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My Personal Reminiscences of Pete

From Marc Nerenberg on 1/28/2014 3:12:43 PM

I posted most of this in a thread, and it's not really about Pete's music as much as it is about the man and what he's meant to me - so it's sorta off-topic for this page - but it's just the day after he died, so you'll forgive me, I hope:

During my youth (and before) my parents were communists. My father was a full time communist party functionary, and ran for office in elections, and my mother ran a communist party nursery school during the school year, and worked at the communist party summer camp in the summer (where she was first cook, and later director). I first met Pete Seeger when he visited the camp when I was around 3 or 4. We put on a concert with a rhythm band for him. I played cymbals in the band. My mother tells me that Seeger laughed so hard at my serious expression and consistently off the beat cymbal playing that he almost fell off his chair. I saw many many Seeger concerts over the years, and always went to meet him at the stage door afterwards. He never failed to remind me that he had first met me when I just came up to his knee.

The Seeger concerts I saw as a child really shaped my whole concept of music and of how a concert should be conducted. The interaction between Seeger and his audience was magical, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone else who could communicate at so many levels simultaneously with his audience - who were never passive listeners, but always active participants in the music making. Certainly no one else could get the audience singing along in four part harmony with a mere wave of his arm.

Aside perhaps from seeing him perform Abiyoyo when I was a young child, the most memorable Pete Seeger concert experience I ever had was when I was a 19 year old art student in New York, and I happened to walk past Carnegie Hall and noticed that he was performing there that evening. I went right in and tried to buy a ticket, only to discover that they were sold out. But the nice lady in the ticket booth told me that she thought they might be selling "stage seats" 20 minutes before the concert started. I immediately became the first in line for these possible stage seats, and indeed was the first to buy one when they went on sale, and the first to be seated on the stage. We were seated in a semi-circle that started at the edge of the stage and went around behind Pete to the other side of the stage. I took the seat right at the stage edge so that I saw Pete in profile (rather than from behind). It was astonishing to see the Carnegie Hall audience from his perspective - and to hear them all singing along. (It was also interesting to hear the delay in the sound reaching the stage from the far balconies - when you're in the audience we all seem to be singing together, but on stage, the sound arrives in waves depending on how far the people are from the stage.)

When Pete was blacklisted, and prevented from performing in concert halls in the US, my parents were instrumental in bringing him to Canada to perform, and when he came here, he would sometimes come over to our house. On one such occasion, he left his banjo propped up in the corner of our living room, while all the adults went into the kitchen for coffee. I think I was about 4 years old at the time, and that banjo leaning there in the corner exerted a fatal attraction on me. I went over and strummed it! Of course, my father ran in and told me not to touch it - but Pete's banjo was indeed the first banjo I ever played. Years later I went down to participate in one of the Open Mic concerts given by the Hudson River Sloop (The Clearwater) along the banks of the Hudson River. I was standing talking to Pete Seeger near the stage with my banjo in my hands when he was solicited to perform a closing song. He didn't have his banjo with him, so he borrowed mine (a Pete Seeger long neck), and played "This Land is Your Land". So I got to return the favour of playing his as a child.

My mother turned 90 yesterday and I called her to wish her a happy birthday. Our conversation somehow turned to her reminiscing about how, as a five year old, I used to "help" her run that communist party nursery school. She said that while I thought I was being helpful - really I was being a pest. I told her that the only part of that I remembered was once pushing some desks together to make a stage, and gathering together all the kids to hear me give a concert, in which I played air banjo and sang all the songs from the live concert side of the "Pete Seeger Sampler" one of the only records we had at home. I did the songs complete with the spoken introductions from the record. When I introduced one song using Pete's words: "Now here's a song you all know well" one of the kids protested: "But we don't know any of these songs!" I sang it anyway.

Pete has been with me for all of my life. I cried real tears this morning when I read the news. I will miss him for sure.

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