Pete Seeger: A Mean-Spirited and Vengeful Recollection

PJ Media ^ | 1-29-14 | David P. Goldman

[uncommonsense]

"Same goes for that other fraud, Bruce Springsteen."

Couldn't agree more! Add the faux talent, Tom Petty, to the list.

[Argus]

Doc Watson’s version is pretty good, though.

[Sherman Logan]

Didn’t mean to imply a moral equivalency between Chambers and Seeger. Only that not every person who was ever a Stalinist was therefore beyond redemption.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

There is no such thing as an American “folk.” We are a people summoned to these shores by an idea, not common ties of blood and culture.

I disagree strongly with what he says here. Despite current conventional wisdom, there was a core of an American nationality established here by the start of the 19th Century. Despite the impression you might get from TV shows, America did not begin at Ellis Island.

[Finny]

Wow!!! That was a fabulous read!! A Red Diaper Baby who grew up on a diet of commie folk music, whose mother was Arlo Guthrie's nursery school teacher, and who heard Pete Seeger live for the first time when he was six years old, concludes:

One of Seeger’s great selling points is that during the great leveling of the 1960s, any idiot who could play three chords on a guitar could plunk and howl through most of his repertoire. Try to play like Robert Johnson. There’s a great gulf fixed. Johnson may have been self-taught, but his music sought to rise above adversity and sorrow with craft and invention. The folkies aimed lower .... I know how mean-spirited and vengeful this sounds, but after suffering through this pap through my childhood, I feel entitled.

A very excellent read. Even mentions the song in my home page, a song I have always loathed: "Where have all the flowers gone?"

I was blessed and lucky enough to be listening to Paul Desmond on the saxophone when I was six -- my mom and dad played great music on the stereo all the time, I was so ... lucky. I totally understand this guy's contempt for Pete Seeger! {^)

[SunkenCiv]

> 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.

Thanks afraidfortherepublic.

[Gay State Conservative]

RIP Pete Seeger, you weren’t evil, just on the wrong track to the path of truth.

Do you have the same attitude toward the likes of Kennedy,Clinton,Clinton,Reid,Pelosi,Soros and Obama?

[little jeremiah]

Not evil? Everyone should read Seeger’s entire Keywiki page. Keywiki - the best site for looking up your favorite leftist.

http://keywiki.org/index.php/Pete_Seeger

Contents
[hide]

1 Communist Activity
2 Vagabond Puppeteers
3 Highlander School
4 GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee
5 National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
6 60th Birthday Celebration of James E. Jackson
6.1 Program
6.2 Sponsors
7 Rally for Detente and World Peace
7.1 “Victory over German fascism”
8 Socialist Debs award
9 New American Movement
10 We Will Make Peace Prevail!
11 DSA concert
12 CoC National Conference endorser
13 Honoring the Sidels
14 Peace for Cuba Appeal
15 Massachusetts May Day
16 Letter to the Editor, People’s Weekly World, October 12, 1996, Page 16
17 Communist “Manifestivity”
18 Robeson event sponsors
19 Rosenberg Fund for Children
20 Not In Our Name Newspaper Ad, New York Times, January, 2003
21 Peoples World reader
22 Symposium on James and Esther Jackson
23 Endorsed people’s World
24 Obama inauguration
25 Chicano movement
26 Nobel Prize for Pete Campaign
27 National Jobs For All Coalition
28 “Free the Cuban 5”
29 External links
30 References

A few excerpts:

Communist Activity

Pete Seeger first subscribed to the Communist Party USA paper New Masses in 1932 and formally joined the Party ten years later, under the influence of his secret Party member father.

His father, an ethno-musicologist at Julliard and later at UCLA, wrote a column for the Daily Worker under the byline Carl Sands.[3]

Seeger says he left the Party in 1950, but continued involvement in communist fronts and organs for decades including;

American Peace Mobilization
American Youth Congress
American Youth for Democracy
Council on African Affairs
American Committee for Yugoslav Relief
National Council of American-Soviet Friendship
Civil Rights Congress
American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born
Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy
Jefferson School of Social Science
New Masses
Daily World
Labor Youth League
California Labor School
National Lawyers Guild
Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Committee for the First Amendment
American Peace Crusade
National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee
National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee

Political Rights Defense Fund SWP front

Communist “Manifestivity”

On October 30 and 31, 1998 the Brecht Forum presented the “Communist Manifestivity to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto” at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, New York.

Individual endorsers of the event included Pete Seeger.[19]

Obama inauguration

In 2008, Pete Seeger sang at a concert to benefit the Obama presidential campaign.
Pete Seeger at the Obama inauguration party

At Barack Obama’s inauguration concert Pete Seeger sang fellow communist Woody Guthrie’s socialist anthem “This Land is Your Land” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Fred Klonsky-son of communist Robert Klonsky, former Students for a Democratic Society activist Progressives for Obama supporter and brother of Obama supporter Mike Klonsky, marked the occasion on his blog;

How ironic. Here was the legendary Pete Seeger singing for the president-elect at the Lincoln Memorial. Seeger, a life-long radical, one-time communist, fighter for working people and defender of the environment from corporate greed. For the first time many got to hear the original Woody Guthrie lyrics to This Land is Your Land, which include these words:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Massachusetts May Day

In May 1995 the Communist Party USA newspaper Peoples Weekly World published a May Day supplement. Included was a page offering May Day greetings to Massachusetts Communists Lew Johnson, Laura Ross, and Ann Timpson. Endorsers of the greeting included Pete Seeger.[18]

[little jeremiah]

Check out the Keywiki link I just posted above.

[Finny]

Ping to this music thread!

[driftless2]

Love me a lot of Doc Watson. Used to play his records by the hour. Still on my mp3. If you hear Doc Watson, and you don’t like him, something is wrong with you.

[miss marmelstein]

Yeah, I thought the piece got off-point. I have no problem with Brecht’s plays - some of them are brilliant - but it sounded so ludicrous when he named one of his songs as the funniest song he had ever heard, I just had to reply.

[ronnie raygun]

The chew guys are closet people

[Sirius Lee]

Cultural pollution. Seeger wasn’t just a casual litterer, he was a 30 inch pipe spewing toxic sludge into a pristine river.

[Berosus]

I was of the impression that the main difference between country and folk music is that most country singers are conservatives, while folk singers are liberals. It looks like Pete Seeger is where I got that idea.