Pete Seeger

Born in 1919 into a family of musicians, Pete dropped out of Harvard at 19 to bicycle across New England and hop freight trains across the country with Woody Guthrie. Through his father, ethnomusicologist, Dr. Charles Seeger, he landed a life-changing job following noted folk archivist Alan Lomax on trips through the South collecting and transcribing songs for the Library of Congress. The experience opened his eyes to the lost gems of American traditional music, which formed the basis of his work throughout his six-decade career. Pete not only preserved folk songs and stories through his numerous recordings, he also invigorated the genre with hundreds of original compositions, including “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and the folk standard “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” As a leading voice of folk music, Pete was an inspiration to countless artists who followed.

For Pete, music has always been a grassroots effort, a way to unite and inspire people for a common cause. He brought protest songs with pro-labor and antiwar themes to the people at picket lines, schools, colleges, union halls, clubs, concert halls and festivals. He played first with The Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie, Sis Cunningham and Lee Hays, and then with the legendary folk band The Weavers, which Pete formed after World War II when he got out of the army.

During the McCarthy-era communist witch-hunts, The Weavers were blacklisted and barred from major recording contracts, concerts and television. Pete went underground releasing numerous albums on independent labels. In the 1960s, Pete and his wife, Toshi, marched in Selma, AL and participated in Civil Rights workshops at the Highlander Institute. It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King first heard “We Shall Overcome.” Barred from performing on television and radio, Pete sang at summer camps and private colleges across the USA and Canada. Pete became a vocal opponent to the Vietnam War, and his protest songs found a new, younger audience.

Around this time, Pete began turning his attention to the environment, long before it became fashionable. In 1969, he co-founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, an environmental organization that champions the restoration and preservation of the Hudson River and its estuaries through grassroots activism, music and education. Clearwater also refers to the 106-foot-long sloop Pete helped build. Today, the sloop still plies the Hudson and the Classroom of the Waves program continues to advocate for the environment and the community of the Hudson Valley by taking over 20,000 school children a year out on the river.

On stage or off, Pete continued to be heard. In 2009 Pete became one of the only folk artists to be featured at the Monterey Jazz Festival and in 2011 he sang along side other musicians at an Occupy Wall Street march. He continued using the powered of collective song to advocate for change until his death in 2014. Perhaps poet Carl Sandburg described it best when he called Seeger “America’s tuning fork.” Pete resonated with the best part of America, our soul.