(Pete Seeger performing at a CIO labor canteen in Washington, D.C., in 1944, with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the audience.)
Roots music fans across the country are mourning the recent
death of American folk music hero Pete Seeger at the ripe old age of 94, and
many of them, like me, are thinking about their favorite Seeger songs. It’s a
huge body of work.
For me, there’s not much question. It’s not a Pete Seeger
original, but the Seeger-led Almanac Singers’ version of Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You On? (from a 1955 collection--not sure when it was recorded) wins
hands-down. It’s a haunting version, made more so by the slow, percolating sound
of Seeger’s banjo in the background.
Don’t scab for the bosses
Don’t listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize
Seeger’s long life stretched across modern labor history in
this country, and he was a major champion of the movement, celebrating its
music as well as its stand for the working man and woman. Seeger kept alive a
tradition that goes back to the anthem of the French Revolution, La Marseillaise, and the Paris Commune, L’Internationale, across the ocean to
Wobbly troubadour Joe Hill at the turn of the last century and Reece’s 1931 hymn
to striking coal miners in Harlan Country, Kentucky. Also in that tradition is
Sarah Ogan’s bitter indictment of rabid, unhinged capitalism in the 1944 ballad
Come All You Coal Miners (recorded by
folklorist Alan Lomax).
Seeger performed at rallies for the Congress of Industrial
Organizations, worked with Lomax on a book of protest and workers’ songs in the
late 1930s, sang and raised hell with balladeer Woody Guthrie, joined the
American Communist Party for a time, got in trouble with the House for
Un-American Activities Committee and was found guilty of contempt of Congress by
that less-than-august body. He and his 1950s group The Weavers were banned from
the television show Hootenanny in the
early 1960s even though that show ostensibly championed folk music.
Seeger was the connection between those earlier traditions
and a later generation of labor and folk-singing musicians like Joe Glazer and
Anne Feeney. Rock ‘n’ Rollers like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello pay homage
to Seeger’s legacy in their music.
Working people had a champion in Pete Seeger. They’ve always
needed music to articulate things banners and speeches aren’t always able to
say. Seeger knew that, and he provided a heck of a lot of that music. We’ll be
hearing it for a long time to come.
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