Well, this weeks choice should be no surprise. Pete Seeger died this week, so he’s the obvious choice. The folk craze crested just before I became musically conscious. I got my transistor radio when I was about nine, but if they weren’t playing it on the Big D, I didn’t hear it, and they weren’t playing Pete, since at the time, he was fighting contempt of Congress charges and they weren’t going to play his music, though they were playing plenty of other people playing his music. The first song of his that I really recall hearing was Little Boxes, but the song that I most associated with Pete (not knowing he had at least partially written We Shall Overcome, and had wholly written If I Had a Hammer, was this gem, which made an irrefutable argument against the Vietnam War in just a few verses:
For good measure, here he is singing If I Had a Hammer, way back in 1956.
It’s great that he outlived the people who tried to hunt him down in the fifties, and he’ll live on in our collective memories while they will live in infamy. One thing that comes through in all of his performances is how genuinely nice he was.
By the way, there’s a petition out there to have the new Tappan Zee bridge named after Pete, who spearheaded the drive to clean the Hudson. It’s unlikely that barely Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo will agree to do it, but it can’t hurt to add your name.
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