Seeger, Pete (1919–)

Pete Seeger is a world-renowned folksinger and political activist who was born in Patterson, New York, on May 3, 1919, to musicologist Charles Seeger and classical musician Constance Seeger. He was exposed to the music of the rural South while on tour with his parents. Seeger began to play the banjo as a teenager. After 2 years of study at Harvard, Seeger began a lifetime career studying and singing the folk music of people from all over the world.

During his early years of exposure to and adaptation of what he regarded as people's music, Seeger was influenced by musicians who created an enduring genre of musical culture that would flower and grow in post-war America. These included Woody Guthrie, Hudie Leadbetter (Leadbelly), Lee Hayes, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Aunt Molly Jackson, and the folk archivist Alan Lomax. Before embracing a career as a solo performer, Seeger organized and played with the Almanac Singers before and during World War II and the Weavers from 1948 until the 1960s. In later years, Seeger would perform with many folk artists and activists, including the Freedom Singers, civil rights activists, and Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie. Over the years Seeger has written hundreds of songs and performed them at more than a thousand concerts.

After recording popular songs such as “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Good Night Irene,” he and the Weavers were blacklisted in the 1950s for their left-wing connections. Seeger was called to testify before the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and sited for contempt of [Page 1275]Congress when he refused to answer their questions, on First Amendment grounds, about his political beliefs. Seven years later, a Federal Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and 1-year sentence on a technicality. For much of the 1960s, Seeger was prohibited from performing on network television. In January 1968, after much conflict between the CBS network and comedians Tommy and Dick Smothers, Seeger was allowed to sing his anti–Vietnam War song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” before a nationwide audience.

While Seeger's music and politics has reflected virtually every progressive cause from the late 1930s until the present, his work was influenced by the variety of social movements. In the late 1930s, as Seeger was learning his craft and experiencing rural life, he and Woody Guthrie performed songs about the working class and trade union organizing. Many performances were in solidarity with efforts to organize factory workers into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Seeger and his friends sang songs about anti-imperialism as well: for the democratic forces fighting fascism in Spain, and opposing war in Europe. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union and World War II ensued, he and the rest of the folk left began singing songs in support of a popular front against fascism.

After the war, and for another 25 years, Seeger composed and sang songs opposing the Cold War, nuclear war, and later the Vietnam War. After visiting the South in the early 1960s, he put his talent behind the southern freedom movement. He helped transform an old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” into the anthem of the civil rights movement, and brought the Freedom Singers, young civil rights activists from the South, to folk concert audiences in the North in 1963. He exhorted his audiences to join the struggle for civil rights and he particularly applauded young people who, he said, had taken the lead in fighting for civil rights. As the 1960s movements diversified, Seeger's music did as well. He began to sing songs about women's rights, “I'm Gonna Be an Engineer,” and the environment, “Sailing Down This Golden River.”

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