PETE SEEGER'S HOMEMADE MUSIC
Ervin, Mike
VIEWS REVIEWS PETE SEEGER'S HOMEMADE MUSIC BY MIKE ERVIN If you're one of the many who still think of Pete Seeger as a lanky youngster strumming a banjo and belting out songs at a peace rally or...
...You don't have to be born with a good voice...
...In her own way, she was a great internationalist...
...I can sing songs I like to sing for people who sing along with me...
...It was a beautiful description of folk music...
...I decided she was right...
...said, "Woody, you're a true folk musician," and he said, "Am I?" Well, he wrote a little magazine piece called "Ear Music...
...SEEGER: Whether it's necessary or not could probably be infinitely argued...
...I'm not enthusiastic about it at all...
...magazine ought to change its name from "the magazine of folk music" to "the magazine of homemade music...
...Some of the best folk music in the world is made by parents and grandparents putting children to sleep...
...SEEGER: In the early days, there was only one kind of music...
...Maybe I should have retired right then and there...
...It's now safe to swim in the middle part of the Hudson, and in about five more years it will be safe to swim in Albany and New York City...
...Workers at the Chicago Tribune have been out on strike for months, and whenever I pass their picket line they look glum and solemn...
...Let's solve another problem with guns...
...Everybody assumed I was accusing the Israeli government of massacring the Palestinians...
...After you've done your job nationally or internationlly, go back home...
...The only way I can live with myself is that my wife and I live as simply as we can, and I sing for free most of the time...
...Q: What about your musical involvement now...
...But poor folks still made their own music...
...let's call it a pot-luck supper...
...just sing the songs you like to sing...
...Q: How deep is the division...
...It's always a feast—nothing fancy but lots of good food—and we stuff ourselves...
...SEEGER: No...
...SEEGER: I think it would be more accurate and more important, too...
...Well, I started thinking about it, and it occurred to me that every government in the world has been associated with a massacre of some kind...
...But I don't think we're happier...
...Hundreds of thousands of people come to the docks each year to visit...
...Q: How did you come to serve as a bridge between the traditional Left, with its belligerent demands for an ever bigger piece of the pie, and the modern "greens," who emphasize pacifism and conservation...
...These days, Seeger and his wife Toshi spend much of their time working with the Clearwater organization, which he helped launch in 1969...
...They're doing it all up and down the river...
...There was a strike at Yale University about a year ago—2,000 lab and clerical workers, most of them young women...
...Rich people could afford to hire someone to make music for them, and this was the beginning of fine-arts music...
...Q: Would you say, then, that there are essentially two types of music—classical, made by artists, and folk, made by folks...
...The president of an auto corporation concentrates on making cars and doesn't worry about rail transport or bicycles or boats...
...Everything I've said should be prefaced with the statement, "It seems to me...
...When our ancestors lived in tribes, hunting animals and gathering roots and berries, all the men sang the same hunting songs and all the women sang the same lullabies...
...We think we've discovered a good way for an organization to grow...
...It includes eighty union songs, some well known and some obscure...
...Don't run away...
...Why don't they sing, the way strikers used to in the old days...
...Q: When I go to one of your concerts, I see the whole audience singing along— everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year-olds...
...Then some shrewd people invented agriculture, and class society developed...
...Anthropologists tell us about tribes in far-off places where life is less rushed and often full of laughter...
...A leader's job is to maintain the narrow focus...
...Q: Tell me about Clearwater...
...Television is the primary reason, but I also suspect our educational system, which puts a premium on shut-up-and-listen...
...It becomes very tempting to think, "Well, we solved that problem with guns...
...I'd like to persuade everybody everywhere to make music...
...It goes up and down the Hudson, taking tens of thousands of schoolchildren out for sails...
...They would swipe a good folk melody and jazz it up for the marketplace, or they would swipe a new idea from the hired musicians at the castle and try that out...
...It was another ten years before I could take a few years off in the summer to take my family to the beach...
...And my guess is that I would probably have gone along with him...
...The key issues are those that are close to you, geographically as well as spiritually...
...most of the beaches were closed fifty years ago...
...A few months ago, I was singing for some Arabs, and for the first time in my life I tried singing a song in Arabic...
...It's really kind of obscene...
...SEEGER: The term was invented about 130 years ago in Europe, and it meant "the music of the peasant classes, ancient and anonymous...
...Q: You suggested once that Sing Out...
...Q: What's your involvement now...
...Q: Do you sense that we don't sing as much as we used to...
...My aunt taught school and said, "Come sing to my class and I'll get $5 for you...
...Some of the best folk musicians I've ever known didn't have a great many songs in their repertoire, but the ones they knew they knew awfully well...
...SEEGER: Well, we live a much more comfortable life than our ancestors, who had to endure cold and heat and hunger and often an early death...
...SEEGER: Clearwater was just one of many organizations that pushed for revising the pure-water laws...
...The present generation would have stolen it all from future generations...
...Q: And in terms of cleaning up the Hudson River...
...I answer, "Stay right where you are...
...That's a very concrete victory...
...But since then, my income and my audiences have steadily gone up...
...SEEGER: I've been a reader all my life, and along about 19621 read a book called Silent Springby Rachel Carson...
...Q: What has Clearwater accomplished...
...Nobody wants to come to meetings, but my wife says, "Let's not call it a meeting...
...It's kind of high and mighty for someone up here to say to people who've endured Somoza's dictatorship for fifty years, "Oh, you must not use guns...
...This little club is the main reason why our town now has a million-dollar riverfront park...
...I started singing professionally, you could say, in 1938, when I dropped out of college and was unable to get a job as a journalist...
...The focal point of Clearwater is a sailing vessel of the same name, a 100-ton antique sloop that plies the Hudson River, often passing the Seeger home in Beacon, New York...
...Q: Your wife says you've been saying that for forty years...
...Music is something literally everybody can do...
...Last winter, he was even too busy to pursue one of his favorite forms of relaxation—making maple syrup...
...Q: What do you mean when you say we won't survive unless we learn to do things ourselves...
...SEEGER: My guess is there is much more polarization among organizational bureaucracies than among members...
...If someone says, "I want to change the world...
...Q: What do you regard as your biggest achievement...
...I know that for some years Ernesto Cardenal in Nicaragua maintained a pacifist retreat where he claimed that by following Jesus and turning the other cheek they would rid themselves of the dictator, Somoza...
...SEEGER: Yes, we're getting so used to being spectators...
...But the big danger about using guns is once you start, where do you stop...
...The world needs a certain number of traveling salesmen and diplomats, but maybe they should just be traveling salesmen and diplomats for part of their lives...
...John L. Lewis is supposed to have said, "The singing army is a winning army...
...I'm almost embarrassed...
...SEEGER: Not in the sense that the word has for the average person, though I probably find myself thinking like a pacifist more than most...
...Not only are they 10,000 miles away, but we haven't endured what they've had to endure...
...I used to think my main job was to carry the message of people like Woody Guthrie and others to a new generation...
...Q: Is there anything else you'd like to say...
...Q: But then who will work on such global issues as the arms race...
...And my kids have never gone hungry...
...Q: But you believe violence is necessary...
...So I've been trying to make a connection between the two ever since...
...SEEGER: Darned if I know...
...But around the turn of the century, people in this country began collecting cowboy songs and Negro spirituals, and they said, "This is folk music, too...
...SEEGER: We'll see...
...SEEGER: Oh, just keep in mind that I'm just as dumb as the next banjo picker...
...I'll go sing at a big concert with Arlo Guthrie, and we'll go home with the amount of money some people have to work all year to make...
...SEEGER: Well, my voice is going, frankly...
...What I learned from Woody was that you could make up a song about anything—good, bad, funny, sad...
...Why...
...Then anyone who wants to can stick around and sing...
...Then the chairperson for the evening produces a big sheet of paper with the agenda and we spend two minutes on this, three minutes on that, maybe five or ten minutes for something really important...
...They found themselves putting new words to pop tunes, and their picket lines were so musical they were the talk of the town...
...There are Clearwater holidays, Clearwater festivals, and, of course, Clearwater songs...
...Our aim is to show people what fun it is to get involved with the water...
...I believe that's wrong...
...You probably can't have a war or a revolution without having a massacre...
...Dig in...
...Until he met some folklorists, he had never heard the term folk music...
...But finally he decided he was wrong, and extended a hand to the guerrillas in the hills...
...For the moment, though, Seeger's schedule is more crowded than ever...
...We even have a little in the bank so that when I do something foolish and have to have an operation—I've had two hernias and a knee operation—I can afford it...
...SEEGER: Maybe some professions, some unions, sing more than others...
...I did more reading and came to the conclusion that most unions, most socialist-minded people, weren't paying enough attention to environmental issues...
...It's another example of overspecialization in modern life...
...Similarly, the head of a union tends to think his main job is getting higher wages for the members, not worrying about the quality of the air breathed by union members' families...
...It kept their morale high, and they eventually won their strike...
...Where do I go...
...SEEGER: I'm mainly a rank-and-file member...
...What more could I want...
...There are Clearwater groups in a dozen places...
...It's like knowing how to cook a good dish, and improving it over the years...
...The rise of the cities led to a third kind of music: Some of the folks found they could pick up coins in the marketplace by making music, and their music tended to be more sophisticated than the relatively simple music played in the villages...
...And pop music has for hundreds of years occupied this middle ground between folk music and classical, and it has tended to vary more with the seasons and the fashions and the fads...
...Because we put on festivals—a fish festival in May, a strawberry festival in June, a corn festival in August, a pumpkin festival in October...
...Your repertoire doesn't have to be great...
...I don't want to ignore those who just sit and listen, but I'm really hipped on the subject that this world won't survive unless people realize that it's a lot of fun to do things yourself...
...Our age of specialization makes for efficient production, but not for happiness...
...It would signify being more concerned with the kind of music people make, not the kind people listen to...
...But the problem is they only do it there...
...I'm the luckiest musician I know...
...We have this beautiful, beautiful sailboat, 106 feet tall, one of the handsomest boats ever designed...
...My wife and I help with the annual festival—the Hudson River Revival— every June, and work year-round with a little support group called the Beacon Sloop Club...
...Then along came people like Woody Guthrie...
...Seeger's book, Carry It On, a history in song and pictures of working men and women in America, was published in late 1985...
...I think music was one of the reasons...
...She believed that unless we had international laws internationally enforced, we would lose the air, the water, the soil, the world...
...By this I don't mean that you strum the guitar with your ear," he wrote...
...SEEGER: We've helped on many things, but I think the main thing Clearwater did was keep the river in public consciousness...
...He performs coast-to-coast, most often free to support worthy causes...
...They Mike Ervin is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...By that standard, of course, America has no folk music...
...Q: How do you define folk music...
...I mean you learn it just by hearing it and other people learn it just by hearing you...
...Around 7:30, some musicians sing a song or two...
...We manage to cover fifteen or twenty subjects in one hour...
...they sing very little after they leave the hall...
...It never was much of a voice, but now I can't even hold a nice, even tone...
...I believe we've forgotten what fun it is to lead a well-rounded life in which you do a little of this and a little of that...
...Q: But unlike many other "greens," you're not a pacifist...
...Over the years, they'll sound better and better...
...Among Afro-American people there's a very strong tradition that music is part of life, and unions with black members tend to do a lot more singing...
...Does your heavy involvement mean you believe environmental protection is the key issue...
...SEEGER: My guess is that a lot of people will work on those, but they can still work on local issues at the same time...
...At the same time, I got off a flip statement that was widely misinterpreted, and for which I've been severely criticized: I said it was better to massacre a language than to massacre a people...
...The sloop's Original purpose, and the organization's, was to remind area residents of the river's beauty and to mobilize resistance against the river's pollution...
...VIEWS REVIEWS PETE SEEGER'S HOMEMADE MUSIC BY MIKE ERVIN If you're one of the many who still think of Pete Seeger as a lanky youngster strumming a banjo and belting out songs at a peace rally or on a union picket line, you'll be surprised to know that he's sixty-six years old now and talks about quitting singing pretty soon to spend long-overdue time with his family...
...And the same applies to South Africa: For us to tell the South Africans they must not use guns is kind of foolish...
...But by the 1960s, I'd done that job...
...I'm not sure how many more years I'll keep traveling around...
...All that has been achieved, but Clearwater has become something more—a style of activism and an integral part of the Hudson River culture...
Vol. 50 • April 1986 • No. 4
