| 28th September 2007 07:18 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Movie Review
A full, if incomplete, look at life of Pete Seeger
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff | September 28, 2007
The Boston Globe
Attending Harvard, riding freight trains with Woody Guthrie, hitting No. 1 with "Goodnight Irene" in 1949, jump-starting the folk music revival (and by extension the entire singer-songwriter movement), blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, introducing Martin Luther King Jr. to "We Shall Overcome," cleaning up the Hudson River, being honored by the Kennedy Center - is there anything Pete Seeger hasn't done?
Well, yes, but you won't learn them from "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song," a full and fond documentary tribute to a man Natalie Maines calls "a living testament to the First Amendment" and Bruce Springsteen simply calls "a citizen artist."
Filmmaker Jim Brown is out to make a case for the folksinger-activist - 88 at this writing and still kicking hard - as an American institution, and he succeeds by showing how many strands of the culture Seeger directly touched. The film's assembled talking heads are many and impressive - from Bob Dylan to former New York governor George Pataki to Seeger's siblings, wife, and grown children - but the real drama is in the life.
The son of a musicologist and a concert violinist, he was given a ukulele at age 8 and an early directive to "hear music by the people who know how to make it." He fell hard for the labor movement and the Young Communist League, eventually drifting from the latter but never forsaking the former; by his 20s Seeger was playing banjo in union marches down Fifth Avenue while accompanying a modern-dance rendition of rural hoedowns. In the archival footage he looks like a hayseed Gene Kelly.
Seeger found commercial success with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers in the 1940s before the blacklist knocked him off the airwaves for the better part of two decades. The government had no problem with him teaching folk songs to schoolchildren across the country, though, which prompts his biographer to note ironically that "we have to give the FBI credit for the folk-music revival."
When the boom hit in the late 1950s and early '60s, Seeger was at the zenith of his influence, prompting a generation of earnest young strummers and singers to dig into the American songbook. The key figure, of course, was Dylan, and Brown provides footage of the passing of the torch: Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary backing Dylan on "Blowin' in the Wind" at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival.
And then? Then the kids rushed past Seeger, leaving him a dazed and slightly sanctimonious figure on the sidelines. The folkies had always sneered at rock 'n' roll - an unexamined class bias that proved their Achilles' heel - and when Dylan went electric he took the energy and the audience with him. Seeger had been the teacher, but school was out.
"Pete Seeger: The Power of Song" doesn't attempt to address its subject's growing estrangement from pop culture. Did he try to take an axe to Bob's sound system at Newport in 1965? Martin Scorsese's recent Dylan documentary never came up with a definitive answer; Brown doesn't even ask the question. The larger issue of whether Seeger's pedagogy blinded him to this new and noisy art form remains unplumbed. In fact, rock was as much a music of the folk as the precise re-creations of 1930s miners' songs Seeger favored, but you couldn't enshrine it. It was too messy and alive.
So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York. He's genial and graceful, a legend still intent on fighting the good fight, and if Brown's movie convinces younger audiences to actively participate in their society instead of watching it from the sidelines, all the better. "I look upon myself as a planter of seeds," Seeger says. What he sowed, we still reap.
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| 28th September 2007 07:33 PM |
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| Riffhard |
All you need to know about Pete Seeger is that he's a communist.
"If I had hammer....and a sickle"
"Hell I never even knew the man was a communist at the time. I just really appreciated his music. Of course back then it probably wouldn't have mattered much to me. Back then."-Bob Dylan
Riffy |
| 28th September 2007 07:39 PM |
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| Honky Tonk Man |
quote:
Riffhard wrote:
All you need to know about Pete Seeger is that he's a communist.
Riffy
Your opinions on communism please? |
| 28th September 2007 07:46 PM |
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| Riffhard |
quote:
Honky Tonk Man wrote:
Your opinions on communism please?
LOL! I am not going there Alex. I can more readily give my opinions on people who support it. They're typically idiots who have never lived under the boot of communism. Communism has failed wherever it has been tried. That's all I shall say on that subject.
"All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others."- George Orwell from Animal Farm
Riffy |
| 28th September 2007 08:06 PM |
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| glencar |
Is he dead yet? |
| 28th September 2007 09:31 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
Riffhard wrote:
All you need to know about Pete Seeger is that he's a communist.
Seeger turns on Uncle Joe
Nicholas Wapshott
The New Statesman
Published 27 September 2007
After more than 50 years of obstinate ambiguity, Pete Seeger, one-time member of the Weavers, banjo-playing sidekick of the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, and the man who almost single-handedly invented the protest song and inspired the young Bob Dylan, has finally admitted he was wrong to keep quiet for so long about the horrors of Stalin's Russia.
Now aged 88 and living a frugal life in Dutchess Junction in Fishkill, upstate New York, the man once dubbed "Stalin's Songbird" has penned an extraordinary, if belated, recantation of his days as an apologist for Soviet communism and Castro's Cuba.
"The Big Joe Blues" is a touching act of candour. The words may not have the haunting lyricism of his "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary, nor the strident call to arms of his "If I Had a Hammer". They may not have the eternal appeal of his adaptation of the Old Testament mantra "Turn, Turn, Turn", best remembered in its jingle-jangle version by the California folk rock band the Byrds, nor the powerful simplicity of his civil rights movement anthem "We Shall Overcome".
But "The Big Joe Blues" remains a painful landmark for a defiant member of the American Communist Party, who preferred to spend a year in jail rather than betray his red friends to the witchfinder-general Senator Joe McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.
There is no ambiguity about the words of Seeger's final judgement on Stalin's murderous reign. "I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe./ He ruled with an iron hand./He put an end to the dreams/Of so many in every land./He had a chance to make/A brand new start for the human race./Instead he set it back/Right in the same nasty place./I got the Big Joe Blues./ (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.)/I got the Big Joe Blues./ (Do this job, no questions asked.)/I got the Big Joe Blues."
Seeger admitted to an old banjo pupil of his, Ron Radosh, who had criticised his long silence on the horrors of Marxism-Leninism, that when writing the song he had been "thinking what Woody might have written had he been around" to see the end of the Soviet Union. In a letter responding to Radosh's complaint that he had repeatedly sung about the Nazi Holocaust but failed to acknowledge the millions killed in Stalin's death camps, he wrote: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR."
Old age appears to have mellowed the once stern songsmith, who threatened to cut through Dylan's microphone cables with an axe when the younger man shocked audiences by playing electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Seeger now acknowledges that "if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail".
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| 28th September 2007 09:37 PM |
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| Riffhard |
Well that's good to hear. Albeit it's a bit late, but better late than never I suppose.
Riffy |
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