Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 1. februar 2014 / Time Line February 1, 2014
Version 3.502/01/2014
Den amerikansk folkemindeforsker Francis James Child fødes
1825.
Han samlede og udgav bl.a. folkevisesamlingen The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads, the Child Ballads, 1882-1898.
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https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Francis+James+Child%22
02/01/2014
Pete Seeger Interview: How Can I Keep from Singing?
By Sarah van Gelder
Yes! Magazine
Pete Seeger passed away on Jan. 28 at New
York-Presbyterian Hospital at the age of 94. His wife, Toshi
Seeger, passed away last July. Pete was known around the world for
his performance of the music of ordinary people, and for his
passion for their concerns, especially labor struggles, the fight
against war, civil rights, and cleaning up the Hudson River.
In New York state's Hudson Valley, where he lived for most of his
life, he was known for showing up unannounced at community events,
banjo in hand. And, along with Toshi, he organized the annual
Clearwater Sloop Festival, named for the famous sailboat he took up
and down the Hudson River, reminding people to care for and protect
their iconic river.
Pete believed that change would come, not through big, grand
pronouncements, but through the choices we each make. When I
interviewed him in 2007, he said: “If there’s a world
here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of
millions of little things.”
And when I asked him about what it had meant to him to be famous
for so many years, he scolded me for even asking. “Fame is a
trap and an illusion,” he said.
Pete Seeger has been a presence in my life since the time I was
growing up in the Hudson Valley of New York. My family was among
the scores who went to see him perform at a run-down little park on
the Hudson with his sloop, the Clearwater, docked nearby. His songs
of his love for a polluted, neglected water-way rekindled in people
a yearning for connection to the great river.
Later, I heard him sing at rallies against the Vietnam War, and I
knew then that there were adults who shared my passion for peace
and justice.
More recently, Pete Seeger has been sending post cards to YES! with
ideas for stories we might cover, and he made a donation that he
said should be used to send a copy of YES! to each of the foreign
embassies located in the United States.
Finally, in December, I had a chance to talk to him in person. We
met at the home he built himself on a ridge overlooking his beloved
Hudson River. He introduced us to his wife, Toshi Seeger, told
stories, sang us songs, and showed us his electric pickup truck,
powered by the solar panels on his roof. Here is part of our
conversation:
Sarah: When did you first realize that music, especially the music
of ordinary people, would define your life?
Pete: I didn’t know it would define my life. My mother gave
me a ukulele at age eight, and I sang the popular tunes of the
day.
[Sings] He’s just a sentimental gentleman from Georgia
…
The other songs my family liked to sing were rounds.
Joy and temperance and repose …
I think my mother’s father taught it to her. He was a
conservative New Englander. My father’s family were radical
New Englanders—Unitarians and abolitionists from way back.
But my mother’s father came from Tories.
Sarah: How did you go from pop music to folk music?
Pete: I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor
banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring—just
chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music
and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw
relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear.
I’ll never forget Mrs. Samantha Baumgarner, sitting back in
her rocking chair with a banjo—oh, she’d painted the
head of her banjo with brightly colored butterflies and flowers,
and she was singing funny songs, tragic songs, violent songs,
“Pretty Polly,” about murdering your true love.
Sarah: You did some traveling with Woody Guthrie later on,
didn’t you?
Pete: He taught me how to hitchhike and how to ride freight trains.
You don’t get on a freight when it’s in the
station—the railroad bulls will kick you off. You go about
100 yards or maybe 200 yards outside to where the train is just
picking up speed and you can trot alongside it. You throw your
banjo in an empty car, and then you throw yourself in. And you then
might go 200 or 300 miles before you stop.
Then I would knock on back doors and say, “Can I do a little
work for a meal?” Or I’d sing in a saloon for a few
quarters.
In six months I saw the country like I never would have seen it
otherwise. I was curious to learn how workers were doing. I went
out to Butte, Montana, which was a copper mining town then, and
went a thousand feet down where it was hot, hot, and they were
sweating, down there, working away.
They had a good union, though, and I knocked on the door and said,
“I know some union songs, would you like to hear them?”
And they paid me all of five dollars, which was a lot of money
then, to sing some of the coal miners’ songs I knew from the
East.
After World War II, we started a little organization we called
People’s Songs. It was a very small organization; our
publication had a circulation of about 2,000, and we finally went
broke in 1949. The Cold War was too much for us. The ruling class
knew just how to split the labor movement.
I dropped out of the communist movement about the same time as I
moved up here to Beacon. I was never enthusiastic about being
somebody who was supposed to be silent about being a member of
something. On the other hand, I was still curious about what was
happening to communist countries. I went to the Soviet Union three
times, in 1964, and in 1967, I think, and again in 1981. I
concentrated on singing songs of the civil rights movement, rather
than the labor movement, because that’s what really turned my
life around: seeing what Dr. King did, without using force and
violence, whereas the communists said the world would not be
changed without a great revolution. I think that was the big
mistake.
Sarah: Did you witness for yourself what Dr. King was doing?
Pete: Toshi and I were on the march from Selma to Montgomery for
three days. And I sang in Selma and Montgomery from time to time,
and one time in Birmingham and in Mississippi another time.
It was only through the years that I realized what an absolutely
extraordinarily thoughtful person King was. He insisted, from the
beginning, in winning the bus boycott without violence.
Some of the middle-class African Americans would say, “Dr.
King, accept a compromise. More people are going to be hurt and
killed.” These were doctors and lawyers who didn’t want
to lose their business. And the young people would say, “They
bombed us. Why don’t we bomb them back?” And King would
bring them together to talk and listen to each other, and it might
take a whole day or sometimes two days or even three days. But
finally, they’d say, “Okay, this is what we’ll
say and this is what we’ll do. Because we know we have to
work together or we’re not going to win.”
Sarah: Besides the labor and civil rights movements, you were also
involved in the anti-war movement.
Pete: There are still battles among people who are not quite sure
what kind of actions can be effective. I tend to agree with Paul
Hawken that it’s going to be many small things.
I think of Tommy Sands, an Irish song leader, who got song leaders
from the North and the South singing together for a whole evening.
They had people there who’d been killing each
other—Protestants and Catholics—and at the end of the
evening, they tentatively started talking to each other.
Sarah: When you sing, “Bring Them Home,” you say
“one of the great things about America is that we can speak
our minds.” And you said that at a time when you had been
blacklisted for many, many years. Can you talk about what it means
to you to be a patriot?
Pete: Well, Toshi and I are both deeply proud that we were able to
be part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. And I say this is one of
the great victories for the American people.
Now here’s another story you might like. In Albany, a woman
named Ruth Pelham, about 25 or 30 years ago, found she liked to
make up songs for kids, and the kids in her neighborhood liked to
hear her sing.
She saved up enough money to get a suitcase of instruments and a
little van. She’d go to one neighborhood on Monday, another
neighborhood on Tuesday, and so on, six days a week.
And it got to be a favorite thing in Albany to go to the music
mobile.
And she’s a good songwriter:
We’re gonna look to the people for courage in the hard times
coming ahead.
We’re gonna sing and shout, we’re gonna work it out, in
the hard times coming ahead.
With people’s courage, with people’s courage, with
people’s courage we can make it!
Second verse:
We’re gonna look to the people for laughter in the hard times
coming ahead…
And people just add verses:
We’ve gotta look to the people’s chutzpah!…
Albany is a different town than it used to be because of it. A few
years ago, the mayor of Albany had a big gathering, and there were
hundreds of people there with her, singing together.
Oh, I haven’t even told you about our local group! It’s
called the Beacon Sloop Club. When the Clearwater first stopped
here, we had a little party. A thousand people, mostly young
people, came. Toshi made stone soup. You know the story of stone
soup? I’d never heard of it before, but I got it published in
the local paper, and Toshi fed a thousand people out of one big
iron pot.
One woman brought down a chicken, and said “I was going to
feed it to my family, but they’re all here.” Another
brought down a roast beef—”my family’s here, you
might as well take it!”
And then, when the festival was over, everybody said, “Now
I’ve got to get back to my family, my church, my business, my
veterans’ organization,” whatever it was.
And the next year when Clearwater started again, we had to start
from scratch organizing the festival. At which point a teenager
said, “Why don’t we have a sloop club here, so we have
people who know how to put on a festival.”
I groaned. Another organization, minutes, elections. I called a
meeting but only three people showed up.
Toshi said, “Don’t call it a meeting. Call it a potluck
supper.” Then 30 people came. We have had a meeting the first
Friday of the month for 36 years. When we have a holiday songfest,
almost 200 squeeze in, and we’re practically part of the
establishment. It’s funny.
Before the Clearwater started cleaning up the river, land was very
cheap. This land was only $100 an acre when we bought it. Now my
neighbor is trying to sell one acre for $100,000. That’s
what’s happening in the Hudson Valley. The real estate people
say, “We filled up Long Island. We filled up New Jersey. Now
we will fill up the Hudson Valley.”
Sarah: [laughing] So you never thought you were helping the real
estate industry when you cleaned up the Hudson?
Pete: I was complaining to a politician in Beacon,
“We’ve grown too fast, we’re doubling every 20
years. We can’t do this forever. He says “Pete! If you
don’t grow you die.” And, I didn’t know what to
say, except at one o’clock in the morning I sat up in bed.
“If it’s true that if you don’t grow you die,
doesn’t it follow that the quicker we grow the sooner we
die?”
That doesn’t mean that we know how to solve the problem. But
the first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem
to be solved.
Sarah: One of your most famous songs is “Turn! Turn! Turn!
(To everything there is a season).” What kind of time do you
think we’re in right now?
Pete: We are in a crisis time. I don’t give us a chance
of—well, you never can tell. There might be a little tribe
somewhere in the world on some isolated island, but I see human
beings wiping each other off the face of the earth. We’ve
invented such weapons—not just nuclear weapons but chemical
weapons and all sorts of things.
I’ve been saying for years, it may be that climate change is
a wake-up call for the whole human race. It’s going to be a
multi-trillion dollar disaster for the rich countries, and a human
disaster for the poor countries. Where’s Bangladesh going to
put 45 million people? And Calcutta, and other cities? It’s
going to be a disaster like nobody’s ever seen—and I
hope people like Bush and people from the oil industry are still
living so that they can see what a mistake they made.
Sarah: What’s your secret to getting children singing,
getting people even at Carnegie Hall singing together, getting
people to fall in love with their river and take care of it? Are
there some things we can learn about why people choose to get
involved?
Pete: Well, it’s been my belief that learning how to do
something in your hometown is the most important thing. It’s
not just me who thinks this. Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt
that a small group of people can change the world, indeed it is the
only thing that ever has.” And the great biologist
René Dubos said, “Think globally, act locally.”
And E.F. Schumacher said “Small is beautiful.” And now
Paul Hawken. All these people are saying the same thing.
If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going
to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The
powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can
corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from
the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little
things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring
up!
Sarah van Gelder interviewed Pete Seeger for Climate Solutions, the
Spring 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. You can also watch a video
excerpt of this interview and see Michael Bowman’s photo
essay of Pete Seeger at home. Sarah is executive editor of YES!
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