Remembering Pete Seeger, Before He Was Pete Seeger
By Leslie Kandell, MusicalAmerica.com
February 19, 2014
Photo of Pete teaching Bob
NEW YORK—Pete Seeger, the beloved folk singer who died Jan. 27, had 51.7 million Google entries as of Feb. 14. By now it’s probably more. But “Pete Seeger City and Country” had only one match: “In 1949 Pete Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York.” Except for a couple of entries on the tiny century-old school’s web page, that’s all.
And it’s not even accurate. As most Americans know, Pete never gave vocal instruction--he just made people feel like singing. But he was at City and Country, my grade school, from 1948 till 1950. It’s an undocumented but significant period in his life, when he was at the threshold of becoming the legendary singer and political and environmental advocate of the mid- 20th century.
It was the time of the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, the Peekskill Riots. Pete and his newly-formed folk quartet, the Weavers, were performing at the Village Vanguard, a club down the street from the school, more than a decade before he wrote the iconic Turn Turn Turn, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and Guantanamera.
Financially it was a rough patch for him, or he wouldn’t have bothered with City and Country (which one of my colleagues refers to as “that little commie place in the Village”). Pete, his wife Toshi, and their babies were living in a trailer on weekends, while they built their log house near the Hudson River in Beacon. Pete split rails. We got progress reports.
When Pete died, his C&C community responded immediately, anxious to retrieve and preserve our experience with him. On Feb. 10, eight oldtimers--seventh and eighth graders back then--gathered in my apartment to pool recollections of these two uncharted years. Some who couldn’t get to New York City phoned from around the country with remembered songs and anecdotes.
Prompting each other, we deduced that Pete came after the 1948 election. John, who had been in eighth grade, wrote from New City (near Haverstraw) that “the big rallies were in Madison Square Garden [50th Street and 8th Ave.] a week or two before the election. We went as a class project: Wallace on Tuesday, Truman on Thursday, and Dewey Saturday. Some of us even went to hear Norman Thomas on Sunday afternoon at Town Hall.”
Steve in Virginia remembered the Wallace rally because it was the only one with singing—led by Pete. He added that the first song Pete taught us was a pro-Wallace jingle:
It’s the same, same merry-go-round, Which one will you ride this year?
The donkey and elephant bob up and down, On the same merry-go-round.
Susan in South Carolina recalled that our class play, about the Underground Railroad, was inspired by the song, Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd, which Pete explained to us in detail. We painted the backdrop hot yellow. (Imaginative idea, but then, this was the school where Jackson Pollock had been the janitor.)
Collective memory placed Pete in our classroom with his banjo Fridays after lunch. He brought word sheets that the school office had copied on the ditto machine, or maybe mimeographed. (Bob came in from New Jersey with a pile of them.) Several classmates admitted to teasing Pete about mismatched socks, yellow necktie, and his wiggly Adam’s apple.
Pete had a sick friend, Woody Guthrie, whose songs Pete loved. We sang a number of them, and learned about Huntington’s Chorea, Woody’s illness. We sang songs by his other sick friend, Leadbelly, who had recorded an album (Ha Ha This-a-way) with some of us, in the Bank Street nursery school. We also sang from The People’s Song Book and the magazine Sing Out! We sang songs he never recorded and others that became national favorites.
As Diddy’s handwritten letter from California put it: “It didn’t take long for Pete’s rousing, joyful voice and lively banjo to have us all singing with gusto. It was fun and it was more--something exciting and meaningful.”
The summer when we were entering high school, the Weavers released a recording (78rpm) of Tzena Tzena, in English rather than the Hebrew we had sung. It was a hit, but on the sleeper side was Goodnight Irene. Its effect was unexpected and cataclysmic; the nation sang as if it were at one great campfire. In the next years, songs we knew were tweaked and rolled out, to ecstatic acclaim. “Our teacher! He’s famous!”
From that time through Pete’s confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee and beyond, historians have fleshed out Pete’s story. (A classmate brought copies of obituaries: the Economist’s headline was Bolshie with a Banjo.)
No one (except whoever wrote the lonely Wikipedia entry) would call Pete Seeger a vocal instructor. But he freed children to sing and think about words and to love it, whether or not they were tone-deaf or struggling with changes of voice range. He treated us with impersonal kindness, and recognized us years later at his concerts.
A number of us bought guitars and banjos as teenagers, and later went into some musical profession. Closest to Pete’s example was Steve Addiss of the folk-singing team of Addiss and Crofut, which toured Asia and Africa on a State Department Cultural Exchange Program.
I write about music and dream of singing with Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. Carly Simon and her sister Lucy were the Simon Sisters before Carly went solo. Their sister Joanna became an opera singer and arts interviewer. Karl Kraber is the founding flutist of the Dorian Wind Quintet. Daniel Goode is a composer. Bob Werdenschlag did a stint as DJ at Columbia University, with a guest list including Woody Guthrie, Theo Bikel, and Odetta. Pete came to the WKCR studio with instruments and taught him to play Kisses Sweeter than Wine. On the air.
Ginny, who remembers numerous verses in their entirety, said it for all: “Hooray for Pete and the music he brought into our lives.”
The following group-remembered list of songs is surely incomplete:
Blue Skies (two versions, with fast words and regular)
Cumberland Mountain bear chase. (We clamored for this virtuosic solo.)
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd
Goin’ down that road feelin’ bad
Goober Peas
Go Tell Aunt Rhody
I’m on my way.
If I had a hammer. [Brothers version, pre-“brothers and sisters”].
In New York City, you really gotta know your lines
Irene Goodnight
It Takes a worried man
It’s the Same Same Merry-Go-Round
Joe Hill
John Henry
Kum ba Ya
Listen Mr. Bilbo
Lonesome valley
Midnight Special
Money is king
Newspapermen meet such interesting people
Oh Freedom
On Top of Old Smoky. (Braddy’s Fireside book, now costs about $250.)
Outskirts of town
Pay me my money down (sailing day)
Pity the Downtrodden Landlord
Puttin’ on the Style.
Rock Island Line
Roll on Columbia
Rounds: Brandy leave me alone, Streets of Laredo, I’ve Got Spurs, Shalom chaverim
Shanty Town (Regular words plus fast version)
Sixteen Ton
So Long it’s Been good to know ya, [dusty old dust version].
Study war no more
Suliram (Indonesian)
The Cat Came Back
The Foolish Frog (Way down yonder with a yankety yank)
The Keeper did a wooing go
This Land is your land
Tzena Tzena
T for Texas
Union Maid
Wasn’t That a Time
Wimoweh
Pictured: Pete Seeger [left] with student Bob Werdenschlag in the 1950s at WKCR. [Photo courtesy of Bob Werdenschlag.]
Copyright © 2014, Musical America