The huge party held just now at Madison Square Garden for Pete Seeger's ninetieth birthday, and to raise money for his eco-project, the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, was fun enough. Slapped together, consisting of one- or two-song appearances by Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Dave Matthews, Roger McGuinn, Taj Mahal, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Ani DiFranco, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Bragg, and so on, and then recombinant recombinations of these and other performers, the event had an up-and-down impact on the allegedly sellout crowd . (It didn't look quite sold out.) But you didn't really go to see it it for the music. You went to it for the sentiment, and to honor a man whose important role in the life of this nation and in the world of music for the last seventy years won't be fully understood until he's gone.
The high points of this marathon -- it was four hours -- were Richie Havens singing "Motherless Child" and then there was Richie Havens singing "Motherless Child." I would have him sit in on no show that I wasn't ready to allow him to steal and carry away. Dressed in a purple robe, bald of head and long of beard, he was as ferocious and mesmerizing as I've ever seen him. Arlo Guthrie was great, as well, his geniality and ease as impressive as ever, his guitar computer-monitor blue, and his Seeger pedigree stronger than anyone else's except for Seeger's wife and the rest of their family. He led the audience in singing "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep" and "It Takes a Worried Man," with someone whose name I didn't catch performing perhaps the first and last Jew's-harp solo to be heard in the Garden.
The audience was gray but not all gray -- plenty of young people, too. Nostalgia, genuine and wishful, seemed almost as perceptible as the mist from the wood-preserving humidifiers that sent wispy clouds onto the stage. But for all the performers' claims of music's continuing importance to the struggles of the day, and for all the genuine admiration and gratitude that washed over Mr. Seeger during the evening, there was something anachronistic in the air. As someone said from the stage, a union now OWNS a car company. The Internet builds different kinds of movements from those built by audiences gathering on college campuses and with the Weavers in Town Hall singing union songs and "Freiheit" or coal miners singing "Which Side Are You On?" Do you even know what "Freiheit" is? It would make you want to pick up a gun, join the Lincoln Brigade, and fight the Spanish Civil War all over again.
Anyway, it seems to me, somewhat sadly, that group singing, while it certainly helped to galvanize various important political changes in America, the Civil Rights movement prominent among them, will probably not do so again for a long time, if ever. The event did raise a lot of money to help keep the the Hudson River clean, and that is far from nothing. But the pleasures of tonight's concert, while considerable, had an undeniable quaintness about them, like (no doubt) yours truly.
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Peter Dreier: Pete Seeger Deserves One More Honor -- the Nobel Peace Prize
A truly modest man, Seeger has become a reluctant icon. But he deserves at least one more moment on the world stage -- at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway.
Jesse Larner: Pete Seeger, "Folk Music" and the Left
As someone on the left who loves folk music, I understand that I'm supposed to feel mystically uplifted by the dean of activist folkies. But I never could stand Pete.
I can't recall which songs in particular he sang either time. What I recall is how he opened so many hearts with song, and that when I turned around I saw that my eyes weren't the only ones filled with tears. I have never seen someone that can tap into his audience the way he does, and make them believe that they too can be a little better and do good in the world.
He is beyond being a living national treasure. The world is a much better place for him having traveled with us.
Happy Birthday Pete! May there be many, many more...
Oddly enough, I had lunch today with a friend who told me his parents were married in 1949 in NY and Seeger was the wedding singer. He's in the wedding album. True story.
Would that more musicians and performers had a "we" perspective rather than a strictly "me" perspective.
Many decades ago Pete Seeger evolved away from the idealistic belief in communism that many, many Americans shared until more of Stalin's crimes became known, and toward something more akin to socialism. Extremes like communism and capitalism are flip sides of the same coin and can't survive because of the built-in despotism and lack of accountability of the overlords who operate in class privilege and secrecy.
Pete Seeger's a good role model for evolving away from harmful systems when new information is learned, and for understanding and honoring that people are intrinsically equal and there is power in organizing together to fight oppression.
you go--or i went--because the music was meaningful to you, long time ago, and still is. in our section, there was a couple who must have been 90 or older themselves, who repeatedly had to keep getting up to go--i assume--to the bathroom. it was laborious: they had to use walkers and have someone, maybe their daughter, help them. in one way it was annoyingly distracting, yet i had to admire them for coming to see pete when it was such a hardship. that the music meant so much to them had to be respected.
it still means that much to me, too. i don't want to shun, or speak dismissively of, music that helped form who i am, just because it's not what "the kids" listen to. yes, there's something corny about "we shall overcome" singalongs. but i think the general idea that music moves and unites us as few other things can, lives on and always will. i'm in my 50s but am a 'net addict--i get that the internet is uniting us in a unique way. but i don't think it will replace the power of music, now or ever. i think that's a lot of what last night's concert was about. so glad i was there.
(ps, richie's performance blew me away, too.)
From his days with Woody Guthrie, his singing with the Weavers,his days on the Blacklist, his role in convincing President Johnson to drop out of the 1968 Presidential race, to the vindication of many of his beliefs in the last election, Pete Seeger has been a moral voice for the disenfranchised of the world.
I remember seeing him on SESAME STREET.