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Pete Seeger: A Mean-Spirited and Vengeful Recollection
PJ Media ^ | 1-29-14 | David P. Goldman

Posted on 02/01/2014 2:52:15 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic

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1 posted on 02/01/2014 2:52:15 PM PST by afraidfortherepublic
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To: afraidfortherepublic
Seeger’s (and Guthrie’s) notion of folk music had less to do with actual American sources than with a Communist-inspired Yankee version of Proletkult.

Same goes for that other fraud, Bruce Springsteen.

2 posted on 02/01/2014 2:53:47 PM PST by dfwgator
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To: afraidfortherepublic
My wife tells me that Mario Batali got all teary-eyed on The Chew over the passing of the communist.
3 posted on 02/01/2014 2:55:22 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (Jealousy is when you count someone else's blessings instead of your own.)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Thanks for the post.

I went through a rebellious lefty phase when I was young but even then I thought Seeger sounded phony, trite and possibly damn mean-spirited if you caught him wrong.

My sense was that he was in it, one, for the money and, two, (same as me) for the loose hairy chicks.

Thank God I grew out of it and in time for me to let my parents know how right they always were.


4 posted on 02/01/2014 2:59:31 PM PST by Fightin Whitey
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Those commie organizers systematically scoured the country, stealing every folk tune they could lay their hands on. They especially like taking Christian songs and replacing the words with communist propaganda.

May they rot it hell.


5 posted on 02/01/2014 2:59:31 PM PST by Born to Conserve
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Wow! The author thinks that Brecht wrote the funniest song of the 20th Century. Guess Comden & Greene and all the other American musical comedy geniuses just can’t compete with a good German humorist...


6 posted on 02/01/2014 3:00:47 PM PST by miss marmelstein (Richard Lives Yet!)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Mario? Who just had to pay up for stealing his waiters’ tips? And who is trying to get rid of the hot dog vendors in Washington Square Park so he can move his upscale cart into the area? Ha!


7 posted on 02/01/2014 3:02:39 PM PST by miss marmelstein (Richard Lives Yet!)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Peter was another mason for brick laying on the road to hell with all his good intentions.


8 posted on 02/01/2014 3:06:46 PM PST by bmwcyle (People who do not study history are destine to believe really ignorant statements.)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Congrats, Pete. You have finally been stricken from my Liste d’Merde. I leave you for The Ages to hate.


9 posted on 02/01/2014 3:14:02 PM PST by Blogatron (Fight Boner)
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To: afraidfortherepublic
Spengler...dude...don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think.
10 posted on 02/01/2014 3:19:23 PM PST by RichInOC (No! BAD Rich! (What'd I say?))
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To: dfwgator
He should have been jailed for what he put his family through. A one room self built house with no running water and no electricity. I often wonder "what did they eat?" No romance there I submit.

IMO he was a bum...couldn't play a legitimate instrument and like a few others, played his own stuff because he lacked the discipline to learn music.

11 posted on 02/01/2014 3:20:08 PM PST by Banjoguy (The Mayor of San Antonio is the smoothest liar I have ever seen.)
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To: miss marmelstein

Bertoldt Brecht, who once said of the victims of the 1937 Moscow purges, “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot!!”

Anyone who says he can forgive someone their Stalinism has already lost me.


12 posted on 02/01/2014 3:20:26 PM PST by elcid1970 ("In the modern world, Muslims are living fossils.")
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Seeger was a presence at all sorts of demonstrations including somethat cold and did get violent. From their birth on, he always took his kids putting them in danger. An adult may choose to assume such a risk but the kids had no choice.


13 posted on 02/01/2014 3:21:40 PM PST by muir_redwoods (When I first read it, " Atlas Shrugged" was fiction)
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To: afraidfortherepublic

I’m sure he’s now with his pals Marx and Lenin.


14 posted on 02/01/2014 3:36:20 PM PST by Huskrrrr
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To: afraidfortherepublic

Seegar and the Weavers put out the most stooped and insipid version of “Goodnight Irene!”
Leadbelly sang it with some vengeance!. The weavers sang “I’ll see you in my dreams,” Leadbelly sang “I’ll GET you in my dreams. The original is filled with violence and suicidal thoughts. Ry Cooder has the best modern version. Here’s the original. Not a happy-go-lucky love song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmQXmqbZ3Pc

Here’s Ry and Flaco. “I’m sorry you ever was born”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMGT8DgM4k

The Weavers version borders on the sacrilegious/ A total distortion


15 posted on 02/01/2014 3:39:09 PM PST by Dr. Bogus Pachysandra ( Ya can't pick up a turd by the clean end!)
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To: Born to Conserve
May they rot it hell.

While I do not wish that on anyone, they will have their part in the lake that burns, and the smoke of their torment will rise forever. On the other hand, I do not mourn at Seeger's passing. I say good riddance to all communists and Muzzie POS too.

16 posted on 02/01/2014 3:40:49 PM PST by Mark17 (Chicago Blackhawks: Stanley Cup champions 2010, 2013. Vietnam Vet 70-71 Msgt US Air Force, retired)
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To: muir_redwoods; afraidfortherepublic

I suspect that Spengler and I grew up about the same time in NYC, and while I was not a red diaper baby, many of my friends were. They had gone to the “Little Red Schoolhouse”...no joke, btw...or to some other hotbed of leftist brainwashing, and in my neighborhood, the Upper West Side, they received more spiritual foundation at the Ethical Culture Society (the Jewish version of Unitarianism). Many of them went to Communist summer camps in New Jersey where they sat around and sang “folk songs,” or at any rate the 1930s leftist version thereof. Pete Seeger revived these for another generation and even added his own silly, clumsily strummed, tuneless propaganda songs.

However, I do have to give him credit for one thing: he used his clout to spearhead the cleanup of the Hudson River, which during my childhood, was an open sewer. Literally. You could barely breathe in Riverside Park when the wind was blowing off the Hudson, and I never did figure out how anybody could go boating on it. Much less fish...I used to see black people standing on along the wall of the marina, dangling their lines among the turds to catch eels. I guess they had inoculated themselves against cholera from years of fishing in this sewer.

There was also a tremendous amount of industrial pollution, so they should have been glowing in the dark, as well!

Many, many people worked on the project to clean up the Hudson, but it was basically Pete Seeger’s fame that got the city and state to finally focus on it and provide money for cleaner sewage systems, enforce better industrial waste disposal, etc. And now it’s lovely and I always go down without holding my nose and have a glass of wine at the café near the boat basin. So I have to give him credit for at least that good thing!


17 posted on 02/01/2014 3:41:47 PM PST by livius
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To: miss marmelstein

Eh, I read this piece and while he’s honest in his title and that part is all kind of amusing in a snarky way (and I really liked Seeger as a singer, even though i know he was an awful commie) but some of his other comments about music are pretty questionable.


18 posted on 02/01/2014 3:45:32 PM PST by jocon307
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To: afraidfortherepublic
You will listen to Seeger, or else.
19 posted on 02/01/2014 3:51:06 PM PST by JPG (Yes We Can morphs into Make It Hurt.)
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To: jocon307
some of his other comments about music are pretty questionable

Agreed. For example, the author states that "There is no such thing as an American folk." I suppose he's trying to say that there is no such thing as American folk music, and any American who claims to be a folk singer is a fraud.

That's just silly. Bluegrass, for example, is uniquely American folk. I sure don't see Flatt and Scruggs as frauds.

20 posted on 02/01/2014 3:53:07 PM PST by Leaning Right (Why am I holding this lantern? I am looking for the next Reagan.)
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