Pete Seeger, the singer who spurned commercialism while spearheading the folk music revival, died Monday from natural causes. He was 94. In 2009, he performed at the inaugural concert for President Obama, where he sang “We Shall Overcome,” the civil-rights balled he made famous.
It would be disingenuous to simply call Seeger a singer. He was as much orator as songsmith, and his concerts, especially after he was blacklisted in the early 1950s, took the form of homespun vigils. He was the preacher and his sermons intertwined with the melodies as his audience watched in raptured awe. The songs, many of them from the songbook Seeger helped canonize, would begin and end with stories — about the history of the songs, what they mean, how they resonate with people who are listening. Take in a live recording — “The Complete Bowdoin College Concert, 1960” is a good place to start — and it feels like a conversation, between artist and audience, between the singer and you.
People listened to Seeger because he spoke from experience. Beginning with the Almanac Singers, later with the Weavers, and finally as a solo act, he had lived many lives. He attended Harvard, joined the Young Communist League, and hopped trains with Woody Guthrie, picking up the oral tradition of folk songs along the way. He was all but barred from television and radio for a large chunk of his career due to his refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, who indicted him on 10 counts of contempt of Congress in 1957. Seeger was sentenced to a year in prison, which was dismissed in appeals court the following year.
As his public image was tarnished, his reputation grew. More people came to see him perform. His concerts were an act of protest, his defiant stance against institutions of power — the music industry, the war industry — heroic in their opposition. Sometimes, this stance was too rigid (Seeger famously resisted Bob Dylan’s electric turn at the Newport Jazz Festival), and his politics never addressed his coming from a place of privilege. But his rebellion, as an image, is something to admire and remember.
