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

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“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

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

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.

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, 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.

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.

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. When asked why “John Henry” resonates with

15 David Dunaway Collection, newspaper article, “Weavers ‘Folksong’ Muted by ABC-TV,” Box 4, Fol. 27, Library of Congress American Folklife Center . 16 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Big Bill Broonzy, duplicate of FRB 8021,” LWO 34217, disc 02.04; digital betacam shelf number VBS 1322, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 20 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 243.

him so deeply, Seeger unassumingly suggests that he has long loved the tune’s rhythm, and talks about how its verses have held different meanings for him at different times.21

When Seeger first heard “John Henry” as a young teenager, he thought of the song as a

“Paul Bunyan-type extravaganza, a tall tale like ‘Jack and Beanstalk,’ with a strong man exaggerated beyond belief.” . . . “Later on,” he says, “I think I understood more of the tragedy of the song, and at the age of sixty, the verse I would never leave out is ‘John

Henry had a little baby.’”22 Seeger’s personal reasons for admiring the ballad notwithstanding, it seems that John Henry’s resonance with Pete Seeger goes deep into the core of who Seeger is and what his work has meant in recent history.

Seeger came of age intellectually and musically in the late 1930s and 1940s, and he mastered his technique and his message as an artist through the 1950s. Significantly, these decades were ones of profound change and dislocation for American society. With the Depression and the war came great changes as American men left for the armed services and increasingly more women and African Americans entered the industrial work force.23 Despite its enormity in terms of international involvement and military force, the war ended on anxious and uncertain terms, and U.S. hostility to Hitler and his

Axis Allies was soon transferred to Stalin and the Soviet Union.24 The resulting Cold

War soaked into the cultural and emotional fabric of the nation. Premised on an ideological divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, emerging as major and competing superpowers in terms of social, cultural, political and economic might, the

21 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 243. 22 Ibid., 243 – 244. 23 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 5. 24 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), vii.

Cold War became a contest over which nation – and the system it espoused – offered for its citizens a better way of life.25

On the part of the United States, political leaders and cultural critics declared that

Americans must be united under the mantle of capitalism.26 Bolstered by a wave of economic prosperity as America became a major lender to rebuilding efforts in Europe and elsewhere, Americans, particularly white men, were able to take up salaried, management positions in any number of the nation’s proliferating corporate bureaucracies.27 An individual as “consumer” became an increasingly valid category of identity as men, women, and even American youths exerted heightened purchasing power over an array of fairly inexpensively and abundantly manufactured products.28 The proliferation of many forms of mass culture in these years, including chain stores, standard brands for everyday goods, cars, homes, radio and television shows, Hollywood films, and popular songs, linked the nation’s growing material consumption with the success of its economic system and political outlook.29 According to the day’s policymakers and business leaders, America was a nation of prosperity that offered its citizens, among other liberties, the opportunity to consume.30 Similarly, from a construction boom and the financial benefits of the G.I. Bill, a number of returning veterans from the war were able to purchase a home and start a family within the nation’s

25 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 8. 26 These include political leaders like Presidents Truman and Eisenhower as well as prominent authors and intellectuals, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and David Riesman. 27 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 24. 28 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 121, 319. 29 Ibid., 126, 266, 334. 30 Ibid., 126.

rapidly developing suburban neighborhoods.31 Hundreds of couples entered the nation’s growing middle class and embraced a standard identity of whiteness that minimized what were divisive and stratified ethnic and class divisions earlier in the century.32 With the unemployment rate at three percent, economists concluded that, at least in the United

States, humankind’s fundamental dilemma – the constant striving for an adequate material existence (in terms of securing food and shelter) – was being relegated to the dustbin of history.33

Yet all that was seemingly gold did not glitter in the new post-war America.

Underneath a veneer of opportunity and prosperity was a pervasive sense of disquiet and discontent. In what’s now perhaps a historical cliché, and yet still a relatively apt description for it, the post-World War II and early Cold War days marked America’s

“age of anxiety.”34 As historian K.A. Cuordileone writes, “thanks to modernity and its terrible consequences – two devastating world wars, the horrors of totalitarianism, the arms race, and the possibility of global nuclear holocaust,” the apparent abundance and stability of American social and cultural life in this era was an attempt to capture predictability, security, and peace despite a new awareness of what were a slew of possible political, economic, and military devastations.35 Historian Elaine Tyler May suggests that to many Americans, the path to security was containment: like George

Kennan’s foreign policy recommendation that the U.S. apply policing, surveillance, and

31Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, 5. 32 Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 – 1960 (New York: Cambridge University, 1983), xii. 33 This point was perhaps most influentially articulated in the economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book The Affluent Society. 34 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), viii. 35 Ibid.

pressure to keep the Soviet Union’s communist borders from expanding, so also should

Americans monitor their lives to ensure that they were conforming to the nation’s

“patriotic” cultural ideals.36 Out of this emerged a culture that embraced and naturalized social borders: the ideal American lived within the confines of middle classism, whiteness, gender conventionality, suburbia, material consumption, and of course adhered to a robust anti-communism as well – anything else was to be labeled by the era’s leading political, intellectual, and scientific experts as delinquent, psychologically deviant, and most importantly, politically subversive.37 In these days, the most safe, healthy, and normal American was what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “vital center” liberal, one who shunned the perils of totalitarianism (whether it occupied the extreme left or right, as in communism or fascism) and who instead lived out America’s economic and civic ideals of capitalism and democracy in their public and private lives.38

If the “vital center” informed mid-century America’s stance on proper social, cultural, intellectual, and political behavior, then Pete Seeger, who hailed from the earlier ethos of the America’s “popular front,” was greatly out of joint with current expectations of him.39 But by this point in Seeger’s life, this was not unusual given his perspective, his career, and his hopes for the world. Ever Charles Seeger’s son and an enthusiastic member of New York City’s radical artistic population, Seeger was born and bred on the

1930s popular front alliance between New Deal progressive liberals and radical leftists – including American communists – and aligned himself from this time forward with

America’s progressive movement: he was a staunch supporter, for example, of the

36 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 16. 37 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 14, 16 – 17. 38 Ibid., 1. 39 Ibid., xxi.

Progressive Party Henry Wallace’s bid for the presidency against Truman in 1948. He was also an early advocate for civil rights and racial equality, he approved of the possibility, however remote once the Cold War was in full swing, of Soviet-American friendship, and he was an avid peacenik, once expressing his sentiment in an article that the “guitar was mightier than the Bomb.”40 Although he became apathetic to and formally estranged from it in 1949, for over a decade Seeger was even a card carrying member of the Communist Party.41

But Seeger’s progressive radicalism, however operative, was not the only or even the most important way in which he deviated from post-war American norms. If anything, in the 1940s and 1950s, Pete Seeger was something of a modern day John

Henry. In an age of mass production, mass culture, mass consumption, and the bureaucratized and constrained “mass man,” Seeger, like Henry, staunchly opposed the sameness and mechanization that went into the creation of “mass” products (and “mass” people). He greatly admired thought and behavior that was naturally occurring, organic, and authentic – rather like a folk song, in fact, which has passed through many mouths and ears across a host of geographies and time periods, rendering it several competing lyric options and melodies that are nearly as varied as humankind itself.42 John Henry’s captain was smugly satisfied with the advance in technological innovation that his steam drill represented – it took Henry’s pre-modern reliance on his hammer and physical strength to prove to his authority that there were limits to what even the most proficient

40 Pete Seeger, untitled article, Sing Out! January 1964, 95. 41 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing?, 103. 42 (a) It is worth noting that “authenticity,” however, is “one of these words,” according to Seeger, that he struggled to live out and define, concluding once in 1962 letter that “ . . . it is my duty to be authentically myself and to make as good music as I possibly can, and to transmit the truths as well as I am humanly able to do to those whom I am fortunate to sing for.” (b) Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 272.

modern technology could do. Henry, after all, drove down fifteen feet of railroad track while “the steam drill only made nine.”43 In like manner, through his widespread singing activism, which reached a height in the late 1940s through the early 1970s, Seeger opposed nuclear activity, racial and gender inequality, war in Vietnam, and environmental destruction (or what he boiled down to be the modern conundrums of

“imperialism, fascism, and militarism”). In so doing, he strove to convince those in authority over him – not uncommonly the federal government – that twentieth century modernity, accompanied as it was by the degradations of war, inequality, and a lack of individuality must be soberly remembered in spite of celebrations of the day’s production and technocratic achievements.44 Seeger even brought his “hammer” with him, by this time what had become his well-known long-neck, five-string banjo, when, beginning in

1955, he fought a long and hard won battle against the House Un-American Activities

Committee for his First Amendment right to hold any political opinions he wished when

HUAC brought him to trial for communist subversion of the United States.45 This case in and of itself was a product of modern Cold War anxiety, which feared the Soviet Union’s political system and its “Bomb,” and was plagued also by frenetic notions that there might be an “enemy within,” a number of well-concealed, communist and Soviet sympathizers working toward the U.S.’s annexation into the Soviet bloc.46

It seems, in fact, that much of Seeger’s identity as a John Henry-like activist and non-conformist during the Cold War was driven by the era’s anxiety-filled quest for

43 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing?, 243. 44 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 188. 45 “Seeger Conviction Reversed,” Sing Out! Summer 1962, back page cover. “Should Pete Seeger Go to Jail?” Brochure from “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 46 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 221.

security and sameness in the face of past traumas and Soviet threats. When middle class

Americans clung to their nuclear families, their suburban homes, their jobs, their whiteness, and their mass culture as indispensable to normative and politically upright

American living, they buried the messiness and unpredictability that characterized their society’s past and present. But Seeger, like Henry the railroad builder, couldn’t participate in this essentialized attitude toward mid-century middle class culture – as if it were all there was to American life, history, and experience. His immersion in folk life and music instilled in him an irresistible drive to build a railroad of his own, one that stretched across the many years and places represented in the songs he’d picked up over the decades. John Henry the worker, Seeger spent his early adulthood both on his own and with the Almanacs singing for labor unions of manufacturing, farming, mining, and other occupations as members held strikes and marched for a their right to a decent wage.47 And with Henry the African American, Seeger met and learned music from hundreds of black individuals living in urban and rural communities throughout the nation’s north and south, and he watched them persevere against the persistent injustices and indignities of Jim Crow.48 His old friend Lead Belly, for example, took it in stride and even joked in his song “Bourgeois Blues” about the refusals he received from segregation policies when trying to find a hotel room in Washington, DC after a day of recording music for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress.49

47 Pete Seeger, Camp Woodland Concert (07/15/1962), 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, compact disc 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits, Sony compact disc B000063WD4. 48 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing?, 244. 49 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184.

John Henry laid down his railroad across America’s West Virginian Appalachian

Mountains; Pete Seeger’s extended beyond national boundaries. Seeger’s radicalism and his many immigrant friends in New York fostered an internationalist spirit within him, one that was increasingly unheard of as the Cold War progressed through the 1950s. He desired not only improved U.S.-Soviet relations, but wanted friendly ties with China and the nations of Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and others – Seeger had developed a strong concept of brotherhood and a sense of world’s inhabitants as a

“rainbow race” that needed to live together in cooperation, regardless of whether the race’s members had political and economic systems that were compatible with the United

States, a common concern in the Cold War world.50

John Henry may have built his railroad with a hammer and tracks of solid steel, but Seeger’s railroad was built on song. All his life he’d been an extensive traveler – whether it was driving westward down Route 66 in a beat up automobile with Woody

Guthrie, roaming the woodlands of the northeast with a few friends as a puppeteer, or, as his career advanced, around the United States singing to fans, children, college students and supporters of social movements and traveling abroad to Europe, Asia, and Africa to learn and share folk songs.51 During these travels, Seeger’s musical exchanges contributed to a collection of songs that carried identities hailing from a variety of times and places. There is “Which Side Are You On?,” the turn-of-the-century anthem of

Kentucky coal miners sung in solidarity against their inadequate wages, “Guantanamera,”

50 Pete Seeger, Pete, Living Music compact disc B0000000V4. 51 (a) Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger Town Hall Concert, RR-3366, compact disc 256. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. (b) Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. (c) Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

a poem put to music by the writer and nineteenth century Cuban anti-colonial activist

José Martí, “Wimoweh,” an upbeat South African tune offering hope in the face of

Apartheid, and “We Shall Overcome,” a spiritual that led the way for many marches, gatherings, and protests during America’s civil rights movement.52

Each of Seeger’s songs has a history, a subject, and a purpose that draws attention to moments and places in American life that social wisdom and behavior in the mid- twentieth century tried to minimize and forget. America’s contained society did not have room for the unevenness and moral confusions surfaced by the realities of poor, working class life, struggling black communities, and people living abroad as having a range of interests, knowledge, and experience that was infinitely more complex than rigid Cold

War categorizations of them, concerned most of all with their sympathies as either pro-

Soviet or American. But when Seeger sang, like John Henry’s hammer “sucking wind” as it fortified its railroad track, he connected the lives and experiences of his songs to those who would listen to them. Sometimes these audiences were poor workers, sometimes they were bona fide communists, and sometimes – more often than it would seem, in fact, given the Cold War surveillance of the era – they were the contained middle class Americans who probably had minimal interaction with the way of life these songs expressed. Seeger, the itinerant performer of folk songs from “the U.S. and other lands,” as he often put it, laid down a railroad that connected people from all walks of life and experience, and his track took no notice of day’s borders, frequently rupturing them

52 (a) Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. (b) Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits, Sony compact disc B000063WD4.

as it linked one destination to another.53 With his music, Seeger connected people’s lives, experiences, places, and spaces – introducing the “other,” a relatively common identity during the Cold War, whether this other was a worker, an African American, a radical, an immigrant, or even a member of the mainstream middle class – to his audiences.

When Seeger introduced his listeners to those from a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives, he menaced the narrative of post-war and Cold War America as unchallenged in the contained, “vital center,” bureaucratized, suburban monolith it’s widely described to have become.54 Seeger challenged this image in his period and continues to do so today as historians consider the characteristics and contours of post- war American life. There was certainly an established social, cultural, and political mainstream, but there was also a vast alternative experience that, hidden and underground as it often was, nevertheless entered people’s purviews through Seeger’s music. The effects of hopping aboard Seeger’s train in this era were surely extensive, and they beg a number of questions. Foremost among these questions is what, exactly, was the effect of

Pete Seeger’s music on those who heard it? From what kind of process did they interact with and respond to Seeger’s songs? Further, Seeger has been dubbed “quite arguably the most important folk singer of the twentieth century” (regardless of the fact that, as

Seeger scholar Rob Rosenthal notes, his unpretentious personality would likely cringe at such a declaration).55 Seeger is credited as a key actor in launching the mid-twentieth century’s New Folk Revival, an important opponent of America’s McCarthyist witch-

53 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 54 This tends to be historian Elaine Tyler May’s approach in Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 55 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, xii.

hunts, an influential activist during the many social movements of the sixties, an unlikely cultural arbiter during the Cold War between the U.S. and the world, and a mover and shaker for improved human respect for the environment.56 How did Seeger wield such influence on each of these complex and wide-ranging social causes and events through his music, and what shape did this influence take? In what way did it challenge normative mid-century American experiences? A life of abundant activity, a number of scholars have undertaken studies of Pete Seeger and the events he has responded to and shaped. So far, most of the existing literature on Seeger has been written by folklorists and historians with interests in his progressive activism and push for social and cultural change in the twentieth century. It’s worth taking a brief look at this material to establish a clear sense of how scholars have approached and assessed Seeger’s contributions.

Historiographical Review

Historiographical considerations of Pete Seeger’s role in the twentieth century have to date taken one of three broad directions. Scholars have been interested first in

Seeger’s role in the “New Folk Revival” (1959 – 1964) in which folk music received an unprecedented national platform, with songs from artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and

Peter, Paul, and Mary reaching the top of the Hit Parade.57 Books produced in this vein tend to embed Seeger’s work within the various events that have come to characterize the revival within its emerging historical narrative, from the folk hotbed that New York

City’s Greenwich Village became to the popularity of the annual Newport Folk Festival to the participation of many folk artists in the extensive activism of the sixties. Other

56 “Poughkeepsie Journal Life: Pete Seeger,” 1996, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 4, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 57 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 – 1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2002), 102.

texts similarly explore Seeger through the folk communities and events that he was involved with but take up an earlier time frame than the New Folk Revivalists, exploring the ascent of folk song in terms of its influence and widespread appeal in the 1920s through the late 1950s. These authors are by and large more interested in the politically charged nature of folk music, which they emphasize to be part and parcel with the cultural arm of the Communist Party in the United States. For these scholars, the bottom line of the folk song movement in this period was that it was a popular front attempt to intertwine radical ideas with American cultural preoccupations and dilemmas. Thus, for example, songs like “Which Side Are You On?” become specifically about the struggles of coal miners in Kentucky when the song’s fundamental message was borrowed from

Marxist and pro-Soviet tropes about business greed and proletarian exploitation.58 The third and final trend in Seeger scholarship concerns a growing number of biographies written about him which, like the books on folk music’s earlier twentieth century development, have devoted most of their attention to Seeger’s political outlooks and activities. Much of the scholarship on Pete Seeger and folk song more generally does not fit perfectly comfortably into these categories, and often it combines the interests of each to a more or lesser extent. Nevertheless, this framework provides a somewhat useful tool in making sense of the literature’s development in these areas.

Unsurprisingly, the earliest works on Seeger and American folk song are concerned with the movement’s pre-New Folk Revival development, in part because some of them were written during or just after the Revival and wanted to explore its

58 (a) Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011), 158. (b) Robbie Lieberman, “My Song is My Weapon:” People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930 – 1950 (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1989), 4. (c) Richard Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957, 89, 91.

origins. Seminal among these is Richard Reuss’s 1971 Ph.D. dissertation, American Folk

Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957.59 Not formally published until 2000 due to fears among intellectual circles that it would invoke sympathy for radical causes or encourage university campus activism, for decades scholars considered American Folk

Music to be something of an underground classic.60 In it, Reuss interrogated what in his day was rumored to be a strong connection between folk song and Soviet sympathizers.

His research uncovered a rather straightforward relationship between the two, discussing the interest of the American Communist Party in using song to inspire support for itself.61

Communist musicians, like Charles Seeger, established the Composer’s Collective to write radical music and the Party intermingled with union initiatives to establish workers’ and immigrant choruses.62

From here, Reuss goes onto to discuss the introduction of folk culture into

American communist communities, discussing its unique appeal as neither “mass media” nor “aristocratic ‘fine art,’” but containing a rich national heritage allowing it to be cast as the “people’s music.”63 A number of first generation folk musicians, including Woody

Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Mike Gold, Burl Ives, Josh White, and Pete Seeger began their careers in this context.64 Ultimately, however, folk communities came to share a rocky and limited relationship with the Communist Party-USA, which saw folk performers as impure and unreliable in their commitment to bottom-up revolution.65 All the while, as Reuss insightfully points out, folk singing radicals never shared a

59 Richard Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957. 60 Ibid., 5. 61 Ibid., 29 – 30. 62 Ibid., 52. 63 Ibid., 5. 64 Ibid., 126. 65 Ibid., 139.

completely committal relationship with Soviet communism; their work was obscured by competing preoccupations, like striving for racial and class equality within the local regionalisms of the United States.66 Reuss’s work is bolstered by a number of interviews he conducted with prominent figures in America’s left-wing and folk movements, including Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Sing Out! magazine editor Irwin Silber, and folk song writers like Pete Seeger and Lee Hays.67 Operating in Reuss’s vein is another scholar, Robbie Lieberman, who in 1989 wrote “My Song is My Weapon:”

People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930 – 1950.68 More emphatically then Reuss, perhaps, Lieberman makes the case for Communist Party involvement with early twentieth century folk communities. She suggests that despite the popular front’s efforts to render Soviet leftism as culturally more American, the Party line always took precedence over American interests. This sentiment becomes obvious, for example, in the decision of the Almanac singers to oppose U.S. intervention during

World War II as long as Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler held; once the Soviet

Union entered the war, the Almanacs were soon singing songs like “‘Round, ‘Round

Hitler’s Grave.”69 Lieberman’s book ends with the blacklisting of groups like the

Weavers during the early Cold War from their radicalism that Lieberman suggests was not confined to the past, but still very much intact during the late 1940s and 1950s.70

Reuss’s and Liberman’s works emphasize the radical origins of the folk movement and

66 Richard Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957, 87, 92, 94. 67 Ibid., 176, 260. 68 Robbie Lieberman, “My Song is My Weapon:” People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930 – 1950. 69 Ibid., 54. 70 Ibid., 153.

provide helpful historical underpinnings to the texts that cover its later development – the

New Folk Revival of the late 1950s and 1960s.

The two capstone works of the New Folk Revival are Robert Cantwell’s 1996 book When We Were Good: The Folk Revival and Ronald Cohen’s 2002 Rainbow Quest:

The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 – 1970.71 Cantwell’s book offers a comprehensive and complex history of the long twentieth century folk revival, in which he discusses the cultural origins of modern folk cultures and music, developed from labor and Jim Crow struggles, like worker exploitation and minstrelsy performances.72 He devotes a great deal of attention, and sometimes whole chapters, to specific artists, including Mike and Pete Seeger, as well as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.73 His chapter on

Pete Seeger, “He Shall Overcome,” situates Seeger within wider historical realities and tropes relevant to who Seeger became as a performer. According to Cantwell, Seeger’s banjo, for example, “embodied not only the victimization and marginality of the plantation slave but the Spartan and adventurous spirit of the itinerant theatrical player.”74

Cantwell, too, discusses the earlier precursors to the New Folk Revival, like the popular front politics of the thirties, but presents these as precursors to the New Left movement of the sixties, for which folk music became a readily available soundtrack.75

Cohen’s Rainbow Quest is a richly detailed reference for New Folk Revival, devoting a great deal of attention to the successes of sixties folkies like Dylan and Baez, although he is conscious of the movement’s first generation of artists and the adversity

71 (a) Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996). (b) Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest. 72 Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good, 23, 34. 73 Ibid., 40, 313. 74 Ibid., 246. 75 Ibid., 117.

that came to them by the middle of the century as they faced House Un-American

Activities trials and the subsequent loss of many careers.76 He mentions the role of younger performers in activist movements, like civil rights, while also questioning the utility and legitimacy of white, bourgeois artists singing on behalf of the black community.77 Cohen’s work additionally provides many nuts-and-bolts narratives of background actors and institutions that were instrumental to the Revival, such as the interest of Columbia Records in signing on many of the day’s brightest folk stars and the development of Sing Out! magazine, a newsletter for fans interested in following the on- goings of the folk community.78 Rainbow Quest provides a detailed overview of the essential actors and events that comprised the Revival.

In the mid to late 1970s, a friend and colleague of Richard Reuss, David King

Dunaway, approached Pete Seeger about the possibility of writing his biography. Up to this point, Seeger had long been hesitant to permit a scholarly, book-length look at his life. He has long felt that his role in the Folk Revival or any other significant events in mid-century America has been greatly bolstered by the work of hundreds of unnamed others.79 As an old labor saying that he put to music suggests, “drops of water turn a mill, [but] singly none, singly none.”80 But Seeger at last let down his defenses, allowing

Dunaway to conduct scores of interviews with him and his contemporaries and gave

Dunaway access to “The Barn,” a shed on Seeger’s property in Beacon, New York in which he holds thousands of unpublished documents, from articles to personal

76 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 73, 82, 177, 222. 77 Ibid., 207, 218. 78 Ibid., 85, 104, 201, 223, 249. 79 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 267. 80 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184.

correspondence.81 Dunaway also drew from a number of other relevant sources, including Sing Out! magazine and the mimeographed Broadside folk newsletter, the progressive newspaper The Daily Worker, and the FBI files that were accumulated on

Seeger, the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, and several others in his community.82 From these, in 1981 Dunaway published a magisterial biography on Seeger, covering his early life and radical upbringing through his music and activism in the 1950s and 1960s and concluding with his environmental efforts to clean up New York’s Hudson River beginning in the later sixties.83 Dunaway updated his biography releasing a second edition in 2008. While his book writes at length on many aspects of Seeger’s life, connections, and career, he is perhaps heaviest on Seeger as an artist of topical songs and a broadly progressive worldview, devoting extensive attention, for example, to Seeger’s

HUAC trial and fight for leftist causes.84

Following Dunaway have been two shorter biographies, each published in 2009.

One is Alec Wilkinson’s The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger, which primarily discusses the details of Seeger’s private life, from his family relations to his log cabin on the Hudson.85 The other is Allan Winkler’s “To Everything There is a Season:”

Pete Seeger and the Power of Song.86 Like Dunaway, Winkler is more focused on

Seeger’s public cultural and political life, and makes a case for his role as the singularly most important folk artist of the New Folk Revival, beyond competitors, for example,

81 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? xiii. 82 Ibid., xxiii, 432, 446, 466, 487. 83 Ibid., 3, 158, 346. 84 Ibid., 172 – 270. 85 Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger (New York: Knopf, 2008), 9, 28. 86 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season:” Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (New York: Oxford University, 2009).

such as Bob Dylan.87 Despite some occasional new details and moments of added subtlety, both Wilkinson and Winkler’s works reflect much of what was previously covered in Dunaway, though all three provide comprehensive and useful narratives of

Seeger’s life and work.

Interventions

The existing literature on Pete Seeger and his participation in the folk revivals of the twentieth century, whether one emphasizes their emergence in the thirties or later on in the fifties and sixties, is by and large an innovative and informative body of history.

Scholars have gone to great lengths to establish the relationship between Seeger’s progressive background and his cultural contributions, and have discovered and portrayed a complex relationship between the two. They have also well-presented Seeger’s fluctuating role while “chasing causes,” to use his words, describing the ins and outs of his career as a protest signer.88 Despite these strengths, some scholars, particularly those who hail from musicology circles, have expressed frustration that no studies have appeared yet which look seriously at Seeger’s role as a musician – a writer of sound and lyrics.89 What this study seeks to do is to combine the approaches already taken, concerned as they are with Seeger the progressive and the protest singer, with an increased emphasis on Seeger’s musical and performance presence to consider how he went about using folk song as a tool of social, political, and cultural reform in mid-

87 These “competitors,” it’s worth noting, are constructed by contemporaries. Folk singers rarely thought of themselves as in competition with one another for influence or publicity. 88 (a) PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . (b) Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer, title. 89 Ted Olson. Review of To Everything There is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, by Allan Winkler. Journal of American Music 29, no. 1 (2011).

century America.90 It does not assume that Seeger carried an influential dual role as a musician and an activist, but will interrogate how he used music to become this.

For Seeger, music and activism for social change were not two separate, if related, phenomena. Music as activism more closely fits his approach, which he applied through building, just like old John Henry, a musical railroad. Seeger’s railroad was, in many ways, world making. He introduced his audiences to experiences outside of their own to draw his listeners closer together and closer to what were once far flung people, times, and places as they envisioned them through folk songs, rendering the world smaller and more familiar than what prevailing Cold War borders and hostilities suggested. Seeger’s music became one way in which racial and class equality, international cooperation, a search for alternatives aside from war in handling conflict, and other social changes became more realistic, feasible, and necessary to Americans. It’s also worth pointing out that the image of a railroad is an essentially spatial one, and this is as true of Seeger’s railroad as any. Just as America’s trains lumber to and fro along hills and valleys,

Seeger’s music interacted with space in particular ways to accomplish its world making and changing mission: physically, Seeger’s travels allowed him to accumulate the vast number of songs he knew from all over the country and the globe, making it possible for him to share them with his audiences and in so doing, menace their perceptions of the world around them. Metaphorically, Seeger’s music also created spaces that people could enter into while listening to a song, trying on the experience and identity of its

90 To clarify, methodologically this study relies on historical interpretation, socio-cultural analysis, and some use of performance studies to approach Seeger as an enormously influential and effective performer and communicator of folk music. It does not handle Seeger’s work using tools from music-related disciplines.

author and theme for size.91 This created an opportunity among Seeger’s listeners for a moment of empathy and connection rare in its depth. The case this study makes relies heavily on the theories put forth by five authors, and throughout will apply, add to, and complicate the valuable work that they have each contributed.

Foremost among the authors this work converses with is Josh Kun, author of the

2005 book Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America.92 In it, Kun asserts that the railroad building power of music lies in its capacities to unleash “audiotopias,” on its listeners, something that this study believes Seeger to have done at great length. An “audiotopia” is a term that Kun invented to explain the relationship that music has with a listener.

Music, Kun believes, is a “point of contact.”93 When it enters “the bones and tissues” of a listener’s body, an act of hybridization takes place, in which music, which comes from elsewhere, enters that person’s being and powerfully stimulates the imagination until the listener finds him or herself transported (metaphorically) to a place beyond the here and now.94 What follows is a confrontation between the listener’s understanding of his or her own self-identity and the context in which the song is situated. An audiotopia is rather like a “utopia,” a safe, ideal place, but more closely mirrors what Michel Foucault calls a

“heterotopia,” or a combined multiplicity of idealized places and spaces where the social, cultural, and geographical boundaries known in reality are morphed into a world in which they can all exist together harmoniously.95 Because of its audiotopic power, music is particularly well-suited to foster social change. It places its listeners within a song’s

91 Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 12. 92 Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. 93 Ibid., 2. 94 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 13; 22 – 23. 95 Ibid., 23.

setting and the individuals the song may be about, allowing them to share in the lives and experiences of others.

In Kun’s vein, sociologists Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison and authors of

Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century argue that music “recalls a meaning that lies outside and beyond the self,” but they also add something more: “in that sense,” they suggest, “it can be utopian and pre-modern.”96

Sometimes, the “world that music lives in,” according to Seeger, or the worlds that music can produce, draw from what these authors call the “mobilization of tradition.”97 This is not tradition as in a set of behaviors or rituals frozen in time, but rather a human community that converses together and connects across time through particular mediums.98 In Seeger’s case, this medium is folk song. From Eyerman and Jamison, this study argues that one of the ways in which Seeger challenged contained American society was not only to reintroduce Americans to people different from themselves in the present, but to remind them of by-gone places and spaces that were hidden in this era, like for example, Depression-generated urban and rural dislocation and poverty. Robert

Cantwell, in his landmark article “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk

Revival,” concurs with Eyerman and Jamison’s concept of tradition when he writes that the “spirit” of folksong carries its listeners “beyond itself and into regions where the human story tells itself unabridged and unencumbered.”99 With folk songs, all of human

96 Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 24. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 27. 99 Neil Rosenberg, ed., Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1993), 45.

history and complexity is there, told with a blunt rhythm strange to mid-century cultural mores.

Finally, when discussing music’s ability to transport its listeners to different worlds, Josh Kun writes that eventually, we slide back into “our own worlds,” although we do so “forever changed.”100 Fellow scholar and music critic Karen Tongson agrees with him, but adds that “sometimes popular music is most utopian when it transports us deeper into the heart of our own worlds rather than to different ones. It drags us back.

Not backward looking through time, but back into the spaces and times that collide in our situated presences.”101 What follows is an attempt to look at Seeger’s role in moving his listeners in and out of the “world that music lives in,” and the influence this has wielded on society at large. The narrative begins in 1948, at the height of Seeger’s career with the

Weavers, and arcs through some of the most critical events of his life as a musician and activist into the 1970s. Its goal, more than anything, is to take a good look at the tracks

Seeger built to bring people together as his hammer steadfastly rang through these years.

100 (a) Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 3. (b) Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University, 2011), 25. 101 Karen Tongson, Relocations, 25.

II. “If I Had a Hammer:” 1948 – 1960

The Weavers

In 1948, Pete Seeger and three of his longtime friends and musical collaborators,

Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert, decided to blend their voices and their instrumental talents and form a folk quartet.102 After hearing how they sounded together, they were delighted to realize as Gilbert described several decades later, that they were

“really good!”103 They called themselves “The Weavers,” after a nineteenth century

German play about proletarian weavers struggling for better treatment in their society.104

Their first year as a group was spent in the relatively small world of Hootenannies and labor movement gatherings in New York City – a world which, marginal as it was to the average middle class American, was nevertheless the place in which most of them grew up and lived their lives as progressive musicians.105 During this year, their paid bookings might have been “few and far between,” as Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber remembered in

1963, but “the music they were making was developing in intensity, conviction, and artistic level.”106

In 1949, they were discovered by Gordon Jenkins and signed on to Decca

Records.107 What resulted shortly thereafter was, in Silber’s words, a “meteoric rise to fame.”108 By 1950, two of the Weavers’ songs, “Goodnight, Irene,” and “Tzena, Tzena,

Tzena,” had reached the top of the Hit Parade, and they were singing virtually every night

102 Irwin Silber, “The Weavers: New ‘Find’ of the Hit Parade,” Sing Out! February, 1951, 6. 103 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 104 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 4. 105 Irwin Silber, “The Singing Weavers,” Sing Out! April – May, 1963. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid. 108 Irwin Silber, “The Weavers: New ‘Find’ of the Hit Parade,” Sing Out! February, 1951, 6.

in the nation’s concert halls and night clubs.109 The Weavers suddenly found themselves facing an unlikely outcome for all of them, one of money and fame that seemed more fitting for the day’s pop artists than for these bohemian folk singers. But from the beginning, who the Weavers were, where they came from, and what they saw the purpose of their music to be, would present a challenge to American society, even as that society embraced them.

Riot in Peekskill

The Weavers’ rise to stunning professional success in 1949 coincided with two of the Cold War’s most traumatic events: the Soviet acquisition of nuclear capability and the founding of the Soviet-backed People’s Republic of China.110 Within a matter of months, the ultimate source of leverage that U.S. policymakers held over the Soviet Union – the

“Bomb” – was eliminated.111 Moreover, not only was Stalin’s totalitarian menace suddenly armed with relatively equivalent military might to the United States, but it was expanding throughout the world’s eastern hemisphere, having brought China under communist dictator Mao Zedong into its fold. Soviet activity was becoming more and more disturbing to Americans, many of whom began to nurture a growing anti-Soviet sentiment. Public fears and hostilities were increasingly directed at members of the left as Americans erected borders around themselves to keep safe from not only from the enemy abroad but the enemy within, and they guarded their boundaries with zeal.

This became most apparent to Pete Seeger when, that same year, he performed at an outdoor concert in Peekskill, New York with the well-respected African American

109 Irwin Silber, “The Weavers: New ‘Find’ of the Hit Parade,” Sing Out! February, 1951, 6. 110 H.W. Brands, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2010), 51. 111 Ibid.

baritone, Paul Robeson.112 Robeson was an outspoken radical and Soviet sympathizer, supporting the Soviet Union’s law against racial discrimination at this time and the sentiment among progressives more generally that racial inequality stemmed from capitalism’s history of money and property-based class stratification.113 Robeson’s call for a radical turn in America, one bent in the direction of racial and class equity, was relatively popular in the thirties and tolerated for most of the forties, but as America entered the Cold War world of the fifties, it became an unacceptable point of view. The new American intolerance for figures like Robeson served as a double-edged sword: it both suppressed dissent from those who supported the Soviet idea while also working

(intentionally or otherwise) to suppress items on the radical agenda regarding issues that were for the most part American home-grown, like the consistent American problem of racial inequality. Before the concert, “hoodlums” and “ignorant” people, as Seeger called them, shouted “go back to Russia! Kikes! Nigger-lovers!” as Robeson and other performers were arriving at the venue.114 At the concert’s end, quietly supported by the local police department and the Ku Klux Klan, members of a mob on the edges of the venue’s grounds attacked Seeger, Robeson, and other concert performers and personnel, hurling stones at the “station wagon carrying [Seeger’s] wife, two babies, their grandfather, and two friends.”115 Everyone survived, but as Seeger washed the glass shards out of his children’s hair that evening, he was stunned and shaken by the events

112 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 92. 113 Ibid. 114 (a) Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 93. (b) Joe Stead, Peekskill Outrage: Sidney Poitier, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson. . 115 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 93.

he’d just endured. America’s new intolerance for the progressive community was acquiring a momentum that was increasingly difficult to minimize or ignore.116

The Work of the Weavers

Despite the nation’s mounting political tensions and surging anti-communism, the

Weavers’ success continued. Their associations with progressive radicalism were largely unknown to their new audience of mainstream American radio listeners now that they had entered the “commercial big time,” in the words of a New York Times report.117 And under the care of a vigilant management team, staff members were sure to smooth over the Weavers’ radical edges before they sung to the general public.118 The group was asked to dress in formal evening attire when appearing onstage (a rule that the casual and often recalcitrant Seeger resented; to protest it, he sometimes wore bright red socks under his pant legs), and were banned from commercially distributing one of their well-loved songs, “If I Had a Hammer.”119

Co-written by Seeger and Hays, “If I Had a Hammer” is an upbeat song about swinging one’s hammer to drive out attitudes of social intolerance and inequality, forging instead a bond of brotherhood between Americans. Cheerfully, the Weavers sang, “If I had a hammer / I’d hammer in the morning / I’d hammer in the evening / All over this land / I’d hammer out danger / I’d hammer out a warning / I’d hammer out love between

116 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 94. 117 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 62. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.

my brothers and my sisters / All over this land.”120 But in these days of limited tolerance, to some this song seemed subversive, hammering out a “warning” and calling for a suspiciously pink-tinged order of collective brotherhood. When published in a 1950 issue of People’s Songs Bulletin, a person wrote in, “Cancel my subscription: all you left out was the sickle.”121 In just over a decade’s time, the new folk trio Peter, Paul, and

Mary would popularize a musically streamlined and faster-paced version of the tune, but during the Weavers’ heyday it remained largely hidden from public ears.122

The Weavers may not have been able to openly wield a hammer through their song, but this did not stop them from sharing other folk songs (with similar meanings behind them) from their large repertoire with their audiences. When they took to the stage, they often sang from the best of Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly, wielding a hammer in a more subtle but perhaps equally effective way to crack through society’s boundaries, often to promote racial and ethnic harmony. Through Lead Belly, particularly his tune

“Irene, Goodnight,” the Weavers brought the music of a little known African American ex-convict to a mainstream audience.123 When they sang “Irene” they did not do so unselfconsciously or without mention of the song’s author and origins. Most of the time, they were quite explicit about them. Once, broadcasting the song on television, the

Weavers opened with its first line, their sound dominated by the smooth but “strong” and

“direct” voice of Ronnie Gilbert, as Peter, Paul, and Mary’s Peter Yarrow has described

120 (a) Originally, “If I Had a Hammer” was titled “The Hammer Song.” (b) “The Hammer Song: Words and Lyrics by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger,” “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 8, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 121 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 162. (b) People’s Songs Bulletin was a newsletter on happenings within the folk song community published by People’s Artists until 1949. It was later replaced with Sing Out! magazine. 122 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 161. 123 “Weavers: Goodnight, Irene.” .

it: “Irene, goodnight / Irene, goodnight / Goodnight, Irene / Goodnight, Irene / I’ll see you in my dreams.”124 Following this, Lee Hays held up a photo of Lead Belly and offered a brief description of his life and contributions to their televised audience:

“We learned this song ‘Irene’ from a friend of ours, his name was Huddie Ledbetter. He called himself ‘Lead Belly,’ king of the twelve-string guitar. Some people thought he was the greatest folksinger that ever lived in America. We know him best as a rememberer of folk songs, and he taught us dozens of them, especially ‘Irene.’ This was his theme song, and he sang it for over thirty years before he died. Well, he died before ‘Irene’ got to be known to so many millions of Americans. Huddie had a hard and wonderful life. It’s over now, but his songs are still very much alive.” 125

The Folk Process

From Seeger’s point of view, the Weavers were participating in the heart of what he understood folk song to be all about: “the folk process.”126 He believed that folk music existed as a process, the “continual change, contradictions, action, and interaction of opposing influences.”127 Significantly, Seeger claimed that folk songs were not the result of a process – one in which song writers and listeners heard one another’s songs and innovated on them over time, “changing a note here or adding a note there,” in his words – but instead, “the process [was] the actuality.”128 The Weavers were passing on their version of Lead Belly’s tune hoping to get others to play, hum, and sing it out with them, riffing on the song themselves and making it their own. Though asked many hundreds of times about the Weavers and his own work as within the genre of “folk,” rarely did Seeger attempt to define folk music in any other way except as this process of inheritance and innovation (he’d often balk at attempts to establish a more formal

124 “Weavers: Goodnight, Irene.” . 125 Ibid. 126 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 68. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid.

definition of folk song, such as the one published in the authoritative Funk and Wagnalls

Dictionary of Folklore: “A folk song must be old, carried on for generations by people who have had no contact with urban arts and influence. A folk song must show no trace of individual authorship”).129

Seeger would occasionally refuse even to distinguish the music the Weavers were making, though they called it folk, from the day’s leading pop songs, like the stuff of

Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra.130 In 1965, Seeger asked “is this [effort to separate folk from pop song] not similar to all the trouble the fascist racists have in defining the difference between colored and white races?”131 So when they popularized songs like

“Irene, Goodnight,” the Weavers were trying to collapse both racial and musical boundaries. By singing Lead Belly’s songs, they were introducing their listeners to the experiences and feelings of a poor African American, rendering them familiar and relatable, no matter how distant Lead Belly’s actual life might have been to a middle class white who listened to his song. The most conspicuous dividing line between Lead

Belly and the Weavers’ audiences, his blackness, took up a more peripheral role as people thought about what was being expressed through his song.

Folk Song to Transcend Social Boundaries: Possibilities and Limits

According to Allan Winkler, in addition to race, the Weavers were also “breaking down the often artificial boundaries between different kinds of music,” rendering folk songs as common to mainstream American music as their pop counterparts.132 If one

129 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 67. 130 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 35. 131 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 69. 132 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 63.

sees music as a metaphor for humankind, as the Weavers often did, then this was accomplishing an important goal. The Weavers’ songs were becoming more familiar to the public’s musical tastes, and this allowed them to spread their message across a broad national platform. But it may be that there is something lost when folk songs become too much like pop songs – in his younger years, Seeger more closely aligned himself with this position.133 He was frequently irritated by pop song lyrics (often expressing a shallow and syrupy love between a couple when there were wars raging and injustices everywhere) written for widespread appeal and commercial gain.134

In a similar vein, it’s possible that when the Weavers sang folk music, they’d become so conventional in their appearance (white and well-groomed), so tempered in their radicalism, and so mainstream in their popular appeal that when they sang songs like “Irene, Goodnight” the exchange between them and their listeners resembled well-to- do white artists simply singing to their reflections. This would render the tribute they paid to Lead Belly as falling on deaf ears, or ones that adopted a black exceptionalism that deemed Huddie Ledbetter a talented singer but ultimately had no raised awareness of his plight as a black man living in a white dominated world. This presents an obvious limitation to the Weavers’ message, and Seeger later reflected that sometimes the

“country people” that he and the group sang about were ignored or parodied and belittled by audiences or imitators of their music.135 But sometimes, he said, they were able to introduce to a commercial public “music [that] said something about people’s real lives,”

133 Pete Seeger, In His Words, 243 – 244. 134 Ibid., 244. 135 Ibid., 261.

whether it was Lead Belly’s or any number of old folk writers.136 Although the Weavers’ music was by no means always effective in drawing their fans into the personalities and experiences of their songs, this does not negate that at times it was – and the social horizons this widened as Weavers’ fans encountered somebody like Lead Belly were not insignificant, especially in a world in which these interactions were rare, strange, and not always tolerated.

The Weavers and the Red Scare

Though unaware, the Weavers were on the eve of a first-hand encounter with the limited tolerance of the Cold War era. While they enjoyed their success, international events continued to unfold all around them, contributing to an already pervasive Red

Scare throughout American society.137 In 1950, the communist-led North Korea attacked the South, creating a conflict that quickly involved the United States.138 This overlapped with a few high profile spy cases, leading people to believe that their government was infiltrated with communist conspirators.139 Efforts to rid the country of communists began with the Truman Administration’s 1947 establishment of a Federal Employee

Loyalty Program in hopes of surfacing potential security risks among government workers.140 Shortly thereafter, Congress developed the House Un-American Activities

Committee, drawing from FBI surveillance files and other reports to question suspected

136 Pete Seeger, In His Words, 261. 137 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 65. 138 Ibid. 139 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 65. (b) “Songs and Poems for the Rosenbergs,” Sing Out! May, 1953. (c) H.W. Brands, American Dreams,53. 140 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 65.

communists.141 If suspects refused to comply with Congressional interrogation or were found guilty of subversion of the United States, they could face severe criminal punishments, including several years in prison.142 HUAC became a well-known institution charged with the containment of American society, taking as hard a line toward communism within the country’s borders as diplomats were outside of them.

Throughout the early 1950s, members of the Weavers gradually became targeted as members of the left.143 Pete Seeger received the most attention for his radical connections from both the media and the FBI.144 His time with folk singing community of New York City, including as a member of the Almanac Singers and as the director of the progressive folk music publication, People’s Songs, had him documented as a potential subversive as early as 1939.145 In 1948, an issue of the right-wing journal

Counterattack informed its readers of Seeger’s radical credentials: “This man [Seeger] is director of People’s Songs, an important Communist front . . . He entertains continually at party functions as well as at meetings of fronts and Communist-controlled unions. He was on the party line during the Stalin-Hitler alliance . . . till Hitler attacked Russia.

Then the party line changed and so did Seeger.”146 Seeger was well aware of the publicity aimed at him for his radical past and for a while he and the Weavers tried to avoid attracting any more. He had not forgotten the violence directed at Paul Robeson in

Peekskill, and though he was not one to compromise even in these tense times,

141 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 66. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid. 145 David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 20, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1946 – 1951.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 146 David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 21, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1942 – 1950.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

nevertheless obliged with requests that he avoid radical gatherings and comply with the image of conventionality the Weavers’ were trying to uphold.147 But despite these efforts, the Weavers found themselves unable to avoid a confrontation with anti- communism.

Mounting awareness of the Weavers as potential subversives came to a head in the summer of 1951. A scheduled performance on a variety show hosted by NBC’s Dave

Garroway was canceled without warning, and the governor of Ohio withdrew the

Weavers’ invitation to sing at the Ohio State Fair.148 Unknown to the Weavers at the time, the governor had written to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. “I remember the

Peekskill incident,” he wrote, adding “I do know that the ‘Weavers’ participated in it.” 149

He then submitted the following request: “Would you mind giving me whatever information you can on these individuals concerning their loyalty to the government[?]”150 Hoover was happy to comply, providing the governor with a full profile gathered from various field agents on the Weavers’ links to radicalism, from their frequent mentions in the communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, to Seeger’s stint as a music instructor for the supposedly communist tainted Jefferson School of Social Science in New York “for the fall term, 1946.”151 But attacks against the Weavers exploded in

1952 when Harvey Matusow, a former member of the Communist Party and employee of

People’s Songs, the Jefferson School, and a few communist book shops testified before

147 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 67. 148 Ibid. 149 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 26, “FBI Files. FBI National Office Files on the Weavers, Lang Affidavit, 1951 – 1962.” (b) The Weavers were scheduled to perform with Paul Robeson on the day of the Peekskill riot, but only Seeger was available to perform that day. 150 David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 26, “FBI Files. FBI National Office Files on the Weavers, Lang Affidavit, 1951 – 1962.” 151 Ibid.

Congress, citing the Weavers as “members of People’s Songs and members of the

Communist Party.” They included “Pete Seeger . . . Ronnie Gilbert . . . a member of the singing group, The Weavers; Freddie Hellerman, also a member of the singing group.” 152

Matusow did not mention Lee Hays, but there was no need for him to; by 1952 the FBI had been collecting a file on Hays for several years.153 Matusow had testified about several other suspected radicals in addition to the Weavers.154 A few years later, he released a book entitled False Witness, in which he admitted that some of his testimonies were exaggerated or outright lies, and that FBI agents were paying him for them.155

Nevertheless, for the Weavers the damage was already done. Their lives – and careers – would be permanently altered.

After Matusow’s testimony, the connections the Weavers had with progressive organizations and the Communist Party itself became public.156 Articles proliferated in newspapers around the country with titles like “Singers Accused as Reds” and “Melody

Weaves On, Along Party Lines.”157 Within a matter of months the group was blanketed by an uncompromising blacklist, forcing them to take fewer bookings and ones in less

152 David Dunaway Collection, Box 9, Fol. 79, “FBI Files. FBI New York field office files on People’s Artists, Inc. and People’s Songs, 1951 – 1952.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 153 David Dunaway Collection, Boxes 1 – 14, Library of Congress American Folklife Center . Lee Hays is mentioned repeatedly in files the FBI gathered on his work as an Almanac Singer, Vice President of People’s Songs, a Weaver, and other involvements in the radical folk singing community. Further information on Hays’ run-in with HUAC is available via the Lee Hays Collection at the Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives in Washington, DC. 154 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 9, Fol. 79, “FBI Files. FBI New York field office files on People’s Artists, Inc. and People’s Songs, 1951 – 1952.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) David King Dunaway, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” 416. 155 David King Dunaway, “How Can I Keep from Singing” 187. 156 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 24, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1941 – 1957.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 68. 157 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 24, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1941 – 1957.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 26, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1941 – 1957.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

ideal locations, like “Daffy’s Bar and Grill on the outskirts of Cleveland,” according to

Seeger.158 By December of 1952, the group decided to disband, taking a sabbatical that

Lee Hays said soon became a “Mondayical and a Tuesdayical.”159 Although the blacklist inevitably caused each of the Weavers to face a period of loss and uncertainty given how suddenly their lives changed, it presented an opportunity for Seeger. He had lost a national platform to perform folk music, but was relieved at no longer having to cope with the limitations of commercial work: “I didn’t want a commercial career,” he later recounted, “I looked upon nightclubs as foolish places where people got drunk. People went away to forget their troubles . . . I didn’t want people to forget their troubles.”160 As a Weaver, Seeger may have been able to introduce folk singers like Lead Belly to a wide array of Americans, but over time he had difficulty stomaching the occasions when they didn’t seem to care about him or anything else that the Weavers were singing about.

Seeger Goes Solo

Together with his wife, Toshi (an adept organizer and Seeger’s unofficial manager) and his agent, Harold Leventhal, Seeger decided to go it alone, pursuing a solo career as a folk performer.161 His venue options were limited given the realities of the blacklist, but Seeger was able to find places to perform at churches, schools, community centers, colleges, and summer camps.162 The work of the FBI, HUAC, and the blacklist combined to keep dangerous “commies” like Seeger away from an audience that might

158 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 68. 159 Ibid., 69. 160 Ibid., 71 – 72. 161 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 70 – 71. (b) David King Dunaway, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” 240 – 241. 162 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 71.

be subject to his unorthodox ideas.163 Ironically, snatching him away from a broad public audience put Seeger in direct contact with the people these anti-communist organizations most wanted to keep him from: America’s youth, complete with their unformed minds and coming roles in the next generation.

Although Seeger looked forward to sharing folk songs with his new audiences, making a living under the blacklist would no doubt present many challenges to him and his family. There wasn’t much money in church and school bookings, and despite

Seeger’s personal rejection of material gain, he still had a family to feed.164 To make enough to live from, Seeger would have to perform extremely often. This launched a period of extensive travel for Seeger as he appeared almost everywhere that would take him, the next ten years constituting some of the busiest in his life. A look at the many concert posters Levanthal commissioned to advertise for Seeger at this time testifies to this. “Harold Levanthal presents Pete Seeger in a concert for kids!” they read, or “Pete

Seeger, Folk Music Concert, [featuring] Folk Songs [from] Around the World,” or “Pete

Seeger [at the] Maryland Casualty Auditorium, Nov. 1, 1959,” or “An Evening of Folk

Music with Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry, Lisner Auditorium, George Washington

University,” or finally, as if to suggest the great number of them that had already taken place, one of them simply announced, “Pete Seeger: Another Folk Concert.”165

But in spite of its strains, Seeger relished the challenges that his new life as an itinerant performer presented. Throughout the remainder of the fifties and the early

163 David Dunaway Collection, Box 4, Fol. 26, “FBI Files. FBI national office files on Almanac Singers/People’s Songs, 1941 – 1957.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 164 David King Dunaway, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” 238. 165 (a) Pete Seeger Concert Advertisements, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 2, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) The Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Box 33, Fol. 14, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives.

sixties, Seeger appeared on campus stages, before “very small children,” and seated

Indian-style on a forest floor, teaching banjo lessons to young summer camp goers while light streamed in through the conifers on warm summer days.166 One of Seeger’s most regularly visited camps was Camp Woodland in the Catskills of upstate New York.167 A summer retreat for “red diaper babies,” or the children of now underground old leftists from the days of the popular front, the camp espoused progressive ideals like pacifism, internationalism, and racial integration.168 One July evening in 1962, a man who worked at the camp introduced Seeger to the children there in the following way:

“I think that those of you who’ve been at Camp Woodland know that there are many peoples who sing about their lives and their work, and the things that make them unhappy and the things that make them glad . . . And once we had a great American poet who wrote a poem called ‘I Hear America Singing.’ Then he goes on to talk about the different people and how each one sings about the thing that interests them. Well, if any of you ever want to write a poem, you should write a poem called ‘I Hear the Whole World Singing,’ because the people of Kenya, the people of Spain, the people of Africa, everywhere in the world people sing about their own lives, about their own struggles, about their own sorrows, and joys. There are also people who go around and learn about these things and tell us about these different things . . . They’re people who bring us the songs of other peoples – we’re not all cowboys but there are people who can sing cowboy songs so we can understand what a cowboy’s life is . . . There’s one person in America who has a feeling for [all of these people] and who knows their songs and can make you understand [them], so that you know what the life of a slave was like, [or the logger], [or the hunter], and all these different people. He’s traveled around and he can feel how other people feel and he can bring their songs to you, so that you know how people in the world feel.”169

166 (a) Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. (b) Andrew Revkin, “Pete Seeger on Optimism, Stabilization and the Internet,” . (c) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 73. 167 Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 168 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 5, Fol. 34, “FBI Files. FBI National Office Files on People’s Artists, Inc., 1949 – 1958.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) David Dunaway Collection, Box 6, Fol. 36, “FBI Files. FBI Files on the four groups, various field offices, 1949 – 1962.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 169 Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives.

Perhaps aware of his lengthy lesson-like introduction, the Woodland staff member ended with “And now I’m not going to talk anymore, I’m going to introduce Pete

Seeger.”170 The poet he mentioned was the iconic Walt Whitman, who wrote “I Hear

America Singing” in 1860.171 Josh Kun argues that Whitman’s poem was a tribute to

American democracy and nationhood, but one that was remarkably exclusive, especially along racial lines.172 “I hear America singing,” Whitman writes, “the varied carols I hear,” of “mechanics, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, mothers, and wives.”173 Writing of mostly of lower and middle class workers, Whitman enjoyed the democratic idea of hardworking people climbing to prosperity from modest beginnings, but in his mind, these people were all white – his commitment to the expansionist Mexican War and imperialist projects under notions of manifest destiny are evidence of this.174 To

Whitman, whose interpretative eyesight was dimmed by nineteenth century notions of a fundamental asymmetry between the white and dark races, America’s whites were the only Americans he could see, and their getting ahead would make the country great.

Interestingly, in 1964, Kun also writes that an overwhelmingly famous trio of pop music stars – Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Fred Waring – teamed up to produce an album in Whitman’s honor, America, I Hear You Singing.175 In it, the singers included a number of patriotic songs to laud “those ideas upon which the country was founded,” including Earl Robinson and Lewis Allan’s “The House I Live In” and Woody Guthrie’s

170 Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 171 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 30. 172 Ibid., 30 – 31. 173 Ibid., 30. 174 Ibid., 31. 175 Ibid., 34.

“This Land is Your Land.”176 Unknowingly, the three included folk songs that were written as popular front clarion calls against racism and for a proletarian unity to transform America, and they both packed quite a political punch in their day.177 But given how these songs were presented and arranged in America, I Hear You Singing!

(through the smooth, celebratory harmonies of Sinatra, Crosby, and Waring) the “teeth” of them were all but removed.178 This was typical for the Cold War culture in which these singers lived – contained American society often smoothed over its rougher edges in this way. Its persistent economic injustices and social inequalities threatened the nation’s place as both the material and moral champion over its Soviet contender, so they went unacknowledged, living in the shadows of ostentatious displays of patriotism. Like

Whitman’s original poem, blinded by deeply ingrained racial notions that rendered Anglo

America the only America, during the Cold War the only America these pop artists acknowledged was a tame, prosperous, and unified one – even if attaining that image of unity meant suppressing difference, in society and even where it appeared in the nation’s so-called “musical heritage.”179

But on a warm July evening at Camp Woodland, the well-meaning instructor who had introduced Pete Seeger picked up something different about him: when he heard

America singing, he didn’t have “selective hearing” according to Kun, hearing that acknowledges white prosperity but buries the differences of “other peoples.”180 Seeger didn’t want America to “run from its troubles,” like the nightclub goers he once reluctantly sang for with the Weavers. Seeger heard sounds of difference humming

176 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 35. 177 Ibid. 178 Pete Seeger, “The Emasculation of Folk Music?” Sing Out! Winter 1959, 34. 179 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 40. 180 Ibid., 32.

along, whether this difference derived from someone’s color, class, gender, or ethnicity, like the “cowboy,” the “slave,” or the “hunter.”181 Perhaps in these Cold War years the differences Seeger heard sounded far-off, like a person a stone’s throw away who is unaware of another listening to her softly singing to herself, or a dulled hum whose origins one cannot quite locate. These sounds were faraway and subdued because of

Cold War barriers that kept them at a distance, but Seeger wanted to bring them closer and share them with the audiences he now had available.

In 1946, a member of the FBI carefully clipped and filed away an article from the progressive newspaper, The Daily Worker, discussing the use of political songs within unions.182 The author wanted to drive home a particular point about music’s special value in communicating political ideas: “When you make a speech,” the author argued,

“some people will listen. When you get them to sing themselves, they’ll not only be listening, but they’ll be making the speech for you.”183 Such was music’s persuasive ability, the author believed. Its performative nature – getting people to sing, hum, sway, shut their eyes, or play along (with real or imagined instruments) – allowed people to participate in the music, and to somehow be united with it, in ways that other mediums, like speechmaking, could not elicit. And he found that music’s capacity to draw people into its own unique world could be harnessed to political purposes. If people could be united with song, whether its melodies, its words, or something of both, then perhaps they could also be united with a certain cause if the song was addressing it. Whether or not

181 Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 182 David Dunaway Collection, Box 7, Fol. 59, “FBI Files. FBI New York field office files on People’s Songs, 1946 – 1947. Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 183 Ibid.

one agrees with the author, his argument was enough for the FBI to keep a record of it, just in case he was right enough to conjure up some singing subversives.

To the FBI, Pete Seeger, better known as “Khrushchev’s songbird,” was of course doing just that – using his five-string banjo and a twelve-string guitar to sing progressive tunes that would gladden the heart of any comrade.184 But Seeger didn’t feel quite that way about the music he was making. He admitted that “nothing – not love, sex, our taste in food, clothing, skin coloring, language, sports, architecture, was without political significance.”185 “But,” he added, “this means politics is much more than who is going to get elected next year, or how high taxes are.”186 To Seeger, the most political work he was doing was facing up to the reality that America was “a more recently mongrelized nation than most and our music reflects this” – neither the nation’s people nor its music were “pure,” and he wanted audiences to enjoy the hybrids formed as he played a West

African derived banjo or a German dulcimer, and to sing along with the “lullabies, ballads, work songs, blues, and hymns” that he would show them.187 This was considered only political, and politically controversial, in a world where the uncontrollable nature of difference was not widely tolerated. But Seeger was committed to his musical work regardless: through his music, he wanted to encourage his listeners to embrace being a “whole Human Being in a machine and monopoly age,” and much of this required cracking through the Cold War structures that built up the machine of sameness and allowed it to function.188

184 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 241. 185 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 289. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid. 289 – 290. 188 Ibid., 254.

Audience Participation

Summarizing his career in the early 1990s, Seeger once succinctly said, “It all boils down to what I would most like to do as a musician. Put songs on people’s lips instead of just in their ears.”189 Seeger relished what he called “audience participation,” having his concert goers make music along with him, and incorporated it in almost every performance he gave.190 As his performance skills matured, Seeger recognized the reservations that people tended to have about participating in his music. Some were shy, others wanted to “preserve their dignity,” he would joke, and others still were sometimes reserved or hostile to Seeger’s known leftism, coerced into attending a concert from a friend or a certain amount of curiosity.191 But once Seeger took to the stage, he worked on relaxing his audience’s tensions in a number of ways until at last they would participate. One of Seeger strategies was to divide his audience into vocal parts – base, tenor, and soprano – and have people harmonize with his song’s melodies. Before beginning a song, he would sing a line of it according to all three parts, so that his audience members knew how to sing in line the vocal range appropriate for them.

To Seeger, harmonizing with a song accomplished at least three purposes. First,

Seeger wanted people to participate comfortably in the music, making it their own. A soprano straining to sing lower to match Seeger’s voice would alienate that person from the song at hand, and it would discourage creativity. Seeger did not want audience participation to involve audience members merely parroting his songs. “It is fun to create

189 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 252. 190 Ibid. 191 (a) Pete Seeger: Live in Australia, 1963, DVD, (1963; Acorn Media, 2009). (b) PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, .

for yourself,” he believed, “and if we [in an audience] can help our neighbors in front of us realize some of their own potentialities as singers, we will be doing a service for the whole country.”192 Part of being creative was learning to sing according to one’s own natural capacity.

The second reason for harmonizing was to allow people to nurture the independent, even rebellious, parts of their personalities. When Seeger was twelve years of age, he was a member of a rigid boys’ choir whose musical discipline was stifling and irritating to him.193 To inconspicuously defy his choir master, he used to stand in the back and harmonize to the scores the boys were practicing.194 It was a way for Seeger to be himself in a constrained and pressurized situation – likewise, it couldn’t hurt for

Americans to find alternatives to the pressures of their age, enforced by fears of a nuclear holocaust or criminal punishment for holding an eccentric point of view. The final reason for singing in harmony was to break down his audience’s interpersonal barriers, allowing people to be vulnerable with one another by persuading them not to take themselves so seriously. Seeger’s objective here is most evident when he sings the South

African melody “Wimoweh” with his audiences.195 Singing all three parts to the song’s opening line, “Way up boy, Wimoweh,” Seeger’s audience members would then sink into their respective singing roles. As they were cautiously navigating their voices and contributions as participants, Seeger would belt out “Wimoweh” above them in a high

192 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 254. 193 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 42. 194 Ibid. 195 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184.

falsetto.196 The result was often so unexpected from Seeger’s tenor that it yielded quite a number of laughs. The levity in the room became a way to draw people to together, among many other strategies. Seeger could be remarkably persuasive in getting people to sing with him and one another. The young Bob Dylan, who attended a number of Seeger concerts through the course of his own musical coming-of-age, described the experience in the following way: “Pete Seeger. He had this amazing ability to look at a group of people and to make them all sing parts of [a] song, and he’d make an orchestration out of a simple little song. Everyone in the audience [would be] singing [and] whether you wanted to or not, you’d find yourself singing a part, and it would be beautiful.”197

Harmonizing, though essential to Seeger’s performances, was not the only way he encouraged audience participation. When possible, he requested his performance venues to arrange the chairs according to what he called “democratic seating.”198 Seeger was dissatisfied with the usual arrangement of concert rooms, in which a singer stood at a distance from his audience and elevated on a stage. He preferred to sing in the center of a room with his audience seated around him “in semi-circular fashion.”199 He liked the more intimate and casual setting this provided, and believed that it downplayed his presence in the room, allowing more attention for the music and the people to connect with it and one another. Perhaps it was from the spirit of collective unity he picked up while singing with union workers or at peace marches, or perhaps it was merely a function of his personality, but Seeger saw his audience to be as essential to who he was

196 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 197 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 198 Pete Seeger, “A Few Random Notes,” Sing Out! Winter 1957, 34. 199 Ibid.

as a performer as anything else. “For just as the apex of a pyramid can only be as high as the base is broad,” he observed in 1956, “so we cannot have great professionals unless we have also many audience participants.”200

In addition to their seating arrangement, sometimes Seeger and his audience would work together on what he called “lining out hymns,” in which he would sing out a verse of a hymn and ask his audience to repeat it.201 He did this for decades with one of his favorite hymns, “Jacob’s Ladder.”202 Strumming a guitar and tapping his foot to the melody, Seeger would open with “we are climbing Jacob’s ladder.”203 Nudging his audience to join in, he was quick to follow up with “I don’t hear you!” and “sing it out!” until the audience was energetically repeating after Seeger: “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder / every rung goes higher, higher / every new one makes us stronger / brothers, in our land.”204 Higher and higher climbed Seeger and his audience, until together they reached “revival tent fervor,” according to the Detroit Free Press.205

At the top of Jacob’s ladder, one might say that they entered the “world that music lives in.”206 This world was a place where strangeness and vulnerability relaxed, and where the world’s stiff social boundaries weakened. “When you sing,” claims Peter,

Paul, and Mary’s Peter Yarrow, “you take off your mask. Instead of pretending to be,

200 Pete Seeger, “Why Audience Participation?” Sing Out! Spring 1956, 32. 201 “There’s Nothing to Compare Pete Seeger with an Audience” Advertisement, 1950s, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 2, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 202 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid. 205 “There’s Nothing to Compare Pete Seeger with an Audience” Advertisement, 1950s, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 2, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 206 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 3.

you just are.”207 In this space, it was possible for Seeger’s concert goers to encounter the people and experiences of folk song with less reservation. At colleges, Seeger’s audiences would sing “Hieland Laddie” with him, about nineteenth century Irish transients working on trade ships, “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” an African-

American spiritual sung by freedmen on the South Carolina sea island of St. Helena, or the urban union tune “We Pity Our Bosses.”208 With children, who regarded Seeger as rather like a teacher, he would sing songs like “I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” explaining to them what the song meant before they would begin it together.209 “Funny thing about an old song,” Seeger told the children at Camp Woodland, “it means more here the more you think about it. ‘I’m gonna lay down my sword, that means the thing I was going to try and kill somebody with. But I’m also ‘gonna lay down my shield,’ the thing that protects me when somebody tries to kill me. So it means I’ve got to trust somebody else, that they’re not gonna hurt me.”210 With his younger audiences, Seeger’s performances took the form of an instructor teaching a group about an alternative vision for society’s attitudes and practices.

Not always, though, were Seeger concerts quite so socially and politically loaded.

Seeger loved to make music “for the joy and fun of singing” as a magazine reported on him in the 1960s, and sometimes his songs were about simply letting go of responsibility

207 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 208 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 209 Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 210 Ibid.

and “goofing off.”211 One of Seeger’s banjo melodies, “Goofing Off Suite,” was made while doing just that, so he claims.212 Other Seeger songs are little more than jokes, like the ditty “From Here On Up.”213 “From here on up, the hills don’t get any higher,” he sings three times, until abruptly ending the tune with “But the valleys get deeper and deeper.”214

Whether working as a singer for social causes or a singer for the fun of it, through the 1950s Seeger became very popular among the enclaves he frequented. Newspapers like Detroit’s Free Press and The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin wrote headlines like “There’s nothing to compare with Pete Seeger with an audience,” or “Pete Seeger captivates audience.”215 Boston’s Christian Science Monitor declared that “Pete Seeger is not just a folk singer; he is a way of life filled with warmth and good will.”216 Despite the suppression of the blacklist and the problems it caused him, by the mid to later fifties

Seeger seemed to be on his feet again, singing with audiences and teaching them about folk song.217 But unfortunately for this cheerful troubadour, the valleys of his life would deepen beginning in 1955, when the House Un-American Activities Committee would summon him to testify before Congress about his “subversive activities” while as a youth and a member of the Weavers.218

211 (a) Topper magazine, 1962, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) “Record Review: Pete Seeger, Goofing-Off Suite,” Sing Out! Summer 1956, 29. 212 “Record Review: Pete Seeger, Goofing-Off Suite,” Sing Out! Summer 1956, 29. 213 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 214 Ibid. 215 “There’s Nothing to Compare Pete Seeger with an Audience” Advertisement, 1950s, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 2, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 216 Ibid. 217 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 199. 218 Ibid., 444.

Trouble Appears: The House Un-American Activities Committee

On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1955, Pete Seeger was building a barn on his Beacon property.219 A host of family members and friends were milling around the surrounding forestry overlooking the Hudson River, enjoying a summer holiday of banjo picking and country living with Pete and Toshi.220 While hammering wooden boards into place, Allan Winkler reports that “a black car wound its way up [Seeger’s] driveway. A stranger in a suit got out and asked, ‘Are you Pete Seeger?’ Seeger said yes. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ the man said.”221 Opening the envelope, a stunned Seeger grasped a subpoena to testify before HUAC.222 Ever together and level-headed, Toshi hired a lawyer, Paul Ross, once a close associate of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, to represent both Pete and Lee Hays, who was scheduled to appear before the same panel.223

Seeger never shared Toshi’s deft ability to cut through her emotions, organize, and get the job done, and this was particularly evident here. He alternately felt bits of shock, anxiety, and rage at what he believed was the profound injustice of his subpoena.224 Nevertheless, despite the great emotional and even physical strain this ordeal would place on him (Seeger attributes the beginnings of later heart trouble on his battle with HUAC), he decided to challenge the Un-American Activities Committee in an unlikely way.225 Most victims of HUAC’s “investigations of subversive activities in the entertainment industry,” such as Lee Hays, were let off by the Committee after pleading

219 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 77. 220 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 198. 221 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 77. 222 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 198. 223 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 77. 224 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 200. 225 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 78.

their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.226 Since many of these hearings were, more than anything, theaters of public humiliation against those who differed from the American “party line” on domestic affairs and international relations during the Cold

War, most left-wing artists were released after one or two hearings.227 Others cooperated more fully with HUAC, trying to avoid the blacklist and similar assaults on their career even if Congress rather speedily let them go. These include Burl Ives (whom Seeger criticized without mercy after this decision: “Burl Ives went to Washington, D.C. a few years ago, to the House Un-American Activities Committee and fingered, like any common stool-pigeon, some of radical associates of the early 1940s. He did this because

. . . he wanted to preserve his lucrative contacts”).228 Seeger chose neither of these routes; instead, he decided to oppose his HUAC hearing on First Amendment grounds, claiming Constitutional protection to hold any opinion he wanted, including progressive or even pro-Communist Party sentiments.229 Seeger believed that unlike other artists still firmly entrenched in the nation’s entertainment industry, he was uniquely positioned to take this approach. “After all,” he suggested, “there was no job I could be fired from.”230

On August 16, 1955, Seeger appeared before a HUAC panel.231 He testified just moments after Lee Hays, who declined to answer the panel’s questions citing the Fifth

Amendment.232 Hot-headed, Seeger mumbled to his lawyer, “I want to get up there and

226 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 78. 227 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 208. 228 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 103. 229 “Should Pete Seeger Go to Jail?” Brochure from “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 230 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 78. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid.

attack these guys for what they are, the worst of America.”233 Seeger’s lawyer reminded him that pleading First Amendment grounds, he did not have to answer any questions, but that it would only serve him to be calm and polite, which Seeger managed to the best of his ability.234 HUAC members asked him about concert advertisements that appeared in

The Daily Worker, his Communist Party involvement, and even his decision to sing a song with the Weavers Lee Hays wrote in criticism of the HUAC investigations, “Wasn’t

That a Time.”235 Seeger refused to answer the panel’s questions, amounting to ten in all.236 He concluded his testimony with a statement: “I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion,” Seeger declared, “and I am proud that I never refuse to sing for an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation of life. I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud of what I do.” 237

Shaken, Seeger returned home to Beacon. It would be a year before the

Committee would make a decision on Seeger’s testimony. In 1956, the House of

Representatives cited him for contempt of Congress, and in 1957, he was indicted on ten counts (for each question he did not answer) for contempt, but released on bail after pleading not guilty.238 A final court date, not yet scheduled, would determine whether

Seeger would face further imprisonment, but for the moment he had to live with the dread of an impending court date and with tightened restrictions on his freedom.239 He had to ask permission, for example, from a court every time he left the Southern District of New

233 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 78. 234 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 78. (b) “Should Pete Seeger Go to Jail?” Brochure from “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 235 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 79 – 80. 236 Ibid., 80. 237 Ibid., 80 – 81. 238 Ibid., 81. 239 Ibid.

York, a heavy burden to place on a person who traveled for a living.240 Seeger’s legal troubles cast a shadow on his life and career, even if he worked hard to maintain a sunny demeanor and remain true to his beliefs in spite of them. Well-hidden from public view,

Seeger even maintained a commitment to communism, as a social project if not necessarily a party-organized program of action. In 1956, Seeger typed up a letter to his grandchildren (unborn; his children at this time were not yet adolescents) and placed it in an envelope, carefully sealing its contents and stowing the note away.241 In it, Seeger affirmed his support of the radical sentiments he had been brought up with and that he still could not abandon, even under intense government pressure:

“When I think of communism . . . I think of the communists I have known. Bravery, steadfastness, and, yes, continual intellectual searching and thinking. Every communist leader I have known has lived his life in the frank knowledge that it was unlikely that he or she would live their lives through without suffering jail sentences or possibly cruel deaths because of their beliefs. I never knew people so intent upon a long-range goal to make this a better world to live in. They were not content to say, ‘tsk tsk’ about such a thing as Jim Crow . . . They hated the system [capitalism] which encouraged men to be greedy, rather than hating the greedy men themselves . . . So I think I’ll stick with communism, in spite of its mistakes and excesses . . . Being a communist has helped me, I believe, to be a better singer and folklorist, and a more selfless citizen. I can’t say so openly, unfortunately, at this period. Thus this letter must not be opened for many years . . . At this time I am cited for contempt of Congress and may go to jail. We will see what the future brings.”242

It is no accident that Seeger addressed this letter to his future grandchildren. He was intent on his present struggles becoming as “ancient history” to future generations of

Americans.243 In December of 1955, the Weavers decided to reunite, defying the blacklist, and held a concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall.244 The three thousand

240 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 81. 241 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 99. 242 Ibid., 100 – 102. 243 Ibid., 102. 244 Irwin Silber, “Carnegie Hall Rocks as the Weavers Return,” Sing Out! Winter 1956, 31 – 33.

available tickets to see them sold out almost immediately, many of them gone to young people. Among them were two bohemian teenagers, Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow.

Yarrow described the concert as an “extraordinarily moving and seminal moment for many, many folksingers, young folksingers . . . what I saw at the concert in fifty-five was a connection between the passion for justice and making the world a better place.” 245

Without knowing it yet, Seeger would become a father to a new generation of younger radicals, those who heard his message and believed that their alternative in contained

America paled in comparison. Despite his many hardships and pressures, Seeger continued to climb Jacob’s ladder as he reached into a new phase of his life and vocation.

245 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012.

III. “Die Gedanken Sind Frei:” 1961 – 1965

A Song of Freedom

On a warm summer morning in 1955, Pete Seeger sat perched with his banjo along a shale hillside in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York.246 He was singing for the children of Camp Woodland that day, hoping that some old folk melodies and the bright eyes of his young audience would serve as a healing balm for his anxious thoughts.247 It was just a few days ahead of his first scheduled appearance before HUAC, and Seeger wanted to enjoy this moment of sunlight and song. With the potential of imprisonment ahead, he was beginning to wonder about how much longer he had to sing and play at whim – his time as a free man now felt strangely limited.248 Banjo in hand,

Seeger began to play. “Die gedanken sind frei,” he sang, “my thoughts freely flower.

Die gedanken sind frei, my thoughts give me power.”249

Originally an early nineteenth century political song, “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” –

“Thoughts are Free” – was a German tune celebrating freedom of thought, as well as the futility of efforts to confine or shape the thoughts of a nation according to a particular state or cultural agenda.250 It was once a student song to protest the conservative political regimes of Prince Metternich’s Concert of Europe, and was employed more recently by

Nazi opposition groups in World War II Germany.251 But in 1955, it was being sung by a banjo picker who detected, if for wholly different reasons, a similar threat to his freedom

246 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 204. 247 Ibid. 248 Ibid. 249 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 204. (b) “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” Sing Out! October 1950, 3. 250 “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” Internet Archive, . 251 Ibid.

and an attempt to restrain his thoughts. Seeger continued the song, his voice rising not only with the pitch of the tune but with defiance in his voice, which a few noticed had nearly cracked while he sang: “I think as I please / and this gives me pleasure / my conscience decrees / this right I must treasure / my thoughts will not cater / to duke or dictator / no man can deny / die gedanken sind frei!”252

“Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” a song of unwavering commitment to one’s persuasions, would symbolize the phase of Seeger’s life that followed his performance that morning – one in which he would publicly and directly challenge the cultural and political customs that shaped domestic American containment. He would call on the state and the broader culture to permit his differences as well as the differences of those he sang and stood for, rather than continue its attempts to manage or repress them. This took the form of what became Seeger’s long and challenging face off with the House Un-

American Activities Committee, a social boundary breaking world tour he took during the early 1960s, and Seeger’s role in raising a generation of new, young folksingers who would participate with him in a series of social movements as the 1960s progressed, including those for peace and civil rights. Filled with possibilities and limits, this phase of Seeger’s life was likely his most challenging, exhilarating, and influential.

Seeger on Trial

After Seeger’s first HUAC hearing, in which Congress indicted him on contempt charges for refusing to answer the Un-American Activities Committee’s questions, he awaited a second trial to determine the validity of these charges. If Seeger’s argument –

252 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 204.

that on First Amendment grounds he should not to be subject to HUAC’s interrogations about his political opinions and affiliations – prevailed, then he could be acquitted. If not, he faced up to ten years in federal prison.253 Seeger assumed that his case would come to trial shortly after his initial hearing in 1955.254 However, the court did not reconvene until the spring of 1961.255

During the long interim Seeger continued to perform at camp, school, and church venues throughout the country, earning as much as he could so that his family would be financially sound in the event that he wound up in prison.256 Seeger describes these stressful years as a period that he “thrived” on, and some of his contemporaries, like the folk singer Tom Paxton, have agreed.257 Paxton believes that Pete Seeger was a man always ready for a challenge, and his legal battle with HUAC certainly provided enough of one.258 But Seeger had long been one to downplay his struggles or to put them in an unambiguously positive light, regardless of what reality reflected.259

Seeger was relatively strained during this era. His biographer David Dunaway has observed that in a few records Seeger made for his producer Moses Asch at

Smithsonian Folkways during these years, he sings and plucks away at his banjo on songs like “East Virginia Blues” or “Darling Corey” with an energy and passion unmatched by recordings before or since.260 Dunaway finds that these songs were the products of

253 “Should Pete Seeger Go to Jail?” Brochure from “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 254 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 82. 255 Ibid., 83. 256 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 278. 257 Ibid., 190. 258 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 259 “Pete Seeger.” Sing Out! March 1965, 85. 260 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 190.

Seeger turning to music as an outlet for self-expression during a time of intense pressure.261 Nevertheless, Seeger’s long wait was coming to a close.

Seeger’s new court date was at last set for the morning of March 27, 1961.262

Before his trial began, he held a press conference at New York City’s Park-Sheraton

Hotel, defending the nature and purpose of his music.263 He insisted to reporters that he was willing to sing for any group that would hear him: “I’m proud I can bring good songs to the people,” he declared, “I’m a catalyst cutting across lines.” 264 He sang some of his so-called subversive songs to them, including “If I Had a Hammer” and “Wasn’t that a

Time,” a song written by Lee Hays. It declared HUAC a disgrace to the country’s legacy of fighting for freedom.265 “Our fathers bled at Valley Forge,” the song goes, and “brave men died at Gettysburg,” but through these and other battles American freedoms prevailed.266 But it continues: “And now again the madmen come / and should our vic’try fail? / there is no vic’try in a land / where free men go to jail.”267 By the end of the conference a few journalists found themselves tapping their feet to Seeger’s infectious melodies.268

261 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 190. 262 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 83. (b) “Seeger Explains Stand at Inquiry.” New York Times, March 15, 1961. The Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Box 34, Fol. 27, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 263 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 82. 264 Ibid., 83. 265 Ibid. 266 Pete Seeger. Wimoweh and Other Songs of Freedom and Protest, Folkways Records compact disc B000UWXUIM, 1968. 267 Ibid. 268 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 83. (b) “Seeger Explains Stand at Inquiry.” New York Times, March 15, 1961. The Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Box 34, Fol. 27, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives.

Meanwhile, Seeger’s lawyer Paul Ross was busy preparing for the trial.269 He had built an argument for Seeger’s acquittal that rested on a few important claims. In addition to the trial itself being a violation of the “appellant’s rights under the First and

Fifth Amendments,” Ross also argued that Seeger had never actually committed any subversive acts against the United States.270 This is an important add-on to the claim that

Seeger’s trial was invalid because it was unconstitutional, and reveals the limits of the case that Seeger and Ross were trying to make. Although Seeger was within his rights not to be interrogated for his potentially subversive beliefs, if he had actually behaved treasonously at any time against the United States, his entire argument would lose its power. Seeger needed to be a fully upstanding citizen, with no real past commitments to communism or the Soviet Union, in order to make his case.

Seeger’s lawyer had to negotiate with the realities before him. In these times of great international tension, he had at least partially to sympathize with HUAC’s perspective, indirectly admitting that subversive thoughts could lead to subversive actions and pose a national security threat, in order for the court to listen to him at all. By clearing the air and assuring the court that Seeger had never betrayed the U.S. in favor of

Soviet or other anti-American communist forces, Ross could then make his case that

Seeger’s trial was violating his rights. It was the very cooperation of the recalcitrant

Seeger with the American system – his total lack of a criminal or subversive past – that made his challenge to the nation’s Cold War security excesses valid.

269 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 82. 270 U.S. Court of Appeals, United States v. Peter Seeger, “Defendant-Appellant’s Brief,” “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

If Seeger was cooperating with American principles, Ross wanted to show that

HUAC was not. Aside from his claims that the trial violated Seeger’s rights and that

Seeger was no true subversive, Ross found that “substantial evidence was offered to show the long term interest of the Committee in the blacklisting of entertainers.” 271 This fundamentally undemocratic practice needed to be stopped, Ross contended, both because it was an undue government intrusion into people’s professional lives and also because blacklisting suggested that artists like Seeger had already been subject to surreptitious investigations and found to be in sympathy with radical causes. This therefore “should weigh heavily against the Committee’s alleged need for information from the appellant.”272

With his banjo swung around his back, Seeger filed into the courtroom on the morning of March 27.273 Judge Thomas Murphy, a former district attorney who had once heard him play with the Weavers in New York, presided over the court, with the jury seated nearby.274 Some 500 spectators filled the room, and watched as assistant U.S. attorney Irving Younger opened the trial by stressing that Seeger’s case was no longer about his communist party membership or involvement in potential communist conspiracies, but whether he was in contempt of Congress for failing to cooperate with his investigation in 1955.275 Paul Ross responded by making his case that HUAC was an illegitimate and undemocratic enterprise, used primarily to screen suspected radicals out

271 U.S. Court of Appeals, United States v. Peter Seeger, “Defendant-Appellant’s Brief,” “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 272 Ibid. 273 The Moses and Frances Asch Collection: HUAC Related Correspondence and Clippings, 1957 – 1968, Box 34, Fol. 17, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 274 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 83. 275 Ibid.

of their professional roles, in this case in the entertainment industry.276 Younger objected repeatedly to Ross’s claims, objections which Judge Murphy mostly upheld.277

Moreover, he asked the jury to leave the courtroom during Ross’s challenges to HUAC’s legitimacy.278 Things were not looking so good for Seeger.

Just before passing a sentence, Judge Murphy called him to make a statement.279

Addressing the court, Seeger stood up gave a short summary of what he believed to be his life’s work: breaking through social barriers of all kinds to join his listeners together in song. Seeger proclaimed,

“Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to American over 300 years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England of the 1840’s and ‘50’s. I believe that in choosing my present course I do no dishonor to them, or to those who may come after me . . . For twenty years I have been singing the folksongs of America and other lands to people everywhere. I am proud that I never refused to sing to any group of people because I might disagree with some of the ideas of the people listening to me. I have sung for rich and poor, for Americans of every possible political and religious opinion and persuasion, of every race, color, and creed.”280

Perhaps unable to resist needling the committee that had damaged his career and livelihood for so long, Seeger added, “The House committee wished to pillory me because it didn’t like some few of the many thousands of places I have sung for.” 281 He then offered to sing for the Court “Wasn’t That a Time?” a song he suggested was

276 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There Is a Season,” 83. 277 Ibid., 84. 278 Ibid. 279 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 280 Ibid. 281 Ibid.

“apropos to this case.”282 When the Judge declined (“You may not!”), Seeger ended with a plea: “A good song can only do good, and I am proud of the songs I have sung . . . Do I have the right to sing these songs? Do I have the right to sing them anywhere?”283

Upholding the common sense of contained America – that Seeger did not have the right to sing his subversive, immigrant, lower class, and colorized songs anywhere, the court found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to a year in prison.284

While “Khrushchev’s Songbird” was being led away in handcuffs to a cage that would lock him away from the world, Paul Ross and Toshi immediately went to work on staging an appeal.285 The appeal was accepted and Seeger released on bail after a few hours in prison.286 But as much as Seeger’s conviction bolstered the Cold War sentiment that his songs posed a fundamental threat to the nation’s security (and identity), somehow the nation’s winds were beginning to shift. The U.S Court of Appeals heard Seeger’s case in the spring of 1962, and reversed his conviction on grounds that his indictment

“was defective because it failed to properly allege the authority of the subcommittee to conduct the hearings in issue, and to set forth the basis of that authority accurately.” 287

To Seeger’s utter delight, he was acquitted, marking the end of his long legal battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee.288 He found his victory in court to be one

282 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 283 (a) “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. (b) “Song Halted, Seeger Given 1-Year Term.” New York World Telegram. April 4, 1961, 1. The Moses and Frances Asch Collection: HUAC Related Correspondence and Clippings, 1957 – 1968, Box 34, Fol. 17, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 284 Ibid. 285 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 253. 286 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 253. (b) “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 287 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 86. 288 “Seeger Conviction Reversed,” Sing Out! Summer 1962, back page cover.

not only for himself, but for the nation at large. When asked to comment on the decision,

Seeger replied, “Hooray for us all and Tom Jefferson, too!”289

With Seeger’s HUAC battle behind him, the world took on a new sense of possibility. Although his days as a target for McCarthyist arrows were far from over –

Seeger’s continued struggle to break through the blacklist was proof of this – his interests and ambitions were better able to come into focus without the constant distraction of possible imprisonment that had hung over his head for so long.290 Seeger was also as busy (if not more) performing concerts after his trial as he was before. Assuming that he would be in jail and unable to make them, his manager Harold Leventhal had booked

Seeger for scores of concerts around the country in 1962.291 With no jail to keep him away, Seeger came through for the fans who wanted to hear him, even if it meant an exhausting few months immediately following his acquittal.292

Civil Rights: Learning a New Tune

But in spite of his workload and his blacklist problems, Seeger’s attention was soon drawn to new issues that the nation was grappling with and that he wanted to lend a hand to in whatever way he could. Most important among these new causes was the burgeoning civil rights movement. Seeger had been an ally to African American efforts to obtain their rights as citizens fully recognized since his days at Harvard (he often cited its commitment to racial equality as one of the key reasons why he joined the American

289 “Seeger Conviction Reversed,” Sing Out! Summer 1962, back page cover. 290 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 260. 291 Ibid., 278. 292 Ibid.

Communist Party in the 1930s).293 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Seeger also spent time at the Highlander Folk School in Florida, a center for the writing and reworking of folk songs for labor and civil rights causes.294 It was there that the civil rights movement’s most famous protest spiritual, “We Shall Overcome,” was modified from a church song-turned-worker’s rallying tune to the anthem of racial equality.295 Seeger’s earlier involvement in civil rights had taken place before the movement was at height of its influence. Now bolstered by valiant black participation in the Second World War

(black soldiers fighting the racist ideology of fascism abroad should not have to return to

Jim Crow at home), important NAACP victories in the 1950s (most notably the 1954

Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education), a network of civil rights minded organizations and churches throughout the country, and competent and inspiring leadership, the movement entered the 1960s with a force behind it unlike earlier decades.296

It wasn’t long before Seeger found himself traveling throughout the south, determining how he might once again use music to strengthen the movement.297 Seeger’s early days as a civil rights worker, however, turned out to be surprisingly hard on him, and offered an important learning opportunity. Seeger often recalls an event in 1962 in which a minister at a black church in Georgia invited him down to lead his congregation

293 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 294 “Highlander Folk School – The End and the Beginning,” Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1962, 30. 295 (a) “Highlander Folk School – The End and the Beginning,” Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1962, 30. (b) Seeger does not fully recall, but believes he inserted the “shall” in “We Shall Overcome” (previously the lyric read “We Will Overcome”). He jokingly attributes the more elegant sounding version to his partial Harvard education. (c) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 275. 296 H.W. Brands, American Dreams, 84, 86 – 87, 88. 297 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 271.

in song.298 Excited to sing with the church members and freedom activists, Seeger (quite unusually) prepared a few songs in advance.299 Strumming his banjo – which these church members associated with the degradations of slavery rather than a celebration of

American music’s African roots – Seeger began to play the old union song “Hold On.”300

Shortly into the song, Seeger realized that he was failing to communicate in any meaningful way with his audience. His banjo was offensive, his song out of tune, and his lyrics proved themselves to be surprisingly (to Seeger at least) irrelevant.301 Having grown up out of the energies of the Old Left, but never actually a worker himself, Seeger frequently conflated union with racial causes in his mind.302 It had not occurred to him that the union movement of the thirties was racially connected, but also undermined by a white bias that tended to keep black and white workers divided rather than united in solidarity.303 After Seeger played his humiliating bit, someone in the audience whispered, “If this is white folks’ music, I don’t think much of it.”304 Seeger’s failure to engage his audience – to get them singing in unity and harmony with him – turned out to be jarring experience, for a short while even shaking his confidence in the “basic, universal validity” of folk song.305 Seeger decided that he needed to “test himself” and to revisit his material if he was going to make a difference in future causes.306 He needed to

298 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 273. 299 Ibid. 300 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 274. (b) “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 4, 1970s, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 301 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 274. 302 The Moses and Frances Asch Collection, Box 35, Fol. 1, Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 303 Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945 – 1968 (Ithaca: Cornell, 1995), 220. 304 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 274. 305 Ibid., 277. (a) The Seeger family ultimately visited a total of 22 countries during their tour. (b) Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 306 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 277.

determine new ways to reach people. This made him all the more ready for a trip that

Toshi had been planning for several months now: a nine month-long world tour in which

Seeger would perform concerts for audiences in over thirty countries.307 With the whole family coming along, this was a chance for Seeger to rekindle ties with Toshi and his children that sometimes frayed while he was away performing for long periods, an opportunity to sing for audiences in a host of new and challenging contexts, and a rare occasion for him pick up new songs.308 He looked forward to the journey.

World Tour

In August, 1963, the Seeger family departed from the west coast for American

Samoa.309 Samoa proved to be only the beginning – the family would also visit

Australia, Indonesia, Japan, India, several countries in Africa, Israel, central and western

Europe, the U.S.S.R., and the British isles.310 In addition to performing several concerts in each country they visited (some years later, Toshi emphasized to an interviewer that this was a working tour: “we sang for our supper”), Toshi and Pete also wanted to film the folk songs and cultures that they would encounter abroad.311 The folk revival of the twentieth century has been marked by an interesting intersection with scholarly circles, from anthropologists and folklorists to ethnomusicologists, like John and Alan Lomax, and Seeger’s father, Charles.312 Pete Seeger rarely participated in the intellectual theorizing that went on as people around him studied and wrote about field recordings,

307 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 277. 308 Ibid. 309 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 310 Ibid. 311 Ibid. 312 Richard Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957, 124.

folk instruments, and the communities that produced folk songs, in part because he didn’t care to (“I’m no scholar”) and in part because he had very little success in this area:

Seeger never did complete his formal education, after all, and had been denied a

Guggenheim fellowship to research folk song in 1955.313 Nevertheless, Seeger had always considered himself a “student of folklore,” even if he approached the subject less formally than several of his colleagues and companions.314 When he and Toshi brought film equipment along with them, they were hoping to contribute in their own way to this ongoing scholarly interest in how different cultures and communities produced songs and how these songs shaped, and were shaped by, their respective social and geographical contexts.315 The products, rare glimpses at the music of Japanese, Indian, African, and other villages, were perhaps Seeger’s most valuable gift to the academic communities that studied folklore and folk cultures.

It was not uncommon for Toshi to be rolling the camera while Pete performed for the people of various villages and watched intently (and delightedly – the films reveal a wide smile fixed across Seeger’s face while he immerses himself in new sounds) as they played and sang in return for him.316 The foreign cultures that the Seeger family encountered were far removed from their own, a reality that required careful negotiations, sensitivities to difference, and a certain ability to handle ambiguity if Pete was to connect well, or at all, with his listeners. But Seeger was more than ready for this challenge. Still

313 (a) Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) David Dunaway Collection, Box 1, Fol. 7, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 314 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 315 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 316 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Village Music from Tanganyika,” LWO 34217, disc 07.01; digital betacam shelf number VBS 3517, Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

chastened by his failures with the civil rights community in Georgia, he wanted to sing for audiences that might not be immediately comfortable with his style or his tunes. For the most part, Seeger’s interaction with his global listeners proved successful.

There is footage for example, of Seeger spending time with a village in

Tanganyika.317 Seeger and his family were first politely stooped on the sidelines of a village circle, watching Tanganyikan musicians beat drums while dancers with bell-clad ankles rapidly moved in angular directions while stamping their feet.318 Later the footage shows Seeger performing – he chooses his instrumental “Goofing Off Suite” and follows it up with a song about an American hobo tramping around the country, “Way Out

There.”319 With the sleeves of his collared shirt rolled up and his hair whisked around by the wind, Seeger accompanies his singing while clutching his twelve-string guitar.320 The hobo in “Way Out There” was “humming a southern tune” one day while riding around the country on a freight train he had hopped aboard. Seeger mimicked the hobo by loudly yodeling his tune.321 As Seeger yodels and sings, the village chief fixedly watches him while smoking a cigarette, frequently extending his arms in a motion telling other villagers nearby who were whispering and prattling while Seeger performed to quiet down.322 In an important exchange, Seeger and his family watched and recorded traditional Tanganyikan tribal dances while offering the village a slice of American folk music.

317 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Village Music from Tanganyika,” LWO 34217, disc 07.01; digital betacam shelf number VBS 3517, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 318 Ibid. 319 Ibid. 320 Ibid. 321 Ibid. 322 Ibid.

“Exchange” is the operative word in reference to Seeger’s world tour. It is all too easy to imagine Seeger, the itinerant performer, traveling from place to place in the U.S. and abroad teaching new songs to his audiences. Seeger of course did this, but such of an image does not fully capture his work or his purpose. It implies that Seeger’s career was primarily unidirectional, in which he, loaded with a repertoire of songs, disseminated them to passive audiences who absorbed them by listening and singing along. Folk music stems from a host of contexts and communities, and Seeger had to learn songs as well as share them. His world tour provided many opportunities for Seeger to become familiar with African call-and-response songs, the melodic humming of Indian voices and the strings of sitars, and long English ballads.323 The people Seeger visited gave as much, if not far more, to him as he did to them by sharing from their musical heritages.

Moreover, by performing for audiences abroad, Seeger had to learn how to connect with cultures that were quite distinct from his own. This sometimes meant being sensitive to new cultural mores, as in submitting to the village chief’s authority in

Tanganyika, to relying on an interpreter when talking in between songs, as in a concert

Seeger gave in Kiev, for example (and elsewhere in non-English speaking countries).324

When singing with an audience, Peter Yarrow believes that “if you want an audience to sing with you, you have to listen to them . . . You listen to them, you hear their sound, you feel their heart, and you sing with them. And that’s a very different psychology from

323 (a) Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Ghana. Dragnet Singers,” LWO 34217, disc 03.08; digital betacam shelf number VBS 1323, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Trio of Performers Singing and Playing, Interview by Pete Seeger of Sitar Player Imrat Khan,” LWO 34217, disc 02.10; digital betacam shelf number VBS 1322, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (c) Camp Woodland Concert, July 15, 1962. 7-inch ASCH RR-1928, CDR 240. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 324 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “Pete Seeger Performing in Kiev,” LWO 34217, disc 02.09; digital betacam shelf number VBS 1322, Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

saying ‘I’m a singer, listen to me, now go sing along.’”325 Seeger’s tour was an opportunity for him to hear the sounds and feel the hearts of people from all over the world, encountering who they were as cultures and peoples and not simply delivering

American folks songs to them. It was a new experiment in cutting across social barriers – not only the racial and class barriers that he knew in the U.S., but barriers of language, history, and culture. And these barriers were transcended not strictly by Seeger distributing American folk songs, but by exchanging them for “songs from other lands” as he has framed it.326

Sometimes Seeger struggled to reach his audiences. He described a concert he gave in Czechoslovakia with a cold and “a shaky voice.”327 Though he “plunged bravely on, with the help of a very nice woman interpreter” and an “exceedingly friendly” audience, he could not “get them to open up and really sing.”328 But more often than not,

Seeger proved to be wildly popular with his audiences, and was able after a few attempts to get them to sing along. Countries in the U.S.S.R. welcomed Seeger as the first

American to sing in some of them “in 18 years,” and he was able to punctuate his largely unfamiliar collection of American songs with a few familiar ones he had learned from immigrant friends decades earlier, like a Yiddish song about a town in the Ukraine.329

Seeger’s reputation and popularity became such that a woman from Tbilisi, upon recognizing him in a hotel lobby, approached him to complain: “Mr. Seeger? Why aren’t

325 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 326 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 327 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 328 Ibid. 329 Ibid.

you giving more concerts? I came in from 60 miles, and cannot get even one ticket.”330

There wasn’t anything to hold Seeger back in Europe (east or west), Africa, or Asia – there were no HUAC equivalents there to silence his melodies or his message.331 His fame therefore grew, and by the end of his tour Seeger became a major personality in several of the places he visited. Seeger returned to the United States in June of 1964, eager to share his experiences with his friends and fans at home.

Reaching the Youth: Seeger the “Cultural Guerilla”

Despite the obstacles he faced in America, Seeger’s influence was growing throughout the nation as well, albeit in a more indirect way than it did worldwide. In

1961, he wrote an article in a column he kept for Sing Out! entitled “The Theory of

Cultural Guerilla Tactics.”332 In it Seeger described the approaches that Nazi resistance groups used in Europe to push back against Hitler’s regime, rendering them unlikely but apt metaphors for his own life and purpose. Seeger writes that “some foolhardy young ones” declared: “I’m going to down [to] throw a hand grenade at the very first Nazi truck

I see. I may get killed, but I’ll do something.”333 And sure enough, “they were killed, and it was the last of their contribution against Nazism.”334 Other, he says, “more cautious citizens took the opposite stand: ‘The thing to do is get some groceries and hole up somewhere . . . When the liberating armies appear, we’ll emerge to help them.”335 But despite the prudence that these groups tried to show by choosing to lay low rather than

330 Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection, “The Incompleat Filmmakers: The Little-Known Career of Pete and Toshi Seeger,” AFC 2003/027, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 331 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 259. 332 “The Theory of Cultural Guerilla Tactics,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1961, 60. 333 Ibid. 334 Ibid. 335 Ibid.

confront the Nazis directly, “rarely did these live to see liberation either,” for eventually their hideouts were discovered and they were promptly executed.336 Seeger believes that the most successful groups, those most likely to survive the regime and pose the greatest opposition to the Nazis were “those who kept mobility. It took coolness and self-control.

They picked their battles, and always selected limited engagements which they would win.”337 These groups mastered the necessary “cultural guerilla tactics” to chip away at

Nazi hegemony, staying calm, only partially hidden, and on the move so as to avoid being captured.

Seeger calls it a “farfetched comparison,” but nevertheless writes that he, too,

“pursued a theory of cultural guerilla tactics,” the effects of which were to surface in a very particular way during the early 1960s.338 Instead of fighting Nazi domination, he was up against the forces of contained America, operating politically through HUAC and culturally through the blacklist to strip him of “a steady job or [a place] on a single radio or TV station.”339 So Seeger went underground, making brief appearances “to sing some songs” in venues that barred him from working openly and permanently, like at a

“college or university.”340 During these years he “kept as home base this one sector of our society which refused most courageously to knuckle under the witch hunters: the college students.”341 Seeger’s work with young people at schools, summer camps, and colleges had raised a generation of “new folks,” hundreds of young artists who followed in Seeger’s footsteps, “amateur guitar pickers and banjo pickers . . . like fireflies they

336 “The Theory of Cultural Guerilla Tactics,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1961, 60. 337 Ibid. 338 Ibid. 339 Ibid. 340 Ibid. 341 Ibid.

light up in the night,” he said of them.342 Like Seeger, they saw folk music as an outgrowth of America’s heritage but questioned who this heritage belonged to, what its ideals were, and whether it remained true to them. These young singer-activists folk song to new heights in terms of exposure and influence, where Seeger admits that he himself

“could never expect to go.”343 For many of them, Seeger was some combination of father, friend, and mentor, although this relationship in all its forms was not usually so clear cut and experienced its share of strains as well as joys. But together Seeger and the

“new folks” rendered their music a profound force in American society, reaching a mass audience with the songs of America and other lands along with topical music that spoke to the nation’s persistent injustices.

The New Folks

“Some years ago I mimeographed a little book on how to play the banjo,” Seeger told an audience in Maine’s Bowdoin College in 1960.344 He was referring to a booklet he produced in the late 1950s, How to Play the 5-String Banjo, one of his more desperate attempts to keep food in his children’s mouths while paying down mountains of HUAC- induced legal fees.345 “I sold a hundred copies in three years,” he told them. “Well, four years ago I got a letter from a college student in California. He sent me money, I sent him the book, and a year later I got a letter from him. It said ‘Dear Pete, you ought to know I’ve been putting that book to hard use, and I and some others now have a job at a

342 “The Theory of Cultural Guerilla Tactics,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1961, 60. 343 Ibid. 344 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 345 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 91.

San Francisco night club. We call ourselves the Kingston Trio.’”346 Dave Guard, a sophomore at Stanford University, had purchased Seeger’s booklet hoping that together with his two friends, Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane, he would create a group reminiscent of the Weavers, along with the sound of another increasingly popular musician, the calypso artist Harry Belafonte.347 The Trio’s haunting rendition of “Tom Dooley,” about a civil war veteran, Tom Dula, who committed a murder in 1866, was an instant success.348 “Tom Dooley,” recorded in 1958, reached the top of the hit parade, and propelled folk music back into mainstream culture, a position it had struggled to maintain since the Weavers’ blacklisting.349

Other singers soon emerged on the Trio’s heels. In 1962 Sing Out! magazine described a young man from Minnesota who arrived in New York a year earlier “wearing a pair of dusty dungarees, holey shoes, [and] a corduroy Huck Finn cap,” clutching “a beat-up Gibson guitar and two squeaky harmonicas.”350 Bob Dylan, originally Robert

Zimmerman, had appeared in New York hoping to meet Woody Guthrie, whose travels throughout the country singing the songs of its working and country people had inspired him.351 Dylan met Guthrie shortly before his idol died from complications related to

Huntington’s disease, which had Guthrie bedridden for the last several years of his life.352

He played for Guthrie in his hospital room, with an ardor that resembled a devotee’s

346 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 347 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 91 – 92. 348 Ibid., 92. 349 Neil Rosenberg, ed. Transformation Tradition, 45. 350 “Bob Dylan – A New Voice Singing New Songs,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1962, 5. 351 (a) “Bob Dylan – A New Voice Singing New Songs,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1962, 5. (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 93. 352 “Bob Dylan – A New Voice Singing New Songs,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1962, 5.

pilgrimage to a much loved spiritual teacher.353 Dylan went on to sing in Greenwich

Village’s cafes and nightclubs where Seeger, who immediately identified his potential, took him under his wing.354

Like other folksingers, Dylan sang songs of protest, but he often sang about himself as well, and railed against bondage of the human soul that operated on a bodily and psychological level rather than on a social, political, or economic one, the much more common site of protest music.355 This distinguished Dylan from another emerging artist,

Phil Ochs, who shared a friendship and rivalry with Dylan.356 Ochs identified himself foremost as a “topical singer,” more than a “folk singer” or another type of artist, and used his melodic voice not to sing sweet sounds but to “make people very nervous” with the intensity of his commentary on social problems, from the war in Vietnam to the spendthrift and obsessively anti-communist liberals in government.357

When Joan Baez was a young teenager living in California, her family had taken her to a Pete Seeger concert. She remembered him coaxing his audience to sing: “Sing with me. Sing by yourself . . . We don’t need professional singers. We don’t need stars.

You can sing. Join me now.”358 This encouraged Baez greatly, who believed that she

“could be a singer, too.”359 When Baez’s father, a physicist, took a job at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958, she began to sing at a number of Boston

353 Caspar Llewellyn Smith, “Bob Dylan Visits Woody Guthrie,” The Guardian Online, 2011, . 354 PBS American Masters, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, 2012, < http://video.pbs.org/video/2189501770/>. 355 Ibid. 356 Ibid. 357 Ibid. 358 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 92. 359 Ibid.

clubs, including Café Yana, Club 47, and additional venues around Harvard Square.360

At roughly the same time, Toshi Seeger, with the help of Harold Leventhal, was busy organizing an afternoon of folk song as part of the annual jazz festival in Newport, Rhode

Island.361 Toshi’s plans were realized in 1959, when artists like Pete and his half-brother

Mike, the Kingston Trio, Bob Gibson, and Joan Baez took to the stage.362 Baez’s performance at what became the first annual Newport Folk Festival (greatly popular, the afternoon folk routine would soon supplant the jazz festival entirely), gave her some crucial exposure from which she launched her career.363

Much like the Kingston Trio, another triad of artists who wanted to follow in the

Weavers’ footsteps was Peter, Paul, and Mary.364 Encouraged to come together by Peter

Yarrow’s manager, Albert Grossman, Mary Travers, Noel (Paul) Stookey, and Peter

Yarrow soon blended their voices in harmonies that would delight the Village scene.365

Calling themselves the “Weaver’s children,” Peter, Paul, and Mary covered several of their songs, including “If I Had a Hammer,” “Irene, Goodnight,” and “Wasn’t that a

Time,” propelling them to national and international attention, beyond what the Weavers themselves were able to achieve in the early 1950s due to the limits of their blacklist.366

Folk Song and Commercialism

360 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 93. 361 Ibid., 94. 362 Ibid. 363 Ibid. 364 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 365 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 93. 366 (a) Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 93.

For the most part, the “new folks” were very well-received by the established community of folk singers and aficionados around the country. The staff at Sing Out! magazine (including Irwin Silber, Gil Turner, and Stephen Floot) could not praise their infectious and spirited work highly enough, and established singers like Seeger admired and encouraged them greatly.367 But there were nevertheless some controversial rumblings throughout the folk community that perhaps these new young artists were not so much inspired by folk and topical song as they were self-serving and “fake,” since all of them sang for commercial profit.368 This seemed unfitting and even morally wrong given the folk community’s close ties with the underprivileged and the anti-materialist radical left. Some even criticized “commercial folksingers” for altering their music to render it a greater popular appeal, instead of attempting to remain as true as possible to

“traditional” sounds and the arrangements available on field recordings. These critics saw an authenticity as well as an anti-materialism in older, “original” versions of folk songs.369 But critics, vocal as they were at the start of many of the new folks’ careers, were in the minority.

In his Sing Out! article “In Defense of Commercial Folksingers,” staff writer

Stephen Flott pointed out the benefits of commercialism: signing on with a major record company like Vanguard or Columbia made for a much larger audience platform, as did revising song notes and lyrics to enhance their popular appeal.370 If “people make traditions,” Flott argued, “then maybe the Trio [and similar groups have] started a new

367 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 368 “In Defense of Commercial Folksingers,” Sing Out! Dec. – Jan. 1962 – 1963. 369 Ibid. 370 Ibid.

tradition.”371 Seeger, who believed that folk music was intrinsically defined by a process of constant revision to fit an artist’s tastes and his or her community’s needs, agreed.372

The commercialism of the second generation folk artists remained a somewhat contentious issue throughout the early sixties, and was subject to conversation and debate that filled a few spreads in Sing Out!373 On the whole, however, it was a marginal issue and would have been even more so had it not been for a few related issues that resurfaced talk of commercialism’s potential hazards, including another encounter that Seeger had with the blacklist.

The Hootenanny Controversy

In the spring of 1963, ABC-TV decided to capitalize on folk music’s growing popularity by launching Hootenanny, a television series that featured performances from a variety of popular folk artists.374 The name “hootenanny,” meaning a gathering among friends to make music together, had been in circulation within rural circles for decades but was popularized by Seeger and Woody Guthrie after they heard the word on a trip to

Seattle.375 Seeger wanted to be a part of the program.376 He was amazed at the power of television to communicate images and ideas to a national audience, and wanted to harness this power to teach people across the country about folk song.377

371 “In Defense of Commercial Folksingers,” Sing Out! Dec. – Jan. 1962 – 1963. 372 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 68. 373 (a) “In Defense of Commercial Folksingers,” Sing Out! Dec. – Jan. 1962 – 1963. (b) Dan Armstrong, “‘Commercial’ Folksongs: Product of ‘Instant’ Culture,” Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963. 374 Allan Winkler, “To Everything Is a Season,” 89. 375 (a) “Hootenanny on TV: McCarthy Style,” Sing Out! Apr. – May 1963. (b) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 265. 376 Allan Winkler, “To Everything Is a Season,” 89. 377 Ibid.

The first few episodes aired, however, and Seeger received no invitation to appear.378 Something was amiss; Seeger grew acutely aware that ABC was deliberately not in touch with him, and he was not the only one who felt this way.379 A reviewer of the show, Jack Gould of the New York Times, wrote that “television’s belated recognition of interest in folk singing . . . is accompanied by one disquieting note. Apparently Pete

Seeger’s private political opinions continue to keep him off all network shows of folk singers.”380 Contributors to Broadside, a mimeographed newsletter about folk song, suggested that this was the blacklist at work more loudly and fully, claiming that

Hootenanny “has been crippled – and possibly doomed – by the application of the

BLACKLIST.”381 It reported that an ABC producer had approached Joan Baez about performing on the show. “Will Pete Seeger be on it?” she asked him. When he replied with a firm “no,” Baez told him to “count me out. When Pete Seeger goes on, I’ll go on.”382

It became clear that ABC was blacklisting Seeger. What was less obvious, however, was why. Seeger was recently acquitted from all charges of subversion and contempt of Congress, and the hysterical atmosphere of the McCarthy era had largely passed. Nat Hentoff of Sing Out! looked into the matter, only to report in frustration that

“It’s always somebody else who made the decision [to uphold the blacklist], and you can never find out who that somebody is.”383 The culprits eventually surfaced, however, and

378 Allan Winkler, “To Everything Is a Season,” 89. 379 Ibid. 380 Gordon Friesen, “There’s No Blacklist in Heaven,” Broadside no. 24, Apr. 1963, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 381 “Keep Searching, Pilgrim,” Broadside no. 21, Late Feb. 1963, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 382 Ibid. 383 “Hootenanny on TV: McCarthy Style,” Sing Out! Apr. – May 1963.

when Seeger realized who they were, his fury toward them became difficult to contain.

When ABC recognized that its attempts to silence the Seeger issue with brief insults

(“Pete Seeger just can’t hold an audience”) were not working, network officials admitted that Procter and Gamble, the sponsors of Tide detergent and other household goods, did not want Seeger on the show for fear that his radical background might harm their sales.384 Seeger could hardly believe that after his hard won victory with the courts that once again he was about to become a victim of the blacklist. And worse still was that a business enterprise was responsible for keeping him off, a group without the slightest notion of folk music’s mission or value. “I actually get hot and flushed just thinking about it,” Seeger responded. “We have all this richness and variety in our country but a bunch of schmoes, out to sell soap, keep the whole country seeing the same dreary things night after night.”385

Several of Seeger’s friends, colleagues, and fans rallied to his side, pressuring

ABC to allow him on the air. The folk community in New York formed the “Folksingers

Committee to End the Blacklist” and circulated a petition to protest Seeger’s exclusion from the show.386 Demonstrators picketed ABC’s New York City studios with signs that read “Let Our Pete Sing.”387 Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Kingston Trio, and other singers followed in Joan Baez’s footsteps, refusing to appear on Hootenanny when invited to perform.388 Eventually, the controversy combined with the program’s inability to secure talent pushed the producers to invite Seeger on, providing that he sign a loyalty

384 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 89. 385 Ibid., 89 – 90. 386 Gordon Friesen, “There’s No Blacklist in Heaven,” Broadside no. 24, Apr. 1963, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 387 “Bulletins from the Blacklist Front,” Broadside no. 32, Sept. 1963, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 388 Ibid.

oath.389 “I have just finished fighting a seven year court battle to prove the principle that such oaths are unconstitutional and I was acquitted and vindicated,” was Seeger’s response, “telling ABC where it could stick its precious affidavit,” according to the careful reporting of his companions at Broadside.390 Hootenanny was canceled in 1964 after only a two season run, in large part because of the controversy around Seeger. But the fact that he never did appear on the show – a testament to the folk revival that he helped forge and even named from he and Guthrie – burned Seeger. In the case of

Hootenanny, it was both the nation’s political climate and a commercial enterprise that kept him off the air. This is a key reason why commercialism remained a hot button issue throughout the folk community. But in spite of the troubles that Hootenanny caused Seeger, it was ultimately an unsuccessful project. Its willingness to participate in the containment of American culture was met not with passive acceptance and Seeger standing alone against it, but with anger and stubborn refusal on the part of many folksingers. The new folks were not as tolerant of the social status quo as earlier generations had been, and they refused to participate in it.

A Singing Movement

Although the Hootenanny controversy was a salient episode in Seeger’s life, it was not the only or even the most important way in which he and the new folks came out swinging against the barriers of American cultural containment. In fact, by now the thing

Seeger most valued as an artist and an activist – using music to celebrate an inclusive cultural heritage and to comment on social injustices where they persisted – was growing

389 “Bulletins from the Blacklist Front,” Broadside no. 32, Sept. 1963, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 390 Ibid.

bigger than himself; bigger than his troubles and his victories alike. Folk music was becoming the standard accompaniment to the social struggles of these years, including the civil rights movement, which by now made daily headlines as activists pushed for equality throughout the South, in addition to the fledgling peace movement. Songs like

“We Shall Overcome,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” were sung at Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rallies, during marches on Washington, on integrated buses the freedom riders occupied, and in smaller venues, such as churches and summer music festivals throughout the country.391

Seeger couldn’t get enough of the demonstrations or the music. When he and

Toshi joined a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, he brought a clipboard with him and tried to write down the lyrics to songs the protesters were singing, many of which were devised only days or weeks earlier at other events (or in prison for disrupting the South’s “law and order”) or on the spot.392 David Dunaway writes about how invigorating the Selma march was for Seeger: “For two glorious days, he had found the singing movement he’d hoped for since he was twenty. He seemed as excited about the singing as at the movement’s more concrete achievements.” 393

The idea of a “singing movement” proved to be an appropriate one; the social movements of the day relied heavily on song as they advanced their causes. It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect more systematically on the relationship that Seeger’s and other folksingers’ music had with these movements, particularly the push for civil rights.

391 (a) PBS American Masters, Peter, Paul, and Mary: Carry It On, A Musical Legacy, 2004, . (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 108. 392 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 295. 393 Ibid., 299.

Folk music participated in its aims to break down the racial boundaries of contained

America in at least three ways: music defined and enlarged the confines (or what

Deborah Gould calls the “political horizons”) of what the civil rights movement believed it could accomplish; the growing ubiquity of folk music throughout the early 1960s through television, radio, advertisements, and record sales, saturated American culture with its political and social messages, creating new cultural norms by bombarding, and eventually replacing, the old; and lastly through moral persuasion as folk spirituals lent a sense of legitimacy and rightness to movement’s causes.

In 1963, the Weavers’ young protégés, Peter, Paul, and Mary, sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Washington, DC’s Lincoln Memorial in a short program that preceded

Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.394 Throughout her lifetime, Mary

Travers frequently recalled the experience of looking out into the audience who came to hear King, both black and white, some linking hands and arms, and found what she saw to be one of the defining moments of her career: “I started to sing,” she remembered,

“and I had an epiphany. Looking out at this quarter of a million people, I truly believed it was possible that human beings could join together to make a positive social change.” 395

Noel Stookey describes the scene as the “integration of everything that [they sang for with] the moment,” or the moment in which their songs’ ideals were actualized.396 For

Mary and Noel, participating in a singing movement gave them a more robust sense of the civil rights’ goals: racial equality and integration. As a point of contact, music facilitated a journey from the present of injustice and a greatly flawed social order to an

394 PBS American Masters, Peter, Paul, and Mary: Carry It On, A Musical Legacy, 2004, . 395 Ibid. 396 Ibid.

idealized version of how things could be; it offered a new sense of “what might be possible,” according to Gould.397 Moreover, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s singing created the opportunity for a kind of theater to take place among the audience in Washington. While listening to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and linking arms, singing along with it together, and embracing, the integrated audience acted out the movement’s aims before they were accomplished legally and more widely accepted as social norms. In the early days of

Mary’s career with Peter and Noel, she found it difficult to sing with them in cooperation and harmony. The way she handled this interpersonal and technical challenge as a new artist was to “sing to what you think could be:” “We all sort of sang to an idealized version of each other,” she recalled, “and if you sing to what you think could be . . . all of a sudden you are what you thought could be.”398 Like Peter, Paul, and Mary’s attempts to sing to perfection, the people in 1963 reached for what they “thought could be” in a moment of song-led acting out. Eventually, they accomplished substantial reform and the collapse of long erected racial barriers.

In addition to folk music’s role in establishing a sense of the possible when the civil rights movement sought a clearer vision of its goals and how it might achieve them, its tremendous popularity from roughly 1958 to 1964 allowed it to flood American culture. Teenagers were learning the banjo and the twelve-string guitar, listening to folk records in great quantities, attending folk festivals, and watching shows like Hootenanny

(despite the program’s limitations). Often, they listened to the new folks’ covers of Pete

397 Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against Aids (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 3. 398 Ibid.

Seeger’s songs, from “Turn, Turn, Turn,” to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” to “If

I Had a Hammer.”399

The cultural presence of folk music appeared in two related ways: the first is through what some scholars call “imagined communities.”400 This is when people came together at particular times and places – through common television watching sessions or during folk festivals, for example – and viewed or participated in folk song. These imagined communities were the social product of the growing mass media presence of folk song: it presented opportunities for people to bond by way of discussing or enjoying the music together. In addition to imagined communities, folk music also made a significant cultural presence of itself through what scholar Jennifer Terry calls “remote intimacies.”401 A “remote intimacy” is the social bond formed by the common knowledge of and participation in popular cultural products. Unlike imagined communities, remote intimacies are not forged by people engaging with these products together in person or at the same time, as when people all share the experience of watching Hootenanny, for example. A remote intimacy is the common experience one person can share with another when discussing, for example, a record that both have listened to at length. They listened in the privacy of their own worlds, but when they emerge from them they both have a common cultural capital to draw from when the record comes up in conversation. Folk music created “imagined communities” and

“remote intimacies” that centered on the protest lyrics of civil rights and other songs, songs that routinely challenged America’s social status quo. Its large cultural presence

399 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 232. 400 Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University, 2011), 25. 401 Ibid., 23.

eventually became influential enough to challenge the boundaries of the contained society that came before it.

Finally, folk music assisted the civil rights movement in the early 1960s by contributing to its sense of moral purpose. Singing “We Shall Overcome” became a ritual that occurred before, during, and after meetings, church services, and protests. It created an image of an idealized society to aspire to and lent the movement a kind of religious-based dignity and legitimacy. It made Southern aggression by way of the police force and other civil rights antagonists look unfavorable to the public eye – devotional singings of “We Shall Overcome,” “I Shall Not Be Moved,” and similar spirituals shone when coupled with the violence of police hoses or attack dogs. Pete Seeger has long been criticized for the “preacher’s” tone of his music (“Pete Seeger? That clergyman” was a derogatory line he was once heard toward him on a trip to Ireland).402 But regardless of the criticism it sometimes attracted, the contributions that folk music made to the sense of moral uprightness the civil rights movement conveyed augmented its cause.

By 1965, times overall were good for Pete Seeger. He was back in the States from his successful world tour, he was busy working with a host of talented young artists who wanted to emulate his music and his message, and he was immersed in the social movements of the day. What Seeger did not know is that soon he would be swept away by the growing fervor of these movements, which were becoming almost revolutionary in character. The tide would turn in a direction he neither hoped for nor anticipated, and it would cause him to reassess what he wanted to achieve for the world. The turbulence of

402 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 289.

coming years worried Seeger not only about the future of American society, but of the earth itself that Americans occupied. He wanted to find a way to redeem humanity and the world it lived in, and threw himself into a new project as the later 1960s and early

1970s approached: environmentalism.

IV: “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy:” 1965 – 1972

The Newport Folk Festival, 1965

On a warm summer’s evening in July, 1965, Pete Seeger was enjoying the annual

Newport Folk Festival in New Hampshire.403 It was now some six years since the festival’s inception, and within that time folk song had exploded on the national scene.404

Whether the music was loved as an infectious and nostalgic celebration of America’s past or as a sardonic commentary on contemporary social and political issues, there was no question of its popularity, especially among the nation’s youth. 405 Many of the bright young “new folks” were present, including Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and perhaps the most well-known of them all, Bob Dylan.406 In turn each of the singers took to the stage, exhilarating their audience with a range of traditional and topical songs, as Baez sung from her repertoire of mountain ballads and Ochs introduced his newly composed anti-Vietnam song “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”407

Soon it was time for Dylan to perform. At age twenty-four, the young guitar-and- harmonica virtuoso had attracted a cult following, from Greenwich Village fans intrigued by his poetry to swooning teenage girls who rendered him the unlikely sex symbol of the new folk revival.408 At the height of his career, Dylan had just released a new album,

Bringing It All Back Home, an ironic title given that it featured some of his most

403 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 304. 404 (a) Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 200. (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 92. 405 “The ‘Folkniks’ and the Songs they Sing,” Sing Out! Summer 1959. 406 (a) David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 304. (b) “The ‘New’ Dylan,” Broadside no. 53, Dec. 1964, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 407 “The ‘New’ Dylan,” Broadside no. 53, Dec. 1964, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 408 Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1987), 109 – 110.

experimental songs yet.409 Rather than turning homeward to his familiar acoustic style,

Dylan included an electric backup to accompany several of the songs.410 Pete Seeger, whom Alan Lomax had recently dubbed “folk music’s stodgy right wing,” was nervous and agitated by Dylan’s recent musical choices, repulsed by the sound of electric instruments and believing this new medium to be destructive, rather than healing, to society.411 Nevertheless, Seeger sat backstage ready to watch his performance, unaware that Dylan had requested enormous electric amplifiers on stage.412

Sporting a new look – including a leather jacket and motor cycle boots – and plugging in his electric guitar, Dylan began to perform from his new album, introducing songs like “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone” to what David Dunaway calls the

“idealistic if self-righteous, flannel-shirt-and-denim crowd” at Newport.413 Dylan’s performance fell on surprised and confused ears, “leaving the majority of the audience annoyed, some even disgusted, and, in general, scratching its collective head in disbelief,” according to a Broadside report.414 Above the shock of his new “electronic” style was a more immediate, technical problem: Dylan’s sound was distorted, causing his guitar and drums to be amplified while his voice could hardly be heard.415 Backstage,

Seeger was baffled and furious.416 He repeatedly screamed at Paul Rothchild, Dylan’s soundman, to turn down the amplifiers, and tried to yank Rothchild’s hands away from

409 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 113. 410 Ibid. 411 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 305. 412 Ibid., 304. 413 Ibid., 304 – 306. 414 “The ‘New’ Dylan,” Broadside no. 53, Dec. 1964, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 415 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 312. 416 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 306.

the controls.417 In frustration he declared, “God damn, if I had an axe I’d cut the cable!”418 Peter Yarrow stepped into the confusion, forcing Seeger away from Rothchild and warning him that “if you touch him again, I’ll press charges for battery.”419

After his performance Dylan flew off the stage, rushing past Seeger while Peter,

Paul, and Mary went on to calm the angry and disappointed audience.420 Moments later

Dylan reappeared to play two of his older hits, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and “Mr.

Tambourine Man” to mollify his fans.421 The night ended with Seeger, Dylan, Baez,

Ochs, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and several others singing with locked arms on stage to project a sense of unity among them despite the night’s chaos.422 This was Dylan’s last performance at Newport – he never returned again, and took much of the festival’s crowd with him.423

The disaster at Newport reverberated throughout the folk music community. The pickers and poets of the Village were quick to call Dylan a “sellout.”424 Sing Out! magazine’s Irwin Silber, a growing critic of Dylan for months, suggested that Dylan was more interested in “fast money” and “notoriety” than genuine artistic achievement.” 425

Silber also found that Dylan had “somehow lost contact with the people” in his audience, an assertion that Peter Yarrow has corroborated. To Yarrow, “the truth of the matter was that, it wasn’t so much what Bobby did, it’s the way he did it, presenting [his music] as a

417 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 306. 418 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 312. 419 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 306. 420 Ibid., 307. 421 Ibid. 422 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 423 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 307. 424 Ibid., 304. 425 Irwin Silber, “An Open Letter to Bob Dylan,” Sing Out! Nov. 1964.

fait accompli rather than bringing the audience in as a partner in his exploration.”426 Pete

Seeger’s analysis of the affair was less rational, charged instead with anxiety and anguish. Deeply shaken and uncertain of what overcame Dylan that night, Seeger wondered if perhaps he was to blame for the plight of the now “frail, restless, homeless star on the stage.”427 Was he overbearing to Dylan with his support and mentorship –

“was he killed with kindness?”428 Seeger feared that he became “one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry.”429

Newport, 1965, now the stuff of legends in contemporary music history, symbolizes a number of late sixties changes – changes for the folk music community, for

American society at large, and for Pete Seeger. The times were surely “a-changing,” as

Dylan once wrote, but they were occurring at a rate and taking up characteristics that

Seeger found unnerving.430 Much like Dylan’s new sound, Seeger feared that he and the other folksingers, along with the social movements for peace and civil rights they were wrapped up in, were losing “contact with the people.”431 Though faced with a proliferation of national problems, rifts in the folk community, and a mounting inability to cope, Seeger the troubadour for human brotherhood strove to keep contact with his listeners and to connect them with each other, even though these challenging years necessitated a new approach to his work and purpose.

Folk Rock

426 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 427 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 318. 428 Ibid. 429 Ibid., 319. 430 Irwin Silber, “An Open Letter to Bob Dylan,” Sing Out! Nov. 1964. 431 Ibid.

Despite the stir he caused among the established folk singing community, Dylan was hardly alone in his attraction to the growing “folk rock” movement.432 The mid-

1960s saw a transformation in American music as the folk revival’s acoustic dominance gave way to the untried sounds of drums and electric guitars. Artists like the Bryds, the

Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and Sonny and Cher catapulted to international stardom as listeners enjoyed their more complex musical arrangements.433 Their songs, like their

“pure” folk predecessors, were considered equally, if not more, topical in nature.434

According to Newsweek, “the folky rollers protest – against being put down, being hung up, being drafted, Vietnam, Selma, the FBI, [and] the Bomb,” and Time described them as having “big-beat music with big-message lyrics.”435 By the later sixties, folk rock’s popularity would overlap with, and be challenged by, still a more extreme version of

“electronic” music: rock ‘n roll, as musicians like Jimmy Hendrix and The Rolling Stones introduced the biggest sounds yet.436 Given the popularity of folk rock and rock ‘n roll, it seems almost unfair that Dylan bore so much of the protest against the new genres. This was mainly because unlike artists like the Simon and Garfunkel or the Byrds, established and “traditional” folk singers, including Pete Seeger, helped Dylan’s career take flight.437

For years Dylan was the face of the new folk revival, and when he appeared with

“Maggie’s Farm” at Newport, Allan Winkler writes that he “troubled” the folk

432 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 242. 433 Ibid., 242, 244. 434 Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky, eds., Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s (New York: New York University, 2005), 137. 435 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 242. 436 (a) Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 265, 272. (b) David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 335. 437 PBS American Masters, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, 2012, < http://video.pbs.org/video/2189501770/>.

community, and Seeger particularly, with his “bald and abrasive shift.” 438 His new work was perceived as not only unexpected and disorienting, but as a betrayal of the older folk singers who discovered and cultivated him.

Folk rock quickly became exceedingly popular among America’s teenagers.

Dylan’s new sound rapidly caught on (especially among those who were not committed to a kind of folk song purism), and songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of

Silence” went gold.439 Even so, the turn toward folk rock continued to generate scathing critiques from the folk establishment. Writers at Broadside condemned Dylan for his “art that had, in the past, produced towering works of power and importance, had, seemingly, degenerated into confusion and innocuousness.”440 They openly worried that other artists, like Phil Ochs, might similarly defect: “Will Phil too eventually be disillusioned, or in some other way become discontented, with his personal messages of protest, and abandon them?”441 Once on the radical edges of America’s political and musical landscapes, the people at Broadside and Sing Out! were becoming strangely conservative and stubbornly resistant to change. This was true for Seeger as well, whose position began to shift from father and mentor to “patriarch,” not only for folk rock musicians but for the wider youth generation in America.442

Seeger and the Counterculture

438 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 113. 439 Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 242. 440 “The ‘New’ Dylan,” Broadside no. 53, Dec. 1964, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 441 Ibid. 442 Pete Seeger, Johnny Appleseed, Jr. column, Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963.

Seeger once congratulated himself on leading the nation’s “youth astray” by encouraging teenagers to hobo around the country learning to play and sing – similar to how Seeger spent his own younger years.443 Long an admired picker and teacher for many early career musicians in the Village (Peter Yarrow described Seeger as his “role model” during the 1950s), it seemed as though the generation gap between Seeger and his fledging counterparts worked to his favor, rendering him a much loved guide to building a life in folk song.444 Seeger was not only popular among young musicians, but with other youth leaders as well, who enjoyed his respect and support. Tom Hayden, for example, president and co-founder of the new left organization Students for a Democratic

Society (SDS), was cheered when he received a letter from Seeger praising a campaign in the form of “a leaf, carefully pasted on a hand-made card.”445 But by the later 1960s,

Seeger found himself increasingly at odds with America’s young people. In a sharply toned article for Sing Out! Seeger condemned the growing use of narcotics among

“talented young performers coming up in the folk music field.” 446 Seeger said that all drugs, whether the “hard stuff, with needles,” or the “more common forms of narcotics – the happy dust, the ether sniffs, the tea sticks,” made him feel “violent” and “sick at heart.”447 He warned of their addictive properties and how quickly they could tear through the folk singing community, ruining health and reducing artists to destitution.448

Like “poison ivy,” Seeger asserted, “if not [torn] out by the roots” narcotics will render careers “like the brief flare of a match, instead of a fine hearth which could have warmed

443 Pete Seeger, Johnny Appleseed, Jr. column, Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963. 444 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 445 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, back page cover. 446 Pete Seeger, Johnny Appleseed, Jr. column, Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963. 447 Ibid. 448 Ibid.

us all, for years.”449 Seeger’s article was hostile and defensive. He included an imaginary reply to his drug condemnation: “OK, OK, trim your beard, patriarch; I hear someone say. So the world is full of habits.”450 In response, Seeger continued to press the “big damn difference” between the day’s more common “habit,” smoking, and drug use.451

As more and more of America’s youth were turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, it seemed as though Seeger was losing his edge. It was not only Seeger’s warnings against drugs that made him unappealing. As he moved farther into middle age, Seeger’s radicalism, born out of the aging labor movement, seemed bland, lethargic, and almost amenable to “the establishment” compared with the new, more aggressive goals and strategies of the emerging student movement.452 Phil Ochs, soon to join to the Youth

International Party (commonly known as the “Yippies”) that condoned drugs and used unorthodox street theater tactics to make statements against Vietnam, released a song called “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”453 In it he poked fun at the people of America who claimed progressive values but did little to disrupt the status quo, and included Seeger among them: “I vote for the Democratic Party / They want the UN to be strong / I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts / He sure gets me singing those songs / And I’ll send all the

449 Pete Seeger, Johnny Appleseed, Jr. column, Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963. 450 Ibid. 451 Ibid. 452 Phil Ochs, “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” Broadside no. 58, May, 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 453 (a) Phil Ochs, “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” Broadside no. 58, May, 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . (b) PBS American Masters, Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, 2012, < http://video.pbs.org/video/2189501770/>.

money you ask for / But don’t ask me to come on along / So love me, love me, love me,

I’m a liberal!”454

The Anti-War Movement

The criticism Seeger received from Ochs and others in the growing counterculture

(“You’re not going to have a revolution with a bunch of short-haired older people!” insisted the Yippies) contributed to an insecurity and even a mild depression that gradually began to consume him.455 In addition to his growing outsider status concerning the youth movement, he fell into a personal obsession with the conflict in Vietnam.456

The war was a major point of attention, concern, and harsh criticism among Seeger’s leftist friends and colleagues. The staff at Broadside reported on it ceaselessly, doubling the newsletter’s length from roughly ten to twenty pages between 1965 and 1968, using the additional room to include newspaper clippings and commentary on the war’s events.457 When President Johnson ordered the bombing campaign’s escalation via operation “Rolling Thunder,” Broadside included articles on teach-ins held nationwide against the decision, and included lyrics to songs like Malvina Reynolds’s “Peace Isn’t

Treason” and Tom Paxton’s “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation.”458 It discussed the

454 Phil Ochs, “Love Me I’m a Liberal,” Broadside no. 58, May, 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 455 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 339. 456 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 122. 457 (a) Broadside no. 64, Nov., 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . (b) Broadside no. 71, Jun. 1966, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . (c) Broadside no. 86, Nov., 1967, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . (d) Broadside no. 88, Jan., 1968, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 458 (a) Broadside no. 58, May, 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, .

surges in drafted soldiers and, in a particularly stirring illustration, showed a family of children with only their mother watching a television screen that reads “News Bulletin:

Marines Kill 599 More in Vietnam.”459 Broadside pointed to the damage that the war was doing to both American and Vietnamese troops.460 Seeger was appalled at U.S. policy and internalized the images he read and saw on television showing bombs, injured children, and body bags.461 He couldn’t help but notice that his own children, of mixed

Japanese and European descent, looked rather similar to young ones now daily orphaned in Southeast Asia.462 On a personal level, Seeger’s children rendered the barriers separating Americans from the North Vietnamese hollow and artificial. This precluded him from objectifying the Vietnamese as America’s “enemy,” both a racial and an ideological “other,” despite what the day’s pro-war propaganda tried to suggest.463 In addition, Seeger always allied with the “underdog,” as Allan Winkler writes, and his radical leanings moved him to question and distrust U.S. containment policies abroad.

Troubled by the war, Seeger turned to music to express his concerns.464

In 1966, Seeger began to write anti-war songs and routinely participate in peace rallies.465 He starting singing “Bring ‘Em Home” about America’s troops that year, and supported Peter, Paul, and Mary’s decision to transform his song “Where Have All the

(b) Broadside no. 62, Sept., 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 459 Broadside no. 62, Sept., 1965, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 460 Ibid. 461 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 122. 462 Ibid. 463 Ibid. 464 Ibid., 123. 465 Ibid.

Flowers Gone?” into a peace song.466 Some years later he remarked, “I’m quite proud that a song I wrote way back in fifty-five was picked up and sang in Vietnam – a very quiet little song which only asked a question: ‘When will we ever learn?’”467 But

Seeger’s most important song by far in these years was what he called “Waist Deep in the

Big Muddy.”468 Unlike “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Waist Deep” was anything but a “quiet little song.”469 “Ostensibly about the experiences of an infantry platoon during World War II,” according to the New York Times, it was clear to anyone who heard it that Seeger was directing the song at Vietnam.470 Its plot was about a stubborn captain who insisted that his troops ford the Mississippi River when traveling in wet Louisiana weather.471 Despite receiving numerous reports that the river was too deep for his men to cross, the captain ignored and undermined the advice. “It’ll be a little soggy but just keep slogging,” he said, “we’ll soon be on dry ground.”472 When the soldiers pressed on to find themselves struggling to cross the fighting river, their captain would not let them turn back.473 They were “waist deep in the big muddy,” according to the song’s refrain, “but the big fool said to push on.”474 The controversial song ended with an obvious nod to the nation’s current conflict. Seeger wrote, “Now every time I read the papers / That old feeling comes on / We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy / And

466 Smithsonian Folkways, “Happy 90th Birthday, Pete Seeger!” . 467 Ibid. 468 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 123. 469 Smithsonian Folkways, “Happy 90th Birthday, Pete Seeger!” . 470 George Gent, “Seeger will Sing ‘Big Muddy’ on TV: All of Once-Censored Ballad to Be on Smothers Hour,” New York Times, February 15, 1968. Accessed through ProQuest. 471 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 124 – 125. 472 Ibid., 125. 473 Ibid. 474 Ibid.

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the big fool says to push on.”475 The “big fool” was Lyndon Johnson.476 Although

Johnson claimed to deplore the war as much as anyone else, wishing he could exclusively invest in his anti-poverty legislation (“I left the woman I really loved – the Great Society

– in order to get involved in that bitch of a war on the other side of the world,” he remarked), he nevertheless refused to pull out.477 Seeger’s song pointed out the deadly folly of Johnson’s obstinacy, and it quickly became a sensation at anti-war rallies and college concerts.478 Seeger believed there was power in this song, and he wanted the largest possible audience to hear it. Perhaps, he thought, if he could reach enough of the nation, he might influence the Johnson Administration to consider ending the war.479

The Smothers Brothers

An audience large enough to please Seeger’s imagination existed only through television.480 Seeger seemed to be wasting his time indulging such a flight of fancy, since he was barred from making TV appearances since his blacklist began with the

Weavers back in 1950.481 But now the year was 1967, and the nation’s television industry was not as firm on pushing away suspected radicals as it once was,

McCarthyism’s heyday having long come and gone.482 In August, Tommy and Dick

Smothers, hosts of the popular CBS program The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour

475 George Gent, “Seeger will Sing ‘Big Muddy’ on TV: All of Once-Censored Ballad to Be on Smothers Hour,” New York Times, February 15, 1968. Accessed through ProQuest. 476 “Pete Seeger Takes Stockingful of Song to Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, December 24, 1966. Accessed through ProQuest. 477 Bob Herbert, “Wars, Endless Wars,” New York Times, March 2, 2009. . 478 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 127. 479 Ibid., 128. 480 Ibid. 481 George Gent, “Seeger will Sing ‘Big Muddy’ on TV: All of Once-Censored Ballad to Be on Smothers Hour,” New York Times, February 15, 1968. Accessed through ProQuest. 482 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 128.

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invited Seeger to appear.483 CBS told media correspondents that the station’s change of heart “came about because the network feels this man is entitled to perform for the

American public. He is a great artist despite his earlier political affiliations and beliefs.”484 Privately, CBS staff members wanted to appease the brothers, who liked

Seeger and who regularly held high ratings, and were able to strike a deal with their chief sponsor, Procter and Gamble, to allow Seeger on.485

Seeger considered his appearance on the Smothers Brothers to be both a personal and national triumph. At last he had reached the end of an “endless black tunnel,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and footage of his segment reveals an energetic persona and a wide, glowing smile.486 His appearance was a gain for the nation as well,

Seeger assumed, since his invitation signaled the end of nervous network policies that resulted in blacklisting and showed a readiness to discuss national problems, like the war, that Seeger would inevitably bring up.487 Tommy Smothers introduced Seeger after he led the program’s audience through “Wimoweh,” and after some playful banter between the two, Smothers asked if Seeger intended to play “that song.”488 “That song” was

Seeger’s controversial hit “Big Muddy.”489 Seeger was watching the show at home when his taping aired, and cursed silently to himself when he noticed that CBS cut out his passionate performance of the song.490 His anti-Johnson tune proved to be too much for

483 Robert Dallos, “Pete Seeger Gets New Chance on TV: Banned Folk Singer Set to Smothers Brothers Show,” New York Times, August 25, 1967. Accessed through ProQuest. 484 Ibid. 485 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 128. 486 (a) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 129. (b) “Pete Seeger – Wimoweh and Flowers Gone,” < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kajnEIQGINw>. 487 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 129. 488 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 327. 489 Ibid. 490 Ibid.

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the network, which promptly censored it.491 Seeger was naïve, and had been fooled in his hopefulness.492 CBS was firmly unwilling to involve itself in any meaningful way with the anti-war movement, and Seeger regretted ever hoping otherwise.493 The network’s censorship of Seeger’s performance was only the beginning. In 1968, compelled by widespread anti-war sentiment to allow Seeger back on the Smothers Brothers, Seeger played “Big Muddy” again, this time uncensored.494 But after hearing that Seeger’s appearance created problems in Detroit among station locals who cut the song out of

Michigan broadcasts, Tommy and Dick Smothers fell out of favor with CBS executives.495 A year later, their show was canceled.496 They were never informed if

Seeger had anything to do with it.497 Seeger’s television appearances, the only ones he had made in nearly two decades, ended in disappointment and failure.498 This was one blow too many for Seeger, whose declining emotional health worsened in the aftermath.

Troubled Times

Like many Americans nationwide, 1968 was a difficult year for Seeger.499 He watched television reports on bloody warfare staged against the Viet Cong during the Tet

Offensive, along with a broken President Johnson’s refusal to seek reelection as the

Vietnam debacle raged.500 He heard about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination

(closely followed by a series of racially-charged riots taking place in cities across the

491 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 329 – 330. 492 Ibid., 327. 493 Ibid., 328. 494 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 132. 495 “Detroit TV Station Censors Last Stanza of Seeger Song,” New York Times, February 27, 1968. Accessed through ProQuest. 496 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 132. 497 Ibid. 498 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 329. 499 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 133. 500 Ibid., 132 – 133.

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country) along with the death of popular presidential contender Bobby Kennedy.501 The light of Seeger’s ordinarily robust optimism was beginning to dim. The nation’s racial barriers seemed as high and strong as ever, and the violence in Vietnam was out of control. Seeger began to doubt whether he, or his old mentor Woody Guthrie, recently dead of Huntington’s disease, or anyone else he knew had ever made a difference in the world.502 Invited to sing that year on Steve Allen’s variety show, Seeger began with an old favorite, “Worried Man Blues,” about holding on to hope in spite of one’s troubles.503

Midway through, Seeger stopped, quietly declaring, “I can’t sing this song.”504 Shortly thereafter, he wrote a blues song, “False from True,” expressing his personal problems.505

For Seeger, who rarely sang about himself, this was a highly unusual act.506 “When my songs turn to ashes on my tongue,” he wrote, “when I look in the mirror and see I’m no longer young / then I got to start the job of separating false from true / and then I know, I know, I need the love of you.”507

As Seeger’s anguish deepened, he took to spending hours alone typing notes to himself and others expressing the problems he saw all around him. He took personal responsibility for the persistence of racial injustice and even the war. On Vietnam, in

1970 he wrote, “And inasmuch as I have gone along with them [U.S. policymakers, whom he called “liars”] and not protested out loud, I am also – I, Pete Seeger – also [a liar]. Liar. Criminal. Murderer. I, who paid my taxes and did not go to jail. I would

501 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 133. 502 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 330. 503 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 134. 504 Ibid., 134. 505 Pete Seeger, “False from True,” Broadside no. 88, Jan. 1968, Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, . 506 David King Dunaway, How Can Keep I from Singing? 325. 507 Pete Seeger, “False from True,” Pete Seeger Appreciation Page, .

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like to be part of the solution, but am still part of the problem.”508 Around this time,

Seeger began to refer to world as the “human race,” wondering whether there was any

“hope for the human race,” and often doubting it.509 From his growing sense of doom, almost apocalyptic in nature, he also began to believe that all of the world’s problems were interrelated.510 Seeger increasingly found that not only was humanity in trouble, but the planet itself.

An Environmentalist Turn

As Seeger coped with significant distress, he turned to a source of comfort from a hobby he picked up earlier in the decade. Having lived on the banks of New York’s

Hudson River for decades, he purchased a sailboat and learned to steer it up and down the river.511 Occasionally he would anchor the boat and rest as its waters rocked him in the twilight of a summer’s evening.512 From such experiences he wrote a song, “Sailing

Down My Golden River.”513 Praising the mental healing he received from these retreats into nature, he wrote “sun and water, old life givers / I’ll have them where-e’er I roam /

And I was not far from home.”514 Often, however, an ugly and inconvenient presence interrupted Seeger’s musings aboard his sailboat. Subjected to years of industrial dumping and widespread neglect, the Hudson River was polluted, filled with toxic

508 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 138. 509 Ibid., 267, 309. 510 Ibid., 145. 511 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies, ed. Peter Blood (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, 1993), 201. 512 Ibid., 202. 513 Ibid. 514 Ibid.

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chemicals and floating debris.515 Seeger found it hard, and eventually impossible, to ignore the river’s poor condition.

Since childhood Seeger considered himself a “nature nut.”516 His long hours spent during adolescence reading books outdoors and roaming forests affirms this, along with his and Toshi’s decision to build a log cabin in the woods of the Hudson Valley.517

In 1961, Seeger read Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller, Silent Spring, about the dangers of the earth’s mounting pollution – she preferred to call it “poison,” driving home its lethal potential.518 In the later 1960s, Seeger’s attention slowly began to drift from racial and peace issues to environmentalist ones. He never lost sight of his earlier preoccupations, but society’s outrages compelled him to retreat somewhat into his home life, where he noticed ecological problems that needed handling. Seeger wondered if he might be able somehow to combine the two: it may be, he figured, that “everything in the world is tied together,” in which case if he “[cleaned] up the river,” he might also be able to “[clean] up society.”519

The Sloop Clearwater

In 1966, Seeger was talking with his neighbor and fellow artist, Vic Schwartz.520

Schwartz was merrily entertaining Seeger with stories of large, seventy-foot long cargo

515 “U.S. Presses Drive to End Pollution Of Hudson River,” New York Times, June 10, 1966. Accessed through ProQuest. 516 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 201. 517 (a) David Dunaway Collection, Box 1, Fol. 7, “Interview Transcript of Pete Seeger, April 15, 1976.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) Alec Wilkinson, The Protest Singer, 28. 518 (a) Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 201. (b) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 40th Anniversary ed. (New York: Mariner, 2002), 34. 519 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 145. 520 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 205.

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ships that sailed the Hudson during the nineteenth century.521 When Seeger failed to believe him (“Oh, don’t give me that”), Schwartz lent him a 1908 book, Sloops of the

Hudson, which discussed the majesty of the ships employing the inflated prose endemic to turn-of-the-century writing: “Before we die,” declared authors William Verplanck and

Moses Collyer, “we want to put down what we can remember of these ships, because they were the most beautiful boats we ever knew, and they will never be seen again.”522

Sloops of the Hudson fed Seeger’s vivid imagination with images of a by-gone Hudson

River, healthy and glittering, on which mighty ships sailed.523 He wrote a letter to

Schwartz proposing that they “get a gang of people together and build a life-size replica of a Hudson River sloop.”524 The intention behind Seeger’s proposal combined two passions: it would bring people together along with raising funds and awareness for the benefit of the river. Seeger described what he had in mind in a Look magazine article:

The basic idea is to take a beautiful old boat and sail it up and down a still-beautiful river, stopping at every town and city. The waterfront is public property; we’ll hold a party, free for everybody, and we mean everybody. Young and old. Black and white. Rich and poor. Male and female. Square and hip. Hairy and shaven. Country and city. We can have exhibits, displays, and a PA system for songs. People who won’t read pamphlets or listen to speeches may learn things through music they wouldn’t learn any other way. Who knows, we may even get on radio, on TV, and get our message to millions. What’s the message? Put simply, we want people to learn to love their river again.525

After Seeger sent his letter to Schwartz, he became distracted and dropped the idea for several months.526 When Seeger ran into Schwartz on a train, however, his

521 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 148, 205 522 Ibid., 148. 523 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 146. 524 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 205. 525 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 145. 526 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 205.

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neighbor enthusiastically brought up his proposal and asked him when they might pursue it.527 Looking into the matter, together with Toshi Seeger they embarked on some preliminary fundraising and interest-gathering campaigns.528 To all three’s surprise, they found themselves working with strange bedfellows on their new project. The sloop idea attracted the attention of several Hudson Valley millionaires, who, unlike Schwartz and the Seegers, were bona fide conservatives.529 They wanted to hold cocktail parties and other exclusive social gatherings aboard the ship, and were quick to become donors and members of a growing committee for the building of the Sloop Clearwater, the ship’s intended name.530 This was at significant odds with Seeger’s hopes of holding donation- only concerts aboard the Clearwater and inviting people from all walks of life aboard, but this conflict of interest did not surface for some time.531 Further, although from the beginning Seeger was not especially fond of his wealthy new colleagues (he shook with anger after reviewing the sloop’s blueprints with a donor who commented, “It’s a beautiful boat alright, but what do you want to sail the Hudson for? I do my sailing around the Virgin Islands”), but withheld his irritations to maintain their support.532 Soon

Seeger and the Clearwater committee founded a formal organization, Hudson River

Sloop Restoration, Inc., complete with a small office, builders commissioned to construct the ship, and plans to hire a Coast Guard captain.533

527 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 205. 528 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 356. 529 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 365. (b) Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 153. 530 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 356 – 357. 531 Ibid., 357. 532 Ibid. 533 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 146.

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In June of 1969 the construction of the Sloop Clearwater was complete, “the first of its kind to be built in eighty years,” according to David Dunaway.534 But problems related to the project, quickly mitigated Seeger’s feelings of success during the

Clearwater’s initial sails.535 His disagreements with the sloop’s conservative donors reached a height as they complained about Seeger’s plan to combine sailing the ship with social action.536 They warned him against singing to “hippies” along the Hudson about

Vietnam and related issues lest he lose their support.537 Seeger, uncompromising, was unwilling to concede anything to the committee members, infuriated at their wishes to convert the ship into a luxury liner for well-to-do gatherings.538 By the fall of 1970, it became clear that “as long as Seeger is connected with this organization,” according to board member Donald Presutti, “we’ll never get far.”539 The board tried unsuccessfully to vote Seeger out of the Sloop Restoration, but by then he decided to make two concessions. First, he dedicated the boat primarily to the teaching of schoolchildren about history and the need to keep the Hudson clean, thus participating in a milder form of social engagement that the board’s conservative members could accept.540 Second, he gradually began to distance himself from the organization’s inner circle, taking up the role of rank-and-file member rather than leader.541 This permitted Seeger to remain involved with the Clearwater but simmered many of the controversies he stirred.

Removing himself benefitted Seeger in another way as well. He remained somewhat unwell through the early 1970s. Not only did frustrations over Vietnam continue to erode

534 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 360. 535 Ibid., 360. 536 Ibid., 364. 537 Ibid. 538 Ibid., 357. 539 Ibid., 367. 540 Ibid., 364. 541 Ibid., 368.

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his emotional health, but he needed surgery for a hernia and was grappling with skin issues from overexposure to sunlight, an unintended consequence of his stint as an “eco- nik.”542 For the first time in over thirty years, in 1971 Seeger took a year off from singing, hoping to heal from his physical and psychological ailments before resuming his playing and working for the Hudson or other causes.543

Seeger the Traditionalist

“At some point around this time,” said Seeger’s friend and fellow folk singer

Bernice Johnson Reagon, “I began to get the feeling Pete was no longer on the cutting edge of the movement.”544 As the sixties weaved their way into the seventies, Reagon was acutely aware of American society’s social landscape. The civil rights movement became progressively militant after King’s death, with emerging groups like the Black

Panthers demanding radical and immediate changes to the nation’s racial status quo.545

The Cold War, now aging and the dichotomies between the Western and Soviet blocs less convincing, nevertheless carried on in Vietnam.546 For Seeger’s part in all of this, it seemed rather out of touch for him to be riding an antique ship along the Hudson River hoping that somehow this experience, together with some folk music, would connect people in substantive ways. The world was now too disillusioned, angry, and divided for this. Perhaps Reagon was right – Seeger might have agreed, which is why the Sloop

Clearwater failed to heal his declining emotional health in this years.

542 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 376. (b) Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 140. 543 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 377. 544 Ibid., 363. 545 Ibid. 546 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 138 – 139.

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Scholars Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison argue that Seeger’s main purpose in life was to “mobilize tradition,” employing a particular interpretation of the past expressed through music to reform the present.547 Seeger relished an image of America some centuries ago as a pre-modern, harmonious, egalitarian society populated by Native

Americans.548 He never forgot his days driving through the American South and West with Woody Guthrie, who showed him a connection between folk song and simple rural living, filled with friendship and family.549 All his life Seeger saw the past as the key to healing America’s present. With song people could lose themselves, forgetting the anxieties of the modern age, as Seeger framed them, and approach one another in love.550

Mobilizing tradition was once an effective tool for Seeger. He marched with civil rights activists having resurrected “We Shall Overcome” and inspired many young artists, “the new folks,” with old ballads and spirituals.551 Now it seemed, as Seeger admitted, that people only came to his concerts and to see the Clearwater “for nostalgia,” and he wasn’t sure how to load that nostalgia with meaning for the here and now.

Seeger considered these issues through 1971 while on his year-long retreat from public life. To his surprise, however, despite his career’s problems and disappointments, he discovered that his abstinence from song proved to be worse for his health rather than better.552 Seeger began to realize that he needed his friends, fans, and audiences – they had become a vital source of energy that he could not live without. After 1971, Seeger slowly came to accept that perhaps the arc of his career now tilted downward. Maybe he

547 Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements, 14, 46. 548 David Dunaway Collection, Box 1, Fol. 8, “Interview Transcript. Pete Seeger, July 19, 1976.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 549 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 47. 550 Ibid., 254. 551 Ibid., 117. 552 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 377.

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was no longer at the forefront of a socially engaged folk revival, but he was still able to contribute to the world and bring people together in other, equally important ways.

Continuing his environmentalist work, Seeger threw himself into the local and ecological politics of his home region in the Hudson Valley. He championed the phrase “think globally, sing locally.”553 A magazine writer declared Seeger a modern-day

“Jeffersonian,” committed to the outdoors and filled with a unique sense of the possibilities for democratic participation through localism and provincial politics.554

Over time Seeger regained his emotional balance and resumed singing, appearing at routine Clearwater events and holding concerts around the country and at various international venues.

Hope Restored

Seeger’s faith in power of song, too, was eventually restored. Maybe his songs represented empty nostalgia, but it just might be that through America’s long, hard Cold

War decades they fostered connections in unlikely places, whether they were interracial, mixed-class, blurring international boundaries, or doing similar kinds of work. In 1972,

Seeger wrote that his songs, old as they were, were “like another sunrise,” and act of

“reaffirmation” that intertwined all of humanity together as “links on a chain.”555

Holding on to his activist spirit, he proclaimed the renewed need for folk song to heal and draw people close together. Seeger planned to meet this need as long as he lived:

In each of my concerts there are some old songs which you and I have sung together

553 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 201. 554 Andrew McCullough, “Pete Seeger: Soul-Searching Man,” Topper, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. 555 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 343.

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many times before, but which can always stand another singing. Like another sunrise, or another kiss, this is also an act of reaffirmation. Our songs are, like you and me, the product of a long, long human chain, and even the strangest ones are distantly related to each other, as we are all. Each of us can be proud to be a link in this chain. Let’s hope there are many more links to come. No: let’s make damn sure there are many more links to come.556

556 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 343.

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V. Conclusion: “Tomorrow is a Highway”

Occupy Wall Street

On a chilly October evening in 2011, several of New York City’s Occupy Wall

Street protesters were surprised and delighted to spot Pete Seeger among their ranks.557

The Occupy Wall Street movement, in its thirty-eighth day by the time of Seeger’s visit, was a vocal comment on what economists like Paul Krugman have called America’s

“new Gilded Age.”558 Angered by what they felt was America’s growing disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots,” as Peter Yarrow describes it, the protesters held up signs, gave speeches, and marched against the realities of the nation’s growing income inequality and shrinking social safety net.559 Also a criticism of the recent economic recession, hundreds of protesters staked tents in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.560

Their makeshift housing symbolized the record number of foreclosures that have occurred since the subprime mortgage collapse in 2008 contributed to the ongoing recession.561 Critics on the right have condemned Occupy as a waste of time, energy, and resources that the down-and-out should more wisely spend on improving their life circumstances.562 Critics on the left tend to agree with Occupy’s premise, but decry

557 Chris Talbot, “Pete Seeger at Occupy Wall Street: Artist Enters 9th Decade as an Activist,” Huffington Post, October 24, 2011, . 558 Paul Krugman, “Gilded Once More,” New York Times, April 27, 2007, . 559 (a) Paul Krugman, “Gilded Once More,” New York Times, April 27, 2007, . (b) Chris Talbot, “Pete Seeger at Occupy Wall Street: Artist Enters 9th Decade as an Activist,” Huffington Post, October 24, 2011, . 560 Current Television, The 99%, < http://www.99percentfilm.com/>. 561 Ibid. 562 Amanda Terkel, “Newt Gingrich on Occupy Wall Street: Protesters Should ‘Get a Job’ and ‘Take a Bath,’” Huffington Post, November 19, 2011, .

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protesters for using unrealistic and unsustainable strategies, like living in Zuccotti Park, to call attention to their cause, leading to the movement’s swift demise.563

Pete Seeger was less interested in its particular protest strategies or whether

Occupy more broadly was the most effective way for people to speak out against the nation’s problems.564 Believing in the legitimacy of the protesters’ concerns, he traveled from the quiet of his Hudson Valley home to join Occupy Wall Street’s crowd. Donning a woolen jacket and a knitted red-and-yellow hat with a cheerful pom-pom resting atop it,

Seeger held two canes and proceeded to march down thirty city blocks crowded by hoards of additional protesters.565 Accompanied by his grandson, the musician Tao

Seeger-Rodriguez, they marched toward New York’s Columbus Circle where Woody

Guthrie’s son, the folksinger Arlo Guthrie, was waiting for them.566 Together Pete, Arlo, and Tao led the crowd through renditions of “We Shall Overcome,” and chanted “we are the ninety-nine percent,” a popular Occupy slogan critiquing the nation’s uneven distribution of power and resources – most of which was said to go to the population’s

“one-percent” of politicians and Wall Street financiers, leaving the other “ninety-nine percent” in want.567 “Even if his voice doesn’t carry like it used to,” a Huffington Post reporter observed, “Seeger still takes delight in lending his presence to important

563 Ginia Bellafante, “Gunning for Wall Street, with Faulty Aim,” New York Times, September 23, 2011, . 564 Chris Talbot, “Pete Seeger at Occupy Wall Street: Artist Enters 9th Decade as an Activist,” Huffington Post, October 24, 2011, . 565 Ibid. 566 “Pete Seeger Marches in Support of Occupy Wall Street: 92-Year Old Singer Performed with Arlo Guthrie,” Rolling Stone, October 25, 2011, . 567 (a) “Pete Seeger Marches in Support of Occupy Wall Street: 92-Year Old Singer Performed with Arlo Guthrie,” Rolling Stone, October 25, 2011, . (b) Current Television, The 99%, < http://www.99percentfilm.com/>.

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things.”568 Despite his advanced age, and, it’s true, the absence of a singing voice from worn vocal chords, Seeger joined the activity at Occupy with an energy, enthusiasm, and sense of moral purpose reminiscent of his earlier years as a singing activist.

Seeger’s presence at Occupy Wall Street speaks volumes about his lifetime of civic engagement and his willingness to critique America’s social, political, and economic system where it falls short of its ideals, all with a smile on his face and a banjo around his back. Reporters say that Seeger’s presence at Occupy, met with a crowd of people unwilling to accept injustice and trying to draw attention and change to their cause, is the “fruition” of Seeger’s lifelong efforts.569 The good will of these journalists notwithstanding, it seems doubtful that this protest is somehow a harvest of ripe fruit born from Seeger’s long and hard protest labors – not only because Occupy turned out to be a short-lived movement, but more likely because Seeger sees standing up for what’s right as an ongoing project rather than one that peaks (and fades) at any particular moment. His presence at Occupy, which he tried to downplay (“I’d just as soon be anonymous”), is not so much a crowning achievement as it is a point on the far end of

Seeger’s lifetime continuum of singing activist work.570 All his life, this work stood up for economic equality, the breaking of artificial social boundaries, freedom of thought and belief, peace, and environmental justice.

A Life of Activism through Song

568 Chris Talbot, “Pete Seeger at Occupy Wall Street: Artist Enters 9th Decade as an Activist,” Huffington Post, October 24, 2011, . 569 Ibid. 570 Ibid.

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Seeger’s radical upbringing, in which his Depression-influenced father, Charles, taught him the value of the labor movement’s push for better treatment and fairer pay, never left him.571 Although Seeger’s family came from a well-to-do New England background, he more fully identified with union activism among urban workers and rural farmers, with black racial and economic struggles, and with the lives and livelihoods

America’s heartland introduced to him by his musical mentor, Woody Guthrie.572

Seeger’s experiences and ideas springing from his father, Guthrie, and similar influences combined with an early interest in Native Americans, the nation’s seemingly most authentic and only homegrown population, to shape what became Seeger’s social and economic ideal for American society: “It was unthinkable that in an Indian tribe there would be such a thing as stealing . . . You’d get the ultimate punishment for that. What was the ultimate punishment? Being exiled from the tribe, sent out, we don’t want you anymore . . . The tribe was only one step ahead of starvation and they had to support each other. There were no rich and no poor.”573 Seeger’s concept of a model society was one in which people cared for and cooperated with one another in recognition of their common need for survival. Greed or competition were not accepted or valued; they were grounds for expulsion. And expulsion, in Seeger’s mind, was one of the worst fates that could befall a member of society. This is particularly true in light of Seeger’s most important aim as a musician: to work against exclusion, drawing people together through song in harmony and brotherhood.

571 Richard Reuss with Joanne Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 - 1957 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000), 52. 572 Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger Town Hall Concert, RR-3366, compact disc 256. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. 573 David Dunaway Collection, Box 1, Fol. 8, “Interview Transcript. Pete Seeger, July 19, 1976.” Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

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Seeger’s major preoccupation throughout his folk singing career – what he “most

[liked] to do” – was to mobilize music to draw members of society, however estranged they might be from one another due to racial, ethnic, class, gender, age, and other differences, closer to one another in terms of relationships and experience.574 He saw folksong as a tool to break down social boundaries, something he believed was a widespread and critical need given America’s social and cultural mores in the mid- twentieth century. The international dilemma of the Cold War generated diplomatic policies of containment abroad while fostering a kind of domestic containment at home.575 Pressured by political and other “expert” directives to be culturally superior to the contending Soviet social system, many Americans embraced increasingly inflexible norms of bureaucratized employment, mass consumption, whiteness, middle-class belonging, and heteronormativity in their daily lives.576 These were considered life’s surest paths to success and fulfillment, creating a prosperity in people’s public and private lives that would be the envy of the Soviet Union, and everywhere else in the world, for that matter.577 To depart from these norms was considered at best socially deviant and at worse politically subversive.578

Seeger was never satisfied with these predominant cultural mores; he saw an

America that was more complicated and compelling than what they offered as a value system and a way of life. A frequent traveler, he roamed the country countless times

574 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 252. 575 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 16. 576 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 14, 16 – 17. 577 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, 8. 578 K.A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 14, 16 – 17.

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getting to know the idiosyncrasies and localisms of its people.579 On his travels he learned to play and sing immigrant songs, workers’ tunes, and African American spirituals.580 While the nation’s Cold War social ethos was interested in suppressing these groups – either through rendering suspicious, ignoring or welcoming them into the homogenized world of the middle class – Seeger accepted them as equally legitimate members of American society on the social and cultural terms they offered. Their status as lower class or “non-white” given their appearance or ethnic particularities interested and excited Seeger rather than deterred him from them. An internationalist, Seeger did not only have an inclusive attitude toward Americans of “all colors and kinds,” as he described them, but he hoped to weaken international boundaries, creating a world that was a safer, smaller, and more familiar place.581 This interest is perhaps most visible through the extensive world tour that Seeger took in the early 1960s, performing concerts in nearly thirty countries and getting to know the customs of many societies in Europe,

Asia, and Africa.

After Seeger learned songs from the many places and communities he visited in the U.S. and abroad, he took to playing them for his audiences. The concert experience

Seeger offered is likely the site of his most important contributions as an artist, and his most successful effort at drawing different kinds of people together. Often he sang the songs he learned from marginalized groups to audiences of normative Americans, those

579 (a) Pete Seeger, Pete Seeger Town Hall Concert, RR-3366, compact disc 256. Smithsonian Ralph Rinzler Archives. (b) Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 580 Ibid. 581 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 139.

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who abided by the social rules of middle class life.582 He had particular reach with the mainstream public as a member of the exceedingly popular folk quartet, the Weavers.583

Together the Weavers sang the songs of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, explaining their backgrounds and the racial and economic dilemmas of their times, to listeners who would otherwise have very limited exposure to these personalities and their contexts. When the

Weavers disbanded, Seeger became a solo artist performing for churches, camps, elementary schools, colleges, community groups, and similar venues.584 Here he had his audience encounter his music in an active and participatory way. He coaxed and cajoled his concert goers until they would sing with him and get to know each other better by harmonizing with his melodies, sitting together in a tight-knit circle, and repeating the lyrics of songs after Seeger, or what he called “lining out” a tune.585 When combined with a song from a remote time and place, perhaps devised by a slave or a villager abroad, Seeger’s concerts offered people a rare opportunity to connect with one another and to encounter the experiences, meanings, preoccupations, and contexts of the folk songs they heard.586

Seeger’s ideas about alternative societies with ideal economic systems, like that of

Native Americans, and his much-loved image of an America that included more than mainstream members of the middle class, tended to win him more enemies than friends.

Seeger’s career suffered shortly after it took off when he joined the Weavers. Despite

582 Jeff Place, Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways compact disc 40184. 583 Irwin Silber, “The Weavers: New ‘Find’ of the Hit Parade,” Sing Out! February, 1951, 6. 584 Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 71 – 72. 585 (a) “There’s Nothing to Compare Pete Seeger with an Audience” Advertisement, 1950s, “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” Fol. 2, Library of Congress American Folklife Center. (b) This was Seeger’s preferred method for hymns and spiritual songs. 586 Josh Kun, Audiotopia, 2.

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tremendous commercial success, the Weavers parted ways after only two years of singing together when the House Un-American Activities Committee and other anti-communist groups accused them of having radical affiliations and subversive tendencies.587 It’s true that each member of the quartet, including Seeger, had themselves been members of the

American Communist Party or had communists among their friends and colleagues, but to label them subversive was another matter altogether.588 Seeger and the Weavers, all quite comfortably non-ideological, saw the Communist Party as an organization formally committed to workers’ rights, the breakup of Jim Crow, and other policies they supported.589 Nevertheless, the group was blacklisted, and shortly thereafter Seeger was subpoenaed to testify about his political beliefs before HUAC.590

Seeger’s seven-year legal battle with HUAC speaks to his willingness to defend a particular kind of freedom in America – freedom of thought and belief. His fight with

Congress, who wanted him to admit his radical connections to his public humiliation and possible imprisonment, points to Seeger’s stubborn belief that the American project was founded on a bedrock of freedom. This freedom is so wide and deep that a person can hold an opinion that potentially subverts the nation’s entire social and political enterprise, but cannot be prosecuted on grounds of having this opinion alone. “Die gedanken sind frei,” Seeger once sang, “my thoughts are free.”591 It would seem that Seeger’s legal battle was, more than anything, a critique of American society. So concerned with the

587 David Dunaway Collection, newspaper article, “Weavers ‘Folksong’ Muted by ABC-TV,” Box 4, Fol. 27, Library of Congress American Folklife Center . 588 U.S. Court of Appeals, United States v. Peter Seeger, “Defendant-Appellant’s Brief,” “Pete Seeger Vertical File,” 1960s, Fol. 3, Library of Congress American Folklife Center . 589 PBS American Masters, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, 2007, . 590 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 198. 591 “Die Gedanken Sind Frei,” Sing Out! October 1950, 3.

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potential for Soviet espionage and attacks, America’s own institutions began to mirror its enemy’s, complete with extensive FBI surveillance of citizens along with government pressure and policing where it seemed necessary to suppress unorthodox (or “un-

American”) ideas. But rather than strictly critique America’s political and legal realms,

Seeger wanted them to live up to their own ideals. He saw the suppression of the red scare to be a departure from America’s commitment to freedom, and he faced off with

Congress on several occasions to make this point. Like his ancestors of “religious dissenters” and “abolitionists” in the nineteenth century, Seeger wanted the country to respect the “political and religious opinion and persuasion, of every race, color, and creed.”592 Seeger’s acquittal of all charges in 1961 is perhaps a testament to his success.593

Seeger’s love of folk song gained a momentum that built upon – and came to outweigh – his own contributions in the 1960s. Folk song, as a tribute to an idealized version of the nation’s past and a topical comment on that way things should be socially, economically, and politically, became a vital accompaniment to the social movements that gained ground in these years. Not only did movements for civil rights and peace in

Vietnam gain musical support through a variety of rousing anthems from “We Shall

Overcome” to “If I Had a Hammer,” but they drew support in numbers as well.594 Many of the nation’s most well-known activists came from the “new folks,” a host of young folksingers who Seeger inspired during their childhoods to combine music with causes.595

592 “Pete Seeger’s Statement to the Court,” Sing Out! Summer 1961, 10. 593 “Seeger Conviction Reversed,” Sing Out! Summer 1962, back page cover. 594 (a) “Highlander Folk School – The End and the Beginning,” Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1962, 30. (b) Allan Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,” 62. (c) Ibid., 124 – 125. 595 “The Theory of Cultural Guerilla Tactics,” Sing Out! Oct. – Nov., 1961, 60.

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The vocal, instrumental, and songwriting talent of these artists, including the Kingston

Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, popularized many of

Seeger’s songs in a way that he himself never could given the limits of his blacklist, his older age by the time these movements got off the ground, and his aversion to signing on with commercial labels.596 Seeger’s role in the early 1960s is perhaps the least direct one he played in his career while simultaneously wielding the most influence. Although he himself was rarely in the spotlight, his young protégés in the “new folks” carried forward his understanding of music’s purpose as activism in quite direct ways. In some respects they became Seeger’s proxies, multiplying his ideas as they toured the country and the world and contributed to the day’s social movements.

Seeger’s lifelong relationship with commercialism, tolerant but tense, speaks to both the possibilities and limits commercial venues present. It also points to flexibility of his values and ideas, which often come across as more rigid than they truly are. Seeger was never as well-known as he was during his brief commercial spell with the Weavers.

Simultaneously, commercialism in other areas, like the repeated refusal of advertisers to allow Seeger on television, constrained his reach and critiqued the content of his songs, as when Seeger’s rendition of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” was censored from the

CBS show The Smothers Brothers.597 While Seeger’s radical leanings developed an anti- materialism that deterred him from commercialism, he understood its uses for reaching a wide audience. When the “new folks” were frequently criticized from the staff at Sing

596 Peter Yarrow, interview by Christine Kelly, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., June 9, 2012. 597 “Detroit TV Station Censors Last Stanza of Seeger Song,” New York Times, February 27, 1968. Accessed through ProQuest.

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Out! magazine and related circles for their decisions to sing commercially, Seeger was not to be found among these critics.598

As Seeger’s age advanced and social pressures heated up in the later 1960s through the early 1970s, he endured a brief period of depression and uncertainty.599

Given the new militancy of the civil rights movement and the ongoing violence in

Vietnam, he began to wonder if his attempts at breaking down Cold War barriers were going awry, either because they were simply not working or because they contributed to social discontent which took on an unexpectedly violent cast. During these years Seeger withdrew somewhat from his roles in these movements and indulged a different side of his interests, a commitment to improving one’s local community and environment.600 He launched a campaign to save the polluted Hudson River by commissioning the building of an eighteenth century-style ship, the Sloop Clearwater, designed to educate locals about the need to keep the river clean.601 This project connected Seeger with a new kind of remote personality and experience – that of the Clearwater’s wealthy and conservative patrons – as he accepted their financial support.602 It also allowed Seeger to more fully look to the past as a means of improving the present. He had done this all his life through song, “mobilizing tradition” to comment on current issues, but now did so on a grander scale as he used a reconstruction of an elaborate ship from centuries’ past to encouraged environmental awareness in the 1970s.603 Eventually, Seeger’s temporary period of

598 Dan Armstrong, “‘Commercial’ Folksongs: Product of ‘Instant’ Culture,” Sing Out! Feb. – Mar. 1963. 599 David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 339. 600 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 201. 601 David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 356 – 357. 602 (a) David King Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing? 365. (b) Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 153. 603 Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998), 24.

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doubt and depression gave way to a sense that music and activism, or music as activism, was a continuous program that would no doubt encounter ups and downs. It was the refusal to give up in the hard times that mattered, as well as a trust that old songs “could always stand another singing,” and always had something new to share about modern-day issues.604

Today Pete Seeger spends most of his time at his log cabin in the Hudson Valley.

Despite occasional appearances of a national scale, like his visit to Occupy Wall Street, most of his interests and energies have turned toward the local, a process that began with the building of the Clearwater. He visits classrooms and teaches songs to schoolchildren, and makes annual appearances at local strawberry festivals for the benefit of the

Clearwater.605 His songs and beliefs have a remarkably present-day resonance, speaking to current problems of economic injustice, racial distrust and inequality, and a renewed sense of cultural hostility and uncertainty that has come, ironically, from the shrinking distance between people given globalization’s communications and travel revolutions.

Seeger’s call for people to embrace each other as a “rainbow race” and to live together without fear has seldom been so resonant.606 Seeger has believed for decades that all people, including himself, are simply “links on a chain,” an endless chain of actors who do their part in ways large and small to create a more just and harmonious society.607 In

1949, facing a moment of uncertainty in his life, Seeger wrote a song in dedication to human cooperation, to all the links on humanity’s chain, that he called “Tomorrow is a

604 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 343. 605 Nina Schutzman, “Strawberry Festival has Shortcake, and More: Thousands Attend Annual Waterfront Event in Beacon,” Poughkeepsie Journal, June 10, 2012, . 606 Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone, 82. 607 Pete Seeger, In His Own Words, 343.

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Highway.”608 Perhaps unknowingly, he both summarized his hopes for the world and sounded a clarion call to those who would come after him. Though the future is never as sure as the past, perhaps tomorrow’s highway could point toward a safer, fairer, more loving and inclusive place if it abided in Seeger’s words:

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair, And we are the many who'll travel there. Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair, And we are the workers who'll build it there; And we will build it there.

Come, let us build a way for all mankind, A way to leave this evil year behind, To travel onward to a better year Where love is, and there will be no fear, Where love is and no fear.

Now is the shadowed year when evil men, When men of evil thunder war again. Shall tyrants once again be free to tread, Above our most brave and honored dead? Our brave and honored dead.

O, comrades, come and travel on with me, We'll go to our new year of liberty. Come, walk upright, along the people's way, From darkness, unto the people's day. From dark, to sunlit day.

Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair And hate and greed shall never travel there But only they who've learned the peaceful way Of brotherhood, to greet the coming day. We hail the coming day.609

608 Pete Seeger, “Tomorrow is a Highway,” Pete Seeger Appreciation Page, . 609 Ibid.

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Works Cited

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Broadside Magazine – The Topical Song Magazine, 1962 – 1972. Online Archive. .

Capaldi, Jim and Mary Capaldi. Pete Seeger Appreciation Page. .

Current Television, .

David Dunaway Collection of Interviews and Other Materials with Pete Seeger and Contemporaries. Boxes 1 – 12. Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

“Die Gedanken Sind Frei.” Internet Archive. .

Footage of Seeger and Contemporaries at www.Youtube.com. Footage of Seeger and Contemporaries at www.pbs.org. Pete Seeger Concert Audio Files. The Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

Pete Seeger Vertical File. Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

Place, Jeff. Pete Seeger: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Pete Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings compact disc, 2011.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2009). Accessed through Gelman Library, George Washington University.

Seeger, Pete. Pete. Living Music compact disc B0000000V4.

Seeger, Pete. Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits, Sony compact disc B000063WD4. Seeger, Pete. Pete Seeger: In His Own Words. Edited by Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal. Boulder: Paradigm, 2012.

Seeger, Pete. Pete Seeger: Live in Australia, 1963. DVD. 1963; Acorn Media, 2009. Seeger, Pete. Where Have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies. Edited by Peter Blood. Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, 1993. Seeger, Pete. Wimoweh and Other Songs of Freedom and Protest, Folkways Records compact disc B000UWXUIM, 1968.

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Sing Out! Magazine, 1950 – 1965. Housed at the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

The Guardian Online . The Huffington Post. .

The Moses and Frances Asch Collection at the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. Boxes 33 – 35. Smithsonian Institution. The New York Times. .

The Pete and Toshi Seeger Film Collection. Library of Congress American Folklife Center. The Poughkeepsie Journal. .

Yarrow, Peter. Interview by Christine Kelly. Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C. June 9, 2012.

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Baez, Joan. And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir. New York: Penguin, 1987. Bloch, Avital and Lauri Umansky, eds. Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s. New York: New York University, 2005.

Boyle, Kevin. The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945 – 1968. Ithaca: Cornell, 1995. Brands, H.W. American Dreams: The United States since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2010. Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1996.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring, 40th Anniversary ed. New York: Mariner, 2002. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage, 2003. Cohen, Ronald. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940 – 1970. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2002.

Cuordileone, K.A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Dunaway, David King. How Can I Keep from Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger. 1st ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.

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Dunaway, David King. How Can I Keep from Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger. 2nd ed. New York: Villard, 2008.

Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998. Gould, Deborah. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009. Hirsch, Arnold. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940 – 1960. New York: Cambridge University, 1983.

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Kun, Josh. Audiotopia: Music, Race, America. Berkeley: University of California, 2005. Lieberman, Robbie. “My Song is My Weapon:” People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930 – 1950. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1989.

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Olson, Ted. Review of To Everything There is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song, by Allan Winkler. Journal of American Music 29, no. 1 (2011). Reuss, Richard. American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927 – 1957. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2000.

Rosenberg, Neil, ed. Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993.

“Thomas Hart Benton Biography,” Thomas Hart Benton: Murals in the Missouri State Capitol. Tongson, Karen. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: NYU, 2011.

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