Saturday, May 19, 2001
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC gives insights on conservation, politics and folk music
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
Rare Pete Seeger interview on WAMC gives insights on conservation, politics and folk music
(Columbia County, N.Y.) During an early May Saturday afternoon we were off on a Spring errands trip - the library, plant store and supermarket - when the car radio came live with a Pete Seeger song. WAMC, the Albany Public Radio, was doing a two-hour blockbuster interview with the 81-year old veteran folksinger.. We were spellbound, and sat in the library driveway until the 2PM station break, too late to grab but a quick book before closing. Progressing to the market, we noted that the interviewer, the usually uninhibited Dr.,Alan Chartok, Chairman of the Board of Northeast Public Radio Network and its man of all seasons, was uncommonly self-effacing, limiting himself to throwing one-word song title cues to Seeger, which evoked 10-minute polished reminiscences, interspersed with songs. Did you know that Guantanamera, a poem by Jose Marti, refers to the bar girls of Guantanamo, the American naval base of Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.? Locals, asked where they have been all night, simply answer "Guantanamera." Or that while Where Have All the Flowers Gone started as a camp song, Seeger plucked it out from Michael Sholokhow’s Stalinist book And Quiet Flows the Don, and is voluntarily paying royalties to Russia’s folklore archivists? Or that hootnanny is not what the French couples do on the night before marriage? At the ALDI market, we once more sat in the hot parking lot, mesmerized until the program was over at 3PM. Our day's schedule was shot, but it was worth it.
Story has it that Pete Seeger lives on a hill top in Beacon, the only house visible in the wooded slope above the Taconic Parkway a mile or two south of the only remaining gas station on the Governor's Road. Rightly or wrongly, I never fail to point it out to visiting friends, who are usually more concerned with my staying straight on this winding stretch that we call the Terrible Twenty (miles, that is). We have been Seeger people ever since he started the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater project, to clean the waters of the mighty Hudson, polluted with PCBs by General Electric's upriver plants over the decades. {PCBs don’t mainly cause cancer, they make for deformed babies. Upstate Hudson Valley has a lot of people who need home care.} GE admits its sinful past but declares that stirring the river's bottom sediments will cause an increase of PCBs in the water. Seeger agrees that ordinary dredging will be harmful but a modern method of sucking up the mud will cleanse the river We're with Seeger, but the real trick is where to put the polluted mud.
The singer has been a man of causes all his life - union, civil rights, peace, anti-war movement, Socialism, environment, Henry Wallace's Progressive Party (1948). Blacklisted by the major media during the McCarthy years, he has achieved belated official recognition in the '90s, with a the nation’s greatest musical award at Kennedy Center in 1994, the Harvard Arts Medal and a strange Rock & Roll Hall of Fame designation in 1996, followed by a Grammy a year later.
Son of Juillard’s ethnomusicist Charles Seeger, the 19-year old guitar and banjo picker and second-year Harvard dropout joined the music folklorist Alan Lomax in collecting folk songs in the South. Seeger's singing career was started by a schoolteacher aunt, who offered him five dollars if he would perform before her class, and he's never looked back In 1941, with another musician, Oklahoma’s favorite son Woodie Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers, and the idealistic kids traveled all over the country, singing their songs in rent parties, lumberjack camps and union halls.. WWII broke up the team.
After service in the Army, in 1948 Seeger formed the Weavers, with Fred Hellerman, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert. Their six-month gig at the Village Vanguard brought them to the attention of band leader Gordon Jenkins, a producer for Decca records. When the head of the firm refused to hear the group, Jenkins put them on within his own recording program, and the two sides, Tzena, Tzena Tzena and Goodnight Irene (borrowed from Hudie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, who died in 1949, a few months before fame struck) were the top songs on the Hit Parade for many weeks. The Weavers, whose 19 LP records, produced form 1952 through 1997, are part of the canon of American folk music repertory, brought to our attention such favorites as So Long (It's Been Good to Know You),On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, Kumbaya, Wimoweh, Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, If I Had a Hammer (words by Lee Hays) and Marching to Pretoria. Their protest songs and left-wing politics brought Seeger to the attention of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Weavers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs on the major TV and radio stations. But America wanted them, they gave a historic Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Hall in 1955, repeated in 1963 and 1980. Eventually the Smothers Brothers forced CBS to let them have Seeger as a guest on their popular TV program (sans protest songs such as Garbage). Seeger sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a concealed anti-Vietnam war song. It may have lost the Smothers their show, but the folk singers were on a comeback trail. Good music wins. Although politically at odds with the Socialism of the Weavers and Seeger, I grooved to their songs on Washington Square Sunday afternoon hootnannies. Seeger’s prison sentence for dissing HUAC was reversed by Appeals Court Judge Irving R. Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ trial judge of 1951, on 1st Amendment grounds.
Seeger left the Weavers in 1958, and was replaced by Frank Hamilton, Bernie Krause and Eric Darling, in sequence. He has continued to sing, and to write some two dozen books (The Incompleat Folksinger, 1972) and scads of songs. In concerts with Arlo Guthrie their repertory ranged from Alice's Restaurant to Amazing Grace. He has been campaigning for the rights of the folk musicians of 3rd World, to have publishers recognize the origins of such music, seemingly in "public domain," with some royalties. While it is too late for the South African Xosa (pronounced khosa) day laborer and Wimoweh singer Landa to earn any comforts, his family and the Zulu cultural and music preservation groups will benefit from the Tokens’ and their songwriter George Weiss’ earnings from their adaptation of his song. Seeger's record of children's music, Abiyoyu, likewise pays royalties to Africa. Turn, Turn, Turn, is from the Ecclesiastes, else our indomitable folklorist with a stern sense of justice would pay royalties on it too.
Seeger at 81 continues to play and sing, mostly for children in schools, and to defend the causes of justice and environment. People learning music use his text, Henscratches, and his guitar and banjo study tapes., and anyone joining in a rousing We Shall Overcome is singing with Pete Seeger (only some of the words are his, he would hasten to correct).
WNYC cannot re-broadcast the interview for copyright reasons, but you can hear it on WAMC upstate, Memorial Day, 9-11 AM, and Alan is giving away CDs of the interview in his upcoming WAMC fund-raiser.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:25 PM 
