![]() Pete Seeger more or less personified the folk music movement for decades. When he refused to provide lists of fellow members of organizations he had belonged to, Seeger was convicted of contempt of Congress and given ten 1-year sentences, to be served simultaneously.įor a while it looked like Seeger was headed to jail however, his conviction was overturned upon appeal, and so he returned to his life of music and activism. However, that didn’t stop Seeger from being summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because of the strong anti-Communist fervor at the time, The Weavers tended to focus on less overtly political songs, such as Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene. In 1950, The Almanac Singers were re-constituted as The Weavers, when Hays and Seeger were joined by Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. Their anti-war tune Songs for John Doe was deemed subversive by groups that were trying at the time to enlist the U.S. In 1941 Pete Seeger joined with Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Woody Guthrie in the Almanac Singers. ![]() There, Seeger met a number of folk singers, including Burl Ives, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. In fall 1939, Seeger went to work for Alan Lomax, a musicologist who was assembling a collection of traditional music at the Archive of American Folk Song. His father was a musicologist who was forced to resign from the UC Berkeley faculty because of his pacifist stance during World War I. Inspired, I bought a banjo and laboriously copied Seeger’s clawhammer style. Inspired by the four-record Vanguard collection Folk Songs and Minstrelsy, I listened intently to Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Cisco Houston, and of course Pete Seeger. My early musical tastes tended towards folk music. He was a titanic figure in American folk music and political activism for seven decades, and his contributions to folk music (both original and adapted) are legendary. We first encountered Pete Seeger for his song Wimoweh, a cover of the song by the South African artist Solomon Linda, and again in our blog post on Seeger’s song If I Had a Hammer. We will start with the original by Pete Seeger, and then discuss covers of that song by Judy Collins, by The Byrds, and also The Seekers. ![]() This is a terrific folk/folk-rock song from the early 60s. Hello there! In this week’s blog we consider the song Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season). ![]()
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