Pete Seeger's 90th

Watching Pete’s 90 birthday party in Madison Square Garden on PBS brought back a sea of memories. The Garden Party was for the benefit of the sloop Clearwater. It is part of Pete’s campaign to clean up the Hudson River. Everybody who is anybody in the folk music world was there and it was a most joyous occasion for the thousands who filled the Garden and were happy to sing along. Yet it got me thinking. How did we progress down the road from “Talking Union,” one of Pete’s first songs about the class struggle to songs about cleaning up the Hudson River?

Early on Pete, with the rest of us lefties were singing about worker’s rights to organize. “Which Side Are You On,” “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” “Solidarity Forever” these were the anthems of struggle. When I was a union organizer I was inspired by Pete to learn to play the guitar as just another tool to help in the organizing campaigns. (You see the picture on my blog.) And indeed singing did help as it was a way of creating a common expression that all could participate in. What I am curious about is how the music changed? (I believe that when the singing ends the movement is over.)

The early days of the folk revival were born out of the WPA project to record as much as possible the songs of Appalachia and other rural areas that were rapidly dieing out. Alan Lomax lead this project for the Library of Congress. Much of the “Folkways” recordings that he made are now at the Smithsonian. A lot of the early protest music was sung by the Wobblies, the IWW. Their “Little Red Song Book” became famous for its songs about the class struggle particularly among the loggers in the Northwest.

Joe Hill took the hymn “In The Sweet Bye and Bye” and wrote these words to it
.
Long haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right,
But when asked about how “bout something to eat”
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, Live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The whole idea of that singing was to help people understand the nature of the class struggle. Workers and the poor suffered because the owners of the means of production that included the whole banking world were exploiting them for the sake of their own profits. (Song “The Banks Are Made of Marble with a guard at every door and the vaults are filled with silver that the workers sweated for.”)

When Pete came on the scene the class struggle was still a major focus of the folk singing world. That’s when “Talking Union” appeared and so it continued through the 30ies and 40ies. I can’t pinpoint an exact time when it began to change. This will be a rough try. First there was the McCarty era in which we had to fight off the fascist crazies who where preparing lists of people to be rounded up and put in concentration camps for the duration. (I was on that list.)That’s when singing out for freedom was a critical part of holding people together.

I believe things began to change some time after Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 to the Communist Party Convention acknowledging the horrors of the Stalin era. That was the beginning of the end of the utopian “dream of socialism.” Somewhat later with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “dream” disappeared from the world of alternatives to capitalism.

The coming together of the Viet Nam war protests and the Civil Rights movement is best expressed in the song “We Shall Overcome.” Black folks with the great Spiritual and Gospel tradition sure did sing themselves to many victories. The lefties were very much part of those movements.

The cultural revolution of the sixties was another important turning point. The anti war movement of the sixties pretty much rejected the old Marxist idea of the class struggle. The sixties launched the notion that what we needed to was “love one another.” It was as though “now that the idea of socialism has been pretty much destroyed what can we do to make the world a better place?” Well, loving one and other is not a bad idea it just doesn’t address fundamental underlying problems of society. The epitome of loving through music was demonstrated at the Woodstock celebration in 1969.

It was some time during the Reagan years that I got a sense that a new paradigm had taken over the society. Namely it was okay now to look out for yourself and go forth and make money. In that same time frame the issue of saving the planet began to emerge with increasing reports of the serious erosion of the worlds climate, oceans, air and resources. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring published in 1962 became a best seller and made the fight to save the planet real. No longer having a alternative of socialism this became a new safe harbor for old lefties to move into.

As we were celebrating Pete’s 90th in Madison Square Garden, I couldn’t help but think, have we solved all those old nagging economic problems that society is bereft with? Like the continuous increase in the spread between the rich and the poor? Or have we decided that it is easier to clean up the Hudson River with the help of the sloop Clearwater than it is to do something about the rich growing richer at the expense of the poor? Just more questions than answers.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.