Lives they Lived

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Pete Seeger's Music

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Pete's banjo style is interesting and innovative. This group is for to Pete's music: style, teaching, concerts, & discography

100 Members, Created 1/28/2014 -

Administrators: raharris (owner)

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From raharris on 12/24/2014 8:28:21 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/25/magazine/2014-the-lives-they-lived.html?_r=2#pete-seeger

From the annual NYT Lived they Lived feature

Pete Seeger was not so much a singer as a song leader. He sang well enough and long enough — “as early as 1925,” he told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, by which he meant since he was 6 — that his voice became a great, unique, American sound. To him, this was a sorrow. He didn’t want you to listen to his voice; he wanted you to hear your own, singing. His modesty wasn’t artistic; it was political. “This machine kills fascists,” his friend Woody Guthrie scrawled along the hips of his guitar. Seeger in kind wrote in a tidy script around his banjo: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” For both men, music was a weapon, though Seeger might have winced at the term. A tool, then: utilitarian, but its purpose nothing less than liberation, the deepest kind of pleasure.

2 Comments
	calypsojimmy says: 12/25/2014 9:40:56 PM You know I love the NYT and I think their writers and editors are all top shelf. But I must say here that Pete Seeger was every bit as good a singer as he was a song leader. He was a great singer, a great instrumentalist, and he was on a mission. The sincerity and quality of his musical expression is the essence of great musicianship and, when combined with his unwavering & total commitment to his mission, the result was and still is an enduring force of nature. I never needed to be singing along with Pete Seeger to completely dig his performances and recordings. Nobody sang a nicer lullaby. Or played a better banjo or 12-string solo.
	Joe Connor says: 12/26/2014 7:37:19 AM Pete always wanted the focus to be on the music, not on his singing or banjo playing. As a result, he toned down both. This has caused many people to underestimate his skill as a singer and as a banjo player. Much of this came about because of his philosophy. First, how could folk music be the music of the people if you had to be a virtuoso to sing or play it? Pete tried to keep it simple both vocally and instrumentally. Second, Pete started out as a tenor banjo player in the '20s. He has written that he felt the tenor banjo was ruined by virtuosos who left the audience more impressed with their dexterity than with the music itself. He consciously tried to avoid that trap. One of the coolest things about a Seeger concert was when he got the audience singing lead with him singing harmony. Man, that sounded good.
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