This Land is Your Land

Despite the continuing efforts of the Republicans

I was never a big Pete Seeger fan, but my college years having coincided with the folk music revival, I certainly heard him a lot. I appreciated that he came from the time and conditions that produced Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck and a lot of skepticism about how well our version of Capitalism served freedom and democracy.  Those folks and many others weren't well received by the same sort of  -- I hesitate to use the word bastards, but it fits -- who are still calling everything and everyone Communists for every spurious reason they can.  Seeger has my respect, for his courage more than for his musicianship. He used his humor and his banjo against the union bashers and skull crackers, stood up to the Joe McCarthy thugs and the war mongers and spawned a generation of musical protest that seems strangely absent at a time when much of what he fought is metastasizing like a cancer. We still need to be reminded just who it is who owns this land, the Koch Brothers, Roger Ailes, the Tea Party or the voters.

Pete Seeger died yesterday at the age of 94 after a very short illness.  4 days before he entered the hospital he was chopping wood, says his grandson. He died in the hospital 4 days before he could collect the Woody Guthrie Prize.  So long Pete, it's been good to know ya but your conscience still sings to us.

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: