Pete Seeger

I was going to tweet this today, but thought it might be too stupid: "It's too sad to keep writing about great musicians who have died. We should spend more time writing about the great musicians being born."

The exhaustion, though, is omnipresent.  Time marches on, everyone dies, even important people, people you love & admire, & you comment on it - you reflect on their lives, on how they changed or affected you - & before you know it, someone else has died & the cycle repeats itself.

My mother, who is pretty old, talks a great deal about people who have died or (more unnervingly) people who are dying.  It must seem a strange thing when all of your friends & immediate family are gone.  As I've gotten older & health issues have reared their ugly heads, I've become more acquainted with mortality - & of course it sucks.

If I die, a few people who cared about me would perhaps be sad.  But Pete Seeger was a giant.  I don't think I've known many people like him personally in my life.  He wasn't just a musician, or a singer, or a poet, or an activist, or propagandist, or entertainer.  He had all that inside him & more.  He certainly was full of love, love of the highest order, for all humankind, working tirelessly & facing obstacles that would defeat & wither most of us.  & he sang.  He sang & played guitar & performed to countless folks.  He never stopped believing, he never stopped fighting.

I often say things like, "If so & so hadn't existed, so much of what I love wouldn't exist."  Pete Seeger championed Bob Dylan, one of my musical idols, but there's no reason to think Dylan wouldn't have broken through without his help.  Probably more importantly, Pete Seeger influenced the hell out of Phil Ochs, an underrated musician whose politics often had to compete with his own musical ambitions.  Both Ochs & Seeger had voices critics described as "wooden" - & both put their lives where their mouths were when it came to the causes they believed in.  It's not too hard to draw a line from Seeger to people like Billy Bragg, who wrote something nice about him today.

Of course I love Pete Seeger's songs, I love the Weavers, I love the feeling of being included in a mass of humanity who want to be free of oppression, of greed, of hate.  I am so grateful to live in a time when it's as easy as a click of a mouse to find recordings in video & audio of Pete Seeger doing what he did best.  There are great photos my friend Aaron is posting on Facebook of Seeger live.  I have stolen one, & put it here:

Credit where it's due: Pete Seeger performing at Folk Festival at Town Hall, 8 March 1958. Photo by Ray Sullivan for Photo-Sound Associates.

In the pictures, Seeger is often tilting his head upward, possibly a result of singing at too many places where there wasn't amplification, but I have been charming myself with the notion that that's not entirely it.  Sure, he was singing to the audience assembled there, but maybe he thought that - just maybe - if he sang a little louder, projected a little more, & aimed his voice a little higher than the folks immediately in front of him, the rest of the world would hear, too.

Oh, Pete Seeger, didn't you know?  They did.