To Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger - the singer-songwriter-activist who died Monday at the age of 94 - was “the father of American folk music.”
Much earlier, poet Carl Sandberg crowned Seeger “America’s tuning fork.” while Bob Dylan called Seeger a saint.
But Seeger, who popularised This Land Is Your Land and We Shall Overcome never liked the term folk music.
“It’s been defined as the ‘music of the peasants,’” Seeger told USA Today in a 2009 interview, “and then you get someone saying (of Seeger): ‘he’s no peasant!’’’
If he didn’t want to be called a folk singer, what term did he prefer?
“How about river singer,” he suggested. “I sing up and down the Hudson River.”
“Songs won’t save the planet,” Seeger told his biographer David Dunaway, author of How Can I Keep From Singing? “But, then, neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons.”
He liked to quote Plato: “Rulers should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that Pete Seeger has done more to popularise American folk music than any other musician, authoring or co-authoring the songs that have become folk standards: “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to name just a few.
His work has inspired countless musicians including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the Dixie Chicks, and his tireless political and environmental activism galvanized generations of admirers to follow his lead and take action.
The songs he had written, and those he had discovered and shared, have helped preserve American cultural heritage, imprinting adults and children with the sounds, traditions and values of American’s global past and present.
Born on May 3, 1919, to Charles and Constance Seeger, he grew up surrounded by music, learning to play the ukulele, guitar and banjo by the time he was in his teens.
Seeger’s commitment to the revival of American folk music was rivaled only by his commitment to using music as an instrument for social change. His activism had been a constant in his career.
In the 1960’s, his Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest songs spoke to a new generation of fans. Then in the 70s, Seeger turned his attention to the environment, a cause to which he remained devoted, going green long before it became popular to do so. Of note, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, the Presidential Medal of the Arts in 1994, an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000.
