Pete Seeger is Dead

28 January 2014

     Yesterday, not having seen the news yet, a friend mentioned Pete Seeger and I was going to make a joke about whether he was still alive or not. I didn't make the joke. Irony of ironies he died a few hours later and of course it was all over the news that another American Icon was dead at age 94. When I was a kid and television was new (there were only four TV sets within a two-block radius of the house I grew up in,) the McCarthy Army Hearings were front and center. A couple years after that  most everyone had a set in their homes. These grainy music videos would play in the afternoon (in black and white!) as sort of fillers between programs. Two of them were produced by The Weavers and we had to listen to "Good Night Irene" and "Tzena, Tzena. Tzena" endlessly along with snippets of Liberace. That was my first introduction to Pete Seeger. Then he disappeared. Just seemed to vanish in the 50's witch-hunts. He took the Fifth on admitting he was a communist. He admitted much later and only when it was safe, that he was indeed a communist. He sealed his fate for ever being hired again to work as an entertainer. But one wonders whether it was the communist affiliation or whether he just played lousy banjo? He took up the hootenanny circuit and sold pamphlets on how to play the banjo and entertain your friends. (the instructions never get beyond the ability to 'frail.' He made the comment publicly  that he invented frailing.) Then he sort of resurrected himself during the Folk era and the Vietnam Protests of the 60's.

     From then on, any and every liberal cause was his band-wagon du jour and the aging Old Left would haul him up on a stage to recount his battles with our tyrannous government. He was the Left's equivalent of the Right's 'knights of the limelight,'  Bob Hope, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, and the Toastmaster General George Gessel. They were all dinosaurs of  The Big One and we who were slogging in the mud of Vietnam despised the Cheerleaders no matter what side of the fence the Cheerleaders were on. (They were Chicken Hawks - "It's a lovely war, and you boys go fight and die in it, but I'm too important to go die myself!')  To us, they were all guilty of promoting someone's propaganda. Sometimes the propaganda was merely stupid. Sometimes the propaganda was just stupid and hurtful. Seeger wrote a  few really good songs, even better when performed by the Byrds or others, but Seeger found his shtick in being the Lifetime Achievement Village Curmudgeon continually complaining about how the U.S. government screwed him in the 50's and he won't forget it. There was an interesting profile on Seeger recently on the PBS American Masters series. All the plaudits and nice comments came out upon news of his death. But the PBS show gives us another interesting glimpse into the Man. His almost paranoiac attitude toward authority, his refusal to acknowledge changing trends in his own version of  Folk music, and in nearly comedic terms, his battles with Bob Dylan at the infamous Newport Jazz Festival. What comes through loud and clear in the PBS program is an arrogant bitterness in the man. The egotism that's hard to deal with. The empty wind-bag with a messianic complex. Dylan was taking away Seeger's crown and the Boss didn't like it. Seeger got old. The shtick got boring and old. We all get old. He wrote a few good songs and helped sell a lot of banjos. Two of his biggest sellers were stolen from an old African American spiritual, the other one from the Bible. And he was quick to label anyone who didn't like his music as a Nazi. Pete Seeger is dead; but there are still plenty of entertainer/propagandists out there to take his place.