Pete Seeger: A Prophet in His Own Land

No matter Pete Seeger’s radical associations—the folk-singer was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA and a backer of Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential run—his life and music exemplify the sturdiest Judeo-Christian universalism. Starting out his career in the '30s, he sang workers’ anthems that demanded a revolution in material conditions. While Seeger’s commitment to left-wing causes never faltered, its expression morphed as his voice assumed a paternal timbre and his repertoire took an existential turn.

If “Solidarity Forever” had imagined the final victory of those who “built the cities where they trade,” “Oh, Had I A Golden Thread” offered a spiritual, and surprisingly mundane, vision of utopia. Penned in 1958, the song replaced the social-realist welder with the brave woman in labor, the pugilistic union member with the innocent toddler.

Behind the domestic theme lies a deep skepticism of modernity. Seeger’s privileging of life-cycle events over political ones bespoke a challenge to Marxist, and also Enlightenment, notions of history: in this case, a linear progression and the overcoming of the past. In his work, we measure time by milestones in the life of the family and the individual.

Most of us will raise children. Each of us will pass away. An awareness of death and recurrence lurks in Seeger’s oeuvre, and this comes through most powerfully in “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Its lyrics cribbed from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the song reminds us that to everything there is a season: “A time to gain, a time to lose, a time to rend, a time to sew, a time for love, a time for hate.” That could be seen as an invitation to nihilism, but Ecclesiastes’s message is fundamentally life-affirming: “A man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?”

Seeger’s home-in on the hearth also functioned as an attack on the state, particularly the totalitarian state. Much of this was thanks to the folk genre itself. From its distinctive song-writing process to its emphasis on audience participation, American folk embraces an egalitarian approach to hierarchy and a pre-commercial mode of cultural transmission. It refuses to allow the individual or family to be lost to the anonymity of the masses.

Seeger followed those imperatives to a tee. At one 1963 concert, he brought to the stage at Carnegie Hall the despair of a coal-miner’s wife, the joy of a newborn, the pity of Marilyn Monroe’s demise, and the elation of an emancipated slave. Little was outside his ken. “This Old Car” recounts the story of a vehicle’s break-down on New York’s West Side Highway. “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie” describes the death of a prized goose. Unsurprisingly, many pieces also address the state’s disruptive effect on family life. In “Mrs. McGrath,” the mother of a maimed Irish soldier condemns the monarchs of Europe: “By the heavens I’ll make ’em rue the time they struck the leg from a child of mine.” In “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?,” husbands, torn from their wives, are killed in battle. Prior to an ethos, Seeger had a pathos. That sympathetic quality allowed him to relate events, large and small, relevant and obscure, near and far, to his listeners.

Pathos could come at the expense of depth; reaction could go to excess. On one recording of “Careless Love,” Seeger mused, “Think of all those scientists and inventors who thought their invention was going to save the world, cure all the ills, and somehow, it just didn’t turn out right.” In a 1995 interview with the New York Times, he intimated, “I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

If his solution was wrong, the sense of crisis he felt after the Holocaust and during the bleakest years of the Cold War was palpable. In the “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt had theorized, “We can no longer afford ... to discard the bad and simply think it of as a dead-load. ... The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.” Seeger lamented this dissonance in “Bach at Treblinka,” recalling how the Baroque composer’s work had greeted Hitler’s victims on their arrival at the camps.

Arendt had called “for a new law on earth,” which would remain limited, even as it “comprehend[ed] the whole of humanity.” Seeger’s laws were timeless. Like the lyrics to “Turn, Turn, Turn,” they were borrowed from yesteryear. He was a cataloger of man’s experience, and from that arose his fight for universal dignity.

Seeger crooned for Okies. Seeger agitated for unions. Seeger stood up to McCarthyism. Seeger campaigned and raised money for civil rights. Seeger cleaned up the Hudson River. He recycled and rewrote songs from one movement to the next, as much for convenience as in recognition of intersectionality.

Compelled to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, he was told to identify himself in a photo taken at a Communist rally. “It is like Jesus Christ when asked by Pontius Pilate, ‘Are you king of the Jews?’” he replied.

Last month Pete Seeger died at the age of 94. He was a prophet in his own land.

Daniel J. Solomon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.