seeger

Did anyone else see the documentary on Pete Seeger last night on PBS? I have a soft spot for this stuff. (As it happens, I just bought the Weavers' best-of on Vanguard and have been loving Arlo Guthrie's new In Times Like These). I was raised on standards and show tunes (parents) and rock/pop/R&B (emscee), but folk was the music I found for myself, when I was about nine. Is it because it sounded like day camp songs? I know that the genre can tend toward the self-righteous; that the watered-down versions and imitators can be inane. That said, I find it fun and familiar, and often stirring. Seeger himself comes across as unwaveringly...exactly who he is. He's the pioneer, and practically a monument at this point, but if you look at the old clips (and the documentary has some treasures), he was always forthright and upright, political (not cooperating with HUAC and getting blacklisted), and committed (singing for unions, cleaning up the Hudson, showing up at antiwar marches). As Springsteen says in the doc, "Pete was one of those guys who saw himself as a citizen artist. As an activist, he had a very full idea about those things and how it connected to music, the power that it had to influence, to inspire, and that's the power of folk music and that was the power of Pete Seeger."In 1965 and 1966, Seeger had a show called Rainbow Quest on local public television. (You can get DVDs of select episodes.) It's plain old black-and-white, low-budget, and looks largely unrehearsed-- it's remarkable for its lack of pretension and artifice. Many now-legends showed up: Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Doc Watson, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Here's Seeger with Richard and Mimi Farina:And with Johnny Cash and June Carter: