Books:SINGING OUT

...Curiously, Dunaway does not mention Seeger's experiments with steel drums, the melody instruments made from fifty-five-gallon oil drums...

...Until his recent death at the age of ninety-two, the elder Seeger was an exotic in academic circles, writing trenchant critiques of music and society in mandarin prose that, his son says, sent him scrambling for the nearest dictionary...

...My ancestors came to this country," Seeger told Dunaway, "because they didn't want to answer questions put to them by the then Un-English committees...

...But Seeger had already dug up, revised, and sent into circulation "We Shall Overcome," now the anthem of freedom fighters around the world...

...Dunaway had to sue the Government to gain access to 1,600 documents detailing Seeger's political activities...

...Not one was a royalist...

...The head of the Archives of American Folksong at the Library of Congress automatically turned over all of his correspondence with Seeger to the FBI...

...These and other failures have not turned Seeger from his deep commitment to the power of music...

...It was Alan Lomax who first proposed that combination as the central element of American folksong, and Seeger was lucky enough to work with him in the Congressional Archives, which John Lomax and his son had enriched with thousands of field recordings...

...When Seeger again began to reach large groups with his own compositions like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone...

...Like many radicals of the 1930s, Seeger has always felt uncomfortable "making it," because success has necessarily involved compromises of style and principle...

...Pete Seeger's career has been highlighted by his close association with the two giants of American folk tradition, Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly...

...Ruth Crawford Seeger's classical compositions are winning recognition these days too...

...But McCarthyite blacklisting rendered them virtually unemployable...

...The director of the University of Southern California's prestigious folk music camp demanded a loyalty oath from Seeger before he was allowed to appear there...

...The key to Seeger's consistency is not, as Dunaway claims, his compulsive "puritanism" but a standard of self-reliance much closer to the ideas of Emerson than Calvin...

...But his future had already been charted by a political shift which led his father to radicalism...

...Despite his Rudolf's nose (which often glows allergi-cally), he almost never drinks...

...It was not easy, but Mike and Peggy both managed to establish distinguished careers on their own—Mike with the New Lost City Ramblers, who accented the music of American stringbands from the 1920s and 1930s, and Peggy as a singer and composer, in collaboration with her husband, Ewan MacColl...

...The trips also brought them into contact with the banjo and fiddle music more akin to their audiences, and started Charles on a lifelong career which pioneered the discipline we now call ethnomu-sicology, an attempt to correct the tendency of music studies to concentrate strictly on what was heard in the concert halls of Europe...

...Dunaway tells of Seeger's disappointment when the civil rights movement veered toward black nationalism...

...The Almanac singers first met with excited receptions and then failed to get support from the unions whose ideals they put to song...

...Turn Turn Turn," and "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," the mass media turned him off once more...

...The one unshakable pillar of Seeger's life has been his devotion to achieving the goals of a participatory democracy in a society committed to the general welfare...

...Dunaway's book is structured around his sense of Seeger's typical experience—a series of brief successes, followed by resounding failures to capture a commercial audience...

...As in the case of the five-string banjo, Seeger popularized the twelve-string guitar, Leadbelly's instrument, which came across the border from Mexico...

...David King Dunaway's informative study of Pete Seeger will take its lumps from many sources, but he need not fear that Seeger will change directions on him...

...Alan Lomax chose a lyric from the black ballad "John Henry" to characterize the central theme of American folksong: "A man ain't nothin' but a man...

...One of Seeger's great skills has been his ability to comprehend and transmit the creative power of folk tradition, and he saw it best in Guthrie and Leadbelly...

...Seeger discovered the five-string banjo at a point in its history when it was about to become as archaic a music-maker as most of the traditional instruments of Europe...

...Because Seeger cooperated with the author and made his private papers available, Dunaway has been able to say much that is new and telling about Seeger's family history, education, and even his dreams and nightmares...

...On one occasion he will show up with an African thumb piano, and the next time he will feature a Trinidadian steel drum...

...Charles Seeger, the scion of the family, was a young professor at the University of California, Berkeley, when he became involved with socialists and Wobblies and ultimately declared himself a conscientious objector during World War I. His first wife, Constance, was a classical violinist, and when Charles found himself persona...

...Dunaway's documentation of this period is horrifying...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein, a specialist in folklore and folk music, teaches literature at California State University in Fresno...

...grata in academe, the two set out on tours to bring concert music to the ordinary people of America...

...With characteristic insight he realized that the banjo replicated perfectly the basic history of American folk tradition: It was brought here early by slaves and then became the favorite of Southern white musicians, who added the Anglo-Celtic repertoire to its basically African percussive styles...

...Charles Seeger and his second wife, Ruth Crawford Seeger, became collaborators with the Lomaxes, transcribing and analyzing folksongs for several of their pioneering collections...

...And despite the blacklists, his records and publications reign as major influences on American life...

...Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom...

...Seeger's collaborations on some of Guthrie's best work led ultimately to his own compositions on folk themes...

...Marley wrote...

...he has been married since 1943 to his present wife, Toshi, a Japanese-American whose father fought under Sun Yat-sen...

...And that is the best way to describe the career of Pete Seeger, who took his father's message and work seriously, especially his recognition that folk music in this country influenced popular rather than classical music styles, unlike folk music in Europe...

...Though the great strength of this biography lies in Dunaway's expert understanding of our folk music and its influences, I think he underestimates the extent to which music has enabled Seeger to survive some major disappointments...

...Dunaway has trouble comprehending this commitment, assuming that Seeger will sooner or later acknowledge the tremendous power of conformity in the United States, the celebrated "tyranny of the majority" which Tocqueville was among the first to see as a major factor in American life...

...For the first time, Seeger has discussed his membership in the Communist Party, his disaffiliation from it, and his determination not to be put in the position of "naming names...

...And when the nightclub dates were no longer there, he turned to the issues that had always concerned him...

...When the Weavers insisted on making a cigarette commercial to capitalize on their moment in the sun, Seeger acquiesced, did the date, and then left the group...

...That's not puritanism but an attitude closer to a lyric from one of the late Bob Marley's reggae songs...

...Brought up in a patrician atmosphere, Seeger attended prep schools and entered Harvard...

...It takes nothing away from his talent to recognize that his stunning impact on audiences comes in large part from an ability to demonstrate the creative power of ordinary people, by singing a miner's song or performing a haunting melody on a simple bamboo flute...

...Perhaps best of all, Dunaway has laid to rest some persistent rumors which follow Seeger as if he were the star-celebrity he has spent a lifetime trying not to be...

...He early made it a practice to introduce traditional artists to his audiences, often taking someone like harmonica virtuoso Sonny Terry on tour with him...

...His children," as he calls them, kept him from starving, and he literally became the Johnny Appleseed of his later columns in the folk music magazine Sing Out!, to which he still contributes...

...The Seeger family background is gone into in detail...

...She must be Jewish or Negro—which is she?' 'She's Japanese,' Pete answered...

...Every time the commercial music world rejected Seeger, he turned to his great love, the live performance, appearing in schools, churches, and summer camps across the land...

...The Weavers, which Dunaway accurately describes as a group attempting to tailor traditional music for a popular audience, brought the music of Leadbelly and Guthrie to the top of the hit parade...

...The biographer's art is difficult, ever more so when one's subject is alive and capable not only of contradicting what's been written but changing the life itself...

...A typical Seeger fantasy, the project never got very far, though Seeger brought a great Trinidadian maker and player of steel drums to New York, where he actually did organize some groups among children in trouble...

...Seeger once proposed to wipe out juvenile delinquency by organizing city kids into steel bands...

...And therein lies a main clue to Seeger's noted charisma...

...Seeger has continued to sing and create, indulging in quixotic dreams like promoting the clean-up of the Hudson River by building and piloting a sloop (the Clearwater) up and down its waters...

...Seeger chose the next line: "And before you let that steam drill beat you down,/Die with that hammer in your hand...

...The second family included Mike and Peggy Seeger, who grew up in the all-encompassing shadow of their half brother...

...In one of his essays, Charles Seeger pleaded with folklorists to quit their antiquarian pursuits and become part of the new developments that were taking place, to become, in his term, "applied folklorists...

...It worked—in the same way that Seeger's life and art have worked for him and us...

...One of them, Elder Brewster, was on the Mayflower with Governor Bradford, one of the leaders of the Plymouth Colony...

...They were early settlers on both sides...

...In a nation that often finds it difficult to acknowledge its democratic origins, Seeger exposes for all to see the folk roots which most of us have forgotten, making as many international connections as he can...

...A Harvard dropout (Seeger had a difficult time getting through prep school as well), he ultimately became one of the best researchers in the folk field...

...Seeger's association with the banjo began a process that has saved the instrument from extinction...

...It's all we've ever had, redemption song...

...Dunaway reports that when Seeger told one of his respectable brothers he was thinking of getting married, the response was: " 'You're getting married...