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Lehigh Preserve Institutional Repository Lehigh Preserve Institutional Repository The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds Reese, Brian 2019 Find more at https://preserve.lib.lehigh.edu/ This document is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds by Brian Reese A Thesis Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Lehigh University January 20, 2019 © 2019 Copyright Brian Reese ii Thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English. The Red Menace in the Cellar: Pete Seeger, Folk Music, and the Enduring Power of the Old Left to Subvert Young Minds. Brian Reese Date Approved Dr. Seth Moglen Thesis Director Dr. Dawn Keetley Department Chair iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis began as an argument concerning depictions of patriotism in Edgar Lee Masters’s landmark work of American Modernist poetry Spoon River Anthology. It has obviously changed considerably since its conception. Through all of its many convolutions, pitfalls, resurrections, and redirections, I have had the consistent and enthusiastic support of my advisor, Seth Moglen. He is a natural teacher, a master editor, and a true comrade. Graduate education can often be daunting, lonely, and disheartening. I was fortunate to have had Mareesa Miles as my friend and office mate during my time at Lehigh. Her thoughtfulness and passion for learning were an inspiration, and they helped me through many days when I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Without the help and patience of my wife, Brigid, and the laughter and wisdom of my daughter, Evelyn, nothing would be possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 The Red Menace in the Cellar 2 Afterward 28 Selected References 34 Vita 36 v ABSTRACT Art holds an unparalleled power to encapsulate and carry political aspirations forward in time. Perhaps no art form does this as effectively as music. This essay explores how one particular work created at the height of the Red Scare—Pete Seeger’s 1953 album, Folksongs and Ballads: A Pete Seeger Concert—preserved and then transmitted the Popular Front ideology of the Communist Party of the United States to the author in 1990. Through a mix of personal reflection and critical analysis, this essay examines the album’s meaning at the time it was created, when the author encountered it in 1990, and within the context of our current political moment and beyond. 1 THE RED MENACE IN THE CELLAR Except for the answer I have already given you, I have no answer. The answer I gave you you have, don’t you? That is, that I am proud that I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity, and that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir. —Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, August 18, 1955 So I think I’ll stick with communism, in spite of its mistakes and excesses. I still feel that the basic Marxist analysis of history is correct. —Pete Seeger in a 1956 letter to his unborn grandchildren marked “Not to be opened ‘til after death of both C.L. Seeger II and Peter Seeger. Or around the year 2000 A.D.” The basement smelled like kitty litter, mildew, and bong water. It hardly seemed a likely place for a transformative experience. It was the winter of 1990 and I had graduated from high school in June. My comrades and I regularly gathered in the evening at our friend Angelo’s house. After his kids were in bed, we would creep down to the cellar and sit on the musty couches that he had set up in one corner. We smoked pot and talked about art, music, films, and politics and laughed at the absurdities that emerged from our drug-scrambled brains. Among the clutter in the basement was a shelf of LP records. We took turns playing DJ and entertaining one another with the sundry titles in Angelo’s eclectic record library. One night, when it was my turn to choose, I unearthed a box set of five LPs that was titled An Anthology of Folk Music. The cover bore a painting of a man singing expressively and strumming an acoustic guitar, and the names of the folksingers contained in the collection were listed down one side. One name in particular caught my attention: Pete Seeger. My youthful interest in folk had been returning lately, and his was a name that I seemed to come across wherever I looked. I placed his record onto the dusty turntable and dropped the needle. After the initial hiss, pop, and crackle, 2 there was silence. Then a lone voice—high and reedy—rang out unaccompanied: “‘Well met, well met, my old true love. Well met, well met,’ cried he. ‘I’ve just returned from the salt, salt sea, and it’s all for the love of thee . .’” Then the galloping strum of the banjo kicked in, and the course of my life irrevocably shifted. It was not the likely choice in 1990 for a teenager in Scranton, Pennsylvania to develop a passionate interest in folk music. Folk was something that had happened in the 60s. Whatever bite it once had had since been James Taylor-ed out of it. In the 1980s, my friends and I were skateboarding punk rockers. We rolled through the streets of our crumbling post-industrial city trying to make sense of a world of AIDS, crack, and Reaganomics that we had inherited. The music that spoke to us was made by punk and hardcore bands like the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys. These bands—almost exclusively male and white—howled their lyrics at breakneck tempo accompanied by shrieking electric guitars and crashing drums. The music matched the rage that we felt at the injustice and inequality around us, and the lyrics expressed our growing sense of nihilistic pessimism that we were dominated and controlled by powers we could never fully understand or overcome. I appreciated the politics in punk and hardcore. It helped me to understand my gut reactions to both my conservative high school and to the bleak streets of my dying coal town. I learned a great deal from the music and often felt understood and validated by much of its content, but it never wholly satisfied me. It was too violent and bleak to be sustaining. I craved music that allowed for more subtlety and range of expression and which offered some hope and direction. By the start of the nineties, most of my friends left punk behind and drifted off into several different camps of musical counterculture. Some were drawn to hip hop. I 3 liked much of what I heard, and, at its best, hip hop’s poetic and musical craft is astonishing, but I felt that too much of it was also burdened by the celebration of violence and a pervasive misogyny. Many of the artists seemed to want only material wealth and celebrity themselves rather than to transform society as a whole to make it better for everyone. To my mind, that would merely perpetuate most of the problems that hip hop often purported to address. (I must admit, too, that as a white kid from the suburbs, I seldom felt that hip hop was made with me in mind.) Other friends were drawn to electronic acid house dance music and rave culture. Fueled by ecstasy and cocaine, they attended exclusive and illicit parties in warehouses where they danced for hours to the numbing thump of a techno beat. I was never a dancer, and the mechanistic and repetitive quality of electronic club music left me cold. Moreover, what I witnessed of the gushing, MDMA-inspired love among ravers struck me as false and vapid. Their guiding motivation appeared to be solely the next dance party and hit of E. The eternally touring Grateful Dead enjoyed resurgence in popularity in the late 80s. Many of my friends became second-wave Dead Heads. They wore patchouli and tie-dyed t-shirts, took scads of LSD, and sermonized at length about the hidden meanings that Jerry Garcia had embedded in the set list from the latest Veterans’ Stadium show. I liked some of the Dead’s music, but their fan base looked to me like a slavish cult that was divorced from any reality outside of the endless tour. By 1990 I was hungry for music that was both engaging and engaged and that said something valid about a world that seemed rapidly to be going to the dogs. The union of music and politics was something that I was exposed to in my youth. My parents were older than my friends’ and classmates’. Theirs were baby boomers who 4 introduced them to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. Mine were of the Silent Generation. They played LPs by some of the more commercial acts from the folk revival of the late 1950s and early 60s: the Kingston Trio, Burl Ives, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Harry Belafonte.
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