Pete Seeger and Folk Song Activism in the Cold War Era, 1948 - 1972

“Wasn’t that a Time:” Pete Seeger and Folk Song Activism in the Cold War Era, 1948 - 1972 By Christine Anne Kelly B.A. in History, May 2011, Messiah College A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 19, 2013 Thesis directed by Edward D. Berkowitz Professor of History For Pete who guarded well our human chain as long as sun did shine ii Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………............... ii I. Introduction: “John Henry”……………………………………………………………. 1 Seeger the Steel Driving Man……………………………………………………. 1 Historiographical Review………………………………………………………. 15 Interventions……………………………………………………………………. 22 II. “If I Had a Hammer:” 1948 – 1960………………………………………………….. 27 The Weavers……………………………………………………………………. 27 Riot in Peekskill………………………………………………………………… 28 The Work of the Weavers………………………………………………………. 30 The Folk Process………………………………………………………............... 32 Folk Song to Transcend Social Boundaries: Possibilities and Limits………….. 33 The Weavers and the Red Scare………………………………………............... 35 Seeger Goes Solo……………………………………………………………….. 39 Audience Participation………………………………………………………….. 46 Trouble Appears: The House Un-American Activities Committee…………….. 52 III. “Die Gedanken Sind Frei:” 1961 – 1965…………………………………………… 57 A Song of Freedom……………………………………………………............... 57 Seeger on Trial………………………………………………………………….. 58 Civil Rights: Learning a New Tune…………………………………………….. 65 World Tour……………………………………………………………………… 68 Reaching the Youth: Seeger the “Cultural Guerilla”…………………………… 73 The New Folks………………………………………………………………….. 75 Folk Song and Commercialism…………………………………………………. 78 The Hootenanny Controversy…………………………………………............... 80 A Singing Movement…………………………………………………………… 83 IV. “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy:” 1965 – 1972……………………………............... 90 The Newport Folk Festival, 1965………………………………………………. 90 Folk Rock……………………………………………………………………….. 93 Seeger and the Counterculture………………………………………………….. 95 The Anti-War Movement……………………………………………………….. 98 The Smothers Brothers………………………………………………............... 101 Troubled Times………………………………………………………............... 103 iii An Environmentalist Turn…………………………………………………….. 105 The Sloop Clearwater…………………………………………………………. 106 Seeger the Traditionalist………………………………………………………. 110 Hope Restored…………………………………………………………………. 112 V. Conclusion: “Tomorrow is a Highway”……………………………………………. 114 Occupy Wall Street……………………………………………………………. 114 A Life of Activism through Song……………………………………............... 116 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………… 127 Primary Sources……………………………………………………………….. 127 Secondary Sources…………………………………………………………….. 128 iv I. Introduction: “John Henry” “John Henry was a little baby, sittin’ on his papa’s knee, and he picks up a hammer and a little piece of steel, and cried hammer’s gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord, hammer’s gonna be the death of me!”1 Seeger the Steel Driving Man In 1932, a gangly thirteen-year-old Pete Seeger first heard the ballad of John Henry. Visiting his father, Charles, in New York while on vacation from boarding school, the young Seeger attended events with his politically charged and artistically engaged father, from meetings of the Composers Collective to May Day workers’ demonstrations.2 Steeped in the social and economic upheaval of the Depression, the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger – like many others in the vast community of radical intellectuals that emerged in the 1930s – believed that capitalism was by nature an unsustainable system that distributed wealth unequally and led to the widespread growth of poverty.3 Charles, who wanted to participate in the call of these visionaries for a new world, wrote songs for union workers’ choruses and joined the American Communist Party.4 1 Pete Seeger, The Essential Pete Seeger, Sony Compact Disc B000CELOC2. 2 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger (New York: Villard, 2008), 39. (b) Charles Seeger was a founder of the Composers Collective, a group formed among leftist musicians in the early 1920s to provide musical support and inspiration for the international Communist movement. The May Day demonstrations, held annually on May 1 in Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere throughout the U.S. in the early twentieth century commemorated the unofficial holiday “International Workers’ Day,” celebrating the national and worldwide labor movement. It began in 1886 after the Haymarket affair in Chicago. 3 Richard Reuss with Joanne Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 - 1957 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000), 50. 4 Charles Seeger was a fairly active member of the American Communist community until the later 1940s, when he became less involved with the Party. 1 Charles, a consistent presence in New York City’s leftist circles, once took his son to see the opening of a gallery of murals painted by his friend and New School of Social Research colleague Thomas Hart Benton.5 Benton, a native of the nation’s Missouri heartland and a painter of everyday American life, espoused a kind of New Deal cultural commitment to the country’s natural landscape and its ordinary, hard-working people.6 As Charles and his son roamed the gallery, Benton began to play “John Henry,” a song he picked up during his travels through the American Midwest and South. The song aroused Pete’s senses far more than much of the music he had heard in those days. Weary of his own classical training, in which his violinist mother Constance continuously reminded him of the “three B’s – Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven,” and uneasy with her insistence that he play his instruments in a traditional manner that was free of improvisations, Seeger felt liberated in the presence of this mountain ballad.7 Seeger’s foot began to tap excitedly to the song, and “even in a room echoing with conversation and overshadowed by fifteen-foot murals, the music cut right through him.”8 Although he was unable to locate or describe its exact effect on him at the time, the fast-paced rhythm of the old African American folk tune fascinated Seeger. The tune remained in his head for the rest of his life. Nearly a decade later, Pete Seeger once again encountered “John Henry.” In the fall of 1941, he was living with a musical commune of radical folk artists who called 5 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 40. 6 “Thomas Hart Benton Biography,” Thomas Hart Benton: Murals in the Missouri State Capitol, <http://benton.truman.edu/resources.html.> 7 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 32, 40. (b) Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, ed. Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal (Boulder: Paradigm), 144. 8 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 40. 2 themselves the Almanac Singers.9 The group, which included Lee Hays, Bess Lomax, Sis Cunningham, Josh White, and Seeger’s free-spirited friend and mentor, Woody Guthrie, was sitting around a small and rickety Greenwich Village flat, singing folk songs and drinking a pint of whiskey.10 It wasn’t unusual for friends and affiliates of all sorts, like Lead Belly or Earl Robinson, to drop in for a song or bite to eat.11 Together, the Almanacs sang “John Henry,” belting out the more well-known lyrics about John Henry’s race to build a railroad with his own hammer and enormous physical strength against his boss’s new stream drill, but sometimes throwing in new, impromptu verses, which became more and more innovative as the night wore on and the whiskey kicked in.12 Seeger was singing and playing right along with the others. By this time he had traveled some distance from his New England blueblood upbringing and his former classical training. Letters he sent to his mother in 1933, a year after he had heard Benton’s rendition of “John Henry,” included pleas for an Appalachian banjo: “I’d like to buy a big banjo,” he wrote her, “I’d like to a lot and honestly I think that it would be worth it because I’m awfully interested in the banjo and I’d like to learn how to play it really well . Will you let me get one? Please.”13 Eventually, Seeger got his banjo, and through his father’s friends and colleagues, like the ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax, became well-connected with the folk singing community that grew up around America’s radical left in the 1930s.14 And by 1941, now age twenty-two, 9 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 98 – 100. 10 Ibid., 100. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 8. 14 “Pete Seeger Transcript,” ca. 1991 - 1992, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 6, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 3 he was not simply listening to “John Henry:” he sang out the old tune accompanying himself on the banjo. Seeger and “John Henry” met again in 1957. By this time, Seeger had reached stunning commercial success with a folk quartet, The Weavers, but had been the victim of the Cold War blacklist.15 Seeger, now a solo performer, was left to find work and put himself to use wherever he could. He and his wife, Toshi, had purchased a video camera, which they intended to use to film folk songs performed all over the U.S. and abroad.16 One sunny afternoon Big Bill Broonzy, the legendary guitarist and bluesman, asked Seeger to film him playing a few songs. “Pete, do you have that camera with you? Why don’t you film me?” he asked, before adding, “I’m going under the knife tomorrow.”17 Broonzy was about to be treated for throat cancer, and would die a year later.18 Guitar in hand, and seated on a few paint-cracked porch steps outside of his Michigan home, Broonzy strummed his guitar with his adept fingers and began to sing: “John Henry said to his captain, ‘A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, before I let your steam drill beat me down, I will die with that hammer in my hand, yes I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’”19 Throughout Seeger’s life as a collector and performer of folk songs – a vocation now spanning over seventy years – he has long drawn courage and inspiration from “John Henry.”20 He has made the ballad a staple of his musical repertoire, and sung it hundreds of times to audiences all over the world.

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