Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and social activist. He was a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, and had a string of hit records in the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, especially their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, workers' rights, counterculture, environmental causes, and ending the Vietnam War.
Among the prolific songwriter's best-known songs are "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson), "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" (also with Hays), and "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)", which has been recorded by many artists in and outside the folk revival movement. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963) while The Byrds had a number one hit with "Turn! Turn! Turn!" in 1965.
Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists), which became the acknowledged anthem of the civil rights movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters episode "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song", Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional "We will overcome" to the more singable "We shall overcome".
Early life and education
Peter Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, at French Hospital in Chelsea, Manhattan in New York City. His family, which Seeger called "enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition", traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a physician from Württemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s.
Seeger's father, the composer and musicologist Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was born in Mexico City to American parents. Charles established the first musicology curriculum in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1910s. He also helped organize the American Musicological Society and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology. Pete's mother, Constance de Clyver Seeger (née Edson), raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School. Charles' brother, Alan Seeger, a noted American war poet was one of the first American soldiers to be killed in World War I.
In 1911, Charles was hired to establish the music department at UC Berkeley, but was forced to resign in 1918 because of his outspoken pacifism during World War I.According to Dunaway, the British-born president of the university "all but fired" Charles Seeger (How Can I Keep From Singing, p. 26). Charles and Constance moved back east, making their base of operations on the estate of Charles's parents in Patterson, New York, about north of New York City. When Peter was eighteen months old, Charles and Constance set out with him and his two older brothers in a homemade trailer to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South. Upon their return, Constance taught violin and Charles taught composition at the New York Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard), whose president and family friend, Frank Damrosch, was Constance's adoptive "uncle".
At four, Pete was sent away to boarding school, but was brought home a year and a half later when his parents learned the school failed to inform them that he had contracted scarlet fever. He attended first and second grades in Nyack, New York, before being sent away to another boarding school in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Career and money tensions led to marital discord between Charles and Constance. When Charles discovered in 1927 that Constance had opened a secret bank account in her own name, he became enraged and a series of separations and temporary reconciliations ensued. Pete was eight at the time of the first marital split. As Seeger's biographer David King Dunaway writes, "Like many children of divorce, Pete was caught between parents and developed an aversion to family quarrels." In 1932, Charles married his composition student and assistant, Ruth Crawford, now considered by many to be one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century.See Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: a Composer's Search for American Music (1997). Deeply interested in folk music, Ruth had contributed musical arrangements to Carl Sandburg's influential folk song anthology, the American Songbag (1927), and later created original settings for eight of Sandburg's poems. Beginning in 1936, Charles held various administrative positions in the federal government's Farm Resettlement program, the WPA's Federal Music Project (1938–1940) and the wartime Pan American Union.According to Judith Tick, Charles was fired from his job at Juilliard because Frank Damrosch sided with Constance in the Seeger divorce. Ruth Crawford Seeger, pp. 224–25. After World War II, he taught ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley and Yale University.
In 1935, Pete was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun (CRS), the George E. Jonas Foundation's international leadership camp, held every summer in upstate New York. He remained a loyal alumnus through the decades and attended a CRS event at age 93 in July 2012. He attended Avon Old Farms School, an all-boys school in Avon, Connecticut. He worked on the school's newspaper. Siblings Pete's eldest brother, Charles Seeger III, became a radio astronomer, and his next older brother, John Seeger, taught in the 1950s at the Dalton School in Manhattan and was the principal from 1960 to 1976 at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx. All four of Pete's half-siblings from his father's second marriage—Margaret (Peggy), Mike, Barbara, and Penelope (Penny)—became folk singers. Peggy Seeger became a well-known performer in her own right. Mike Seeger was a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, married Pete's half-sister Penny, also a talented singer, who died young. Barbara Seeger joined her siblings in recording folk songs for children.
Career Musical development Despite being classical musicians, Peter's parents did not press him to play an instrument. On his own, the otherwise bookish and withdrawn boy gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Over time, Seeger developed a talent for singing and whistling, using both in much of his music. At thirteen, he enrolled in the Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1936. During the summer of 1935, while traveling with his father and stepmother, Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville, as he related in an April 1963 interview on Folk Music Worldwide. The festival was organized by local folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom Charles had hired for Farm Resettlement music projects. The festival took place in a covered baseball field. There the Seegers:
watched square-dance teams from Bear Wallow, Happy Hollow, Cane Creek, Spooks Branch, Cheoah Valley, Bull Creek, and Soco Gap; heard the five-string banjo player Samantha Bumgarner; and family string bands, including a group of Indians from the Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads. They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field, hearing music being made there as well. As Lunsford's daughter would later recall, those country people "held the riches that Dad had discovered. They could sing, fiddle, pick the banjos, and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains. I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park."
For the Seegers, experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a "conversion experience". Pete was deeply affected and, after learning basic plucking technique from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo. The teenage Seeger also sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita. Benton, a lover of Americana, played "Cindy" and "Old Joe Clark" with his students Charlie and Jackson Pollock; friends from the "hillbilly" recording industry; and avant-garde composers Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell. It was at one of Benton's parties that Pete heard "John Henry" for the first time.Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, p. 235. According to John Szwed, Jackson Pollock, later famous for his "drip" paintings, played harmonica, having smashed his violin in frustration, see: Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (Viking, 2010), p. 88.
Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938.. Seeger reportedly lost his Harvard scholarship after failing one of his winter exams. He dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art as well. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. He polished his performance skills during a summer stint of touring New York state with the Vagabond Puppeteers (Jerry Oberwager, 22; Mary Wallace, 22; and Harriet Holtzman, 23), a traveling puppet theater "inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico". One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers. The group reprised its act in October in New York City. An October 2, 1939 Daily Worker article reported on the Puppeteers' six-week tour this way:
That fall, Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to help Lomax sift through commercial "race" and "hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938–1953).The resultant 22-page mimeographed "List of American Folk Music on Commercial Recordings", issued in 1940 and mailed by Lomax out to academic folklore scholars, became the basis of Harry Smith's celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways Records. Seeger also did similar work for Lomax at Decca in the late 1940s. Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk-singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940–41) alongside Josh White, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast.Folk Songs in the White House, Time, March 3, 1941 The show was a success, but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast.