actor, had been blacklisted during the decades-long nightmare of persecution of communists and their suspected sympathizers. Stories like that were whispered, but not really talked about in any kind of meaningful way. There was still a lot of fear (and a lot of commie-bashing) but I would learn, through Pete and others, that what had preceded it was a hell of a lot worse; a plague upon the land.

Pete Seeger’s music would – like alcohol and cigarettes – prove to be an acquired taste. (Pete, who did not like to drink or smoke, would probably find that funny.) At the age of 17, about a month after I’d been arrested with 1,400 or so others for camping out on the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire, I heard that a lot of those folks with whom I’d lived that coming-of-age story were headed to Amherst, Massachusetts, for something called The Towards Tomorrow Fair, a convention and festival dedicated to alternative energy sources and where thinkers – from Buckminster Fuller to Helen Caldicott to Murray Bookchin – would present their ideas. There would also be a concert by Seeger at the 2,000-seat UMass Fine Arts Center.

Pete, at first glance, seemed older than his 58 years, already a grey eminence. And between each song he sang, he told stories. While introducing “Wasn’t That a Time” as the song he tried to play in the halls of Congress in 1955 when subpoenaed before the US House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), I looked at Connie Hogarth – who had brought some of us youths from New York up to Massachusetts in her station wagon – almost in disbelief. She explained that Pete had been “blacklisted” for refusing to name names at that hearing, and that his music had been banned for the following years on radio and television in the US. And that is probably the moment when I felt like a schmuck for having thought of Seeger as a mere hippie. I let my guard down, and started singing along.

Other stories he told, in the songs and between them, revealed pieces of his already long road saga: singing with Woody Guthrie and others to organize labor unions and strikes in the 1930s, enlisting in the Armed Forces to stop Hitler in the ‘40s (he and a group called The Weavers had a hit single during WWII, titled “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave,” which envisioned a public hanging of the despot), joining with blacks and whites in the Southern Civil Rights desegregation struggles of the ‘50s. I learned that it was a captain of a slave ship who had penned “Amazing Grace” - what I had considered a sappy church song – when in a burst of conscience he had turned the ship around to return the captured to Africa.

Even some of the songs I had considered “lite,” or corny or cloying, like the kid stuff, after some investigation, turned out to be those numbers Pete developed during his blacklisted years (roughly between the 1955 Contempt of Congress violation served upon him and the 1962 appeals court order that reversed it, and then another five years before they let him back on network TV), in which the seemingly innocent lyrics were in fact “code” for more subversive messages. “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a gospel spiritual, wasn’t taken from Bible verses, as I had wrongly presumed. Those were real instructions for escaping black slaves in the 1800s to learn how to read the constellations in the sky in order to head north toward freedom. To decode Pete was to learn the code of the secret history of the United States of America, of those troubling things that “nice” people only whispered about, if at all.

That night at UMass, he sang a song called “Acres of Clams,” based on an old sea shanty by the same title and rewritten by Charlie King, himself arrested at the Seabrook nuke site some weeks prior. The organization that had convened and trained us occupiers (receiving nonviolence training had been a requirement to be able to participate), was the Clamshell Alliance and its members had taken to calling each other “Clams.” Pete was suddenly singing about another chapter of American History, but a very recent one that I had taken part in. That’s when “the switch” went off in my head. I realized that these people who are mentioned in songs because they did something interesting or even heroic were people just like me. Every other story Pete sang about was suddenly in my reach. It was impossible to be cynical or even skeptical at that moment – looking around the hall, seeing all these folks who had risked arrest along with me, singing their hearts out to a song about them – and “getting” it that, holy shit, I’m in the song, and if I keep living my life that way, I’ll never be left outside of the song. That song was where I wanted to live.

That’s a dangerous thought. It led to a whole chain reaction of events and choices I soon made at early forks in the road of life. I left my teenaged punk rock band the day after we had been offered a record contract. I dropped out of university about as quickly as I entered it. I dedicated the next decade of my life to continued ventures of civil disobedience (27 arrests by age 27) and soon graduated to the harder, more meaningful, work of community organizing. I saw our fledgling movement against nuclear plants grow nationally and internationally, stop a new generation of atomic plants in the US, and even win the shut down of the particular nuke I had most organized against. That’s the song, baby, the one that never ends. And we keep working on the next verse of the story.

Three things about Pete surprised me at first, because they ran counter to his media image.

One, unlike so many of the “activists” who attended his concerts, he was unabashedly patriotic about America and what he considered its true ideals.

Two, he was really into winning (also distinct from many of the aforesaid types). He may have shunned other intoxicants, but, whoa, he was definitely hooked on “the buzz.” In his homage to Woody Guthrie, who had died in 1967, “Precious Friend,” he sang, “And when we sing another victory song, precious friend you will be there.” The whole point of it all – the music, the singing, the traveling, the organizing – for Pete, was to triumph. He didn’t sing and participate merely to be able to think of himself as a “good person.” He did it because those were steps toward concrete changes in society, toward the rush of that victory song, the greatest high there is.

Third – and I found this, as a young guitarist, a bit infuriating – was the astounding refinement of his musicianship. That night, on a twelve-string guitar, he played and sang “The Bells of Rhymney,” set to music from a poem by a Welsh miner-turned-poet, Idris Davies, who had lost one of his fingers in the mine. The “folk music revival” of my childhood had an air of “anybody can do it,” and a lot of those who did had only rudimentary musical skills; a very accessible and populist art form, worthy of its name. The sounds Pete got out of that instrument put the day’s revered rock axe-man guitar legends in their respective places, an entire orchestra and rainforest of cacophony put to order, in escalating and, alternately descending, rhythms. Add to that the perfect pitch of a voice that spanned multiple octaves, with the coordination between the vocal chords, lungs and hands on the instrument – “if, if, if, if, IF!” – and then whistling to hit even higher notes.
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