Seeger on Seeger

ACOUPLE of summers ago I went to an antiwar rally in New York City's Flushing Meadow Park. There were only about 200 people at the rally, but since it was a nice day with a friendly atmosphere we mostly stretched out on the grass, feebly hoping that the speakers' assurances that peace in Indochina and big-name entertainment were both on the way would somwhow come true. Peace in Indochina is nearly as far off now as it was then; but the entertainment actually arrived in the shape of Pete Seeger, who spent an hour or so leading what he charitably called "the crowd" in song--peace songs "for 53 per cent of you" ("I know a young woman who swallowed a lie..."), civil rights songs, folk songs, and just songs--for all the world as through he had never sung for a larger or more lucrative audience.

A similar sort of unobtrusive excellence permeates The Incompleat Folksinger. Most of the book is reprinted, largely from Sing Out magazine, and because it's anthological, it's discursive, repetitious and fun to browse in. It juxtaposes history ("The singingest union America ever had was the old Wobblies..."), memoirs of earlier singers from Joe Hill to Woody Guthrie (with whom Seeger traveled for awhile shortly after he dropped out of Harvard), accounts of the origins of various instruments and of Seeger's travels abroad, an unfortunately cursory version of his confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee (the full transcript is well worth looking up in Eric Bentley's Thirty Years of Treason), a list of the translators who did the King James Bible, quotations from Casanova and Lenin, and--most important of all --a liberal sprinkling of songs.

SOME OF THE SONGS, most of them simple enough to sight-sing, and many of them relatively unknown, illustrate Seeger's musicological points. But I was most pleased at private discoveries--finding that a denunciation of an MTA fare hike someone once sang for me was originally a Progressive Party campaign song from the 1948 Boston mayoral race, or recognizing "The House Carpenter," an English Ballad, as a source or relative of Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather." There are enough songs for everyone to make similar discoveries of his own, or just to revel in familiar things, like the gruesome fates of the wedding guests in "Froggy Went A-Courting."

The book also has quite a lot of filler, particularly in an overlong chronology of the '60s. But throughout there's a healthy sense that music matters even when it seems not to: the CIO may have stopped singing for awhile, but "Which Side Are You On?" helped Boston University's students stop a Marine recruiter only last month. Like fireflies, Seeger says, such songs light up the night

Or maybe I should compare them to a more potent insect. Once a white politician told Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist leader: "Woman, I care no more for you than a mosquito." "Maybe so," she said, "but, praise God, I'll keep you scratching."