Pete Seeger (1919 – 2014)

Every summer in the 1960s, I traveled to Rhode Island - sometimes by car, motorbike, or hitchhiking – for the annual Newport Folk Festival, one of the most legendary musical events in the United States. The festival debuted many of our most celebrated performers, including Joan Baez (1959), Bob Dylan (1963), Jose Feliciano (1964), Johnny Cash, Arlo Guthrie, Linda Ronstadt, Judy Collins, and others too numerous to mention. The festival also raised from obscurity such legendary blues artists as Mississippi John Hurt, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Brownie McGee, and Sonny Terry. However, no performer was more loved and revered than Pete Seeger - folksinger, songwriter, activist, a founder of the Newport Folk Festival, and the conscience of my generation.  Here is a fitting farewell: