Pete Seeger enters 9th decade as an activist

Tao Rodriguez-Seeger was halfway through Fri­day night’s march down Broad­way to sup­port the Occupy Wall Street move­ment, a gui­tar strapped over his shoul­der and his grand­fa­ther Pete Seeger at his side. Sud­denly a New York City police offi­cer stepped from the crowd and grabbed his elbow.

“Are you Tao Seeger?” the offi­cer asked tersely. “Was this your idea? Did you think of this?”

Rodriguez-Seeger was cer­tain arrest was immi­nent. The offi­cer reached for his hand and he read­ied for the cuffs. Then some­thing unex­pected happened.

“He shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you, thank you. This is beau­ti­ful,’” Rodriguez-Seeger said. “That really did it for me. The cops rec­og­nized what we were about.”

That moment affirmed the mes­sage that his grand­fa­ther has preached tire­lessly across nine decades. The causes and move­ments have changed from time to time over 75 years, but his mes­sage has always been the same: Song is the key to under­stand­ing and change.

“Music does some­thing to you,” Rodriguez-Seeger said. “It can cross rivers of mean­ing that entire books can’t get across. … You take any one of Bob Dylan’s songs and you get to the heart of the mat­ter where it took Homer vol­umes and vol­umes of books to get to the same point.”

Today, Pete Seeger is approach­ing the far end of a life lived walk­ing hand in hand with Amer­i­can his­tory, often at odds with the gov­ern­ment that runs things. It failed to shut him up. The courts had no chance. Chang­ing tastes and val­ues? Never. Even time seems to have taken a step back in def­er­ence to the musi­cal rabble-rouser’s resolve and determination.

This time around, Seeger was car­ried along by two canes, not the sound of his banjo. But his pres­ence, in a crowd of nearly 1,000 with gui­tar play­ers and chant­ing sign-holders and police swirling around, gave the new protest move­ment some­thing it seemed to lack over the last month.

A momen­tary clar­ity, long­time friend Guy Davis thinks. A pur­pose. A direction.

“It’s his human­ity,” Davis said.

Seeger’s voice first rose in the 1930s against Hitler. He met Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax and Lead Belly, and began to advo­cate for migrant work­ers and min­ers in the 1940s. He stared down Sen. Joseph McCarthy and endured a black­list­ing he sim­ply shrugged away. In mid­dle age, he was a key fig­ure in the folk revival that pro­duced Dylan and, later, the protests that helped shape mod­ern America.

Seeger still takes delight in lend­ing his pres­ence to impor­tant things, even if his voice doesn’t carry like it used to. He found him­self attracted to the stud­ied inor­ga­ni­za­tion of the Wall Street protesters.

“Be wary of great lead­ers,” he said Sun­day in a phone inter­view full of songs and sto­ries when asked what he iden­ti­fies with in the Occupy Wall Street mes­sage. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”

Other than the canes and snowy beard, Seeger hasn’t changed much since he began singing out against fas­cism in the mid-1930s after drop­ping out of Har­vard in frustration.

“The soci­ol­ogy pro­fes­sor said, ‘Don’t think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it,’” Seeger said. “… But this was 1937 and Hitler had taken power. He was mur­der­ing peo­ple and was ready to go to war.”

You could say Seeger inher­ited his activism. His great-great grand­fa­ther came to Amer­ica seek­ing self-determination after read­ing the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. His great-grandfather was an abo­li­tion­ist. His father was a social­ist who spoke out against World War I.

His views didn’t always make him pop­u­lar. He was a mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist Party, some­thing he later apol­o­gized for. He was ini­tially for stay­ing out of World War II, but changed his mind when Hitler broke his nonag­gres­sion pact with the Soviet Union. He also spoke out against the war in Viet­nam, a move that got him cen­sored on “The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­edy Hour,” and vis­ited North Viet­nam in 1972.

Seeger’s influ­ence is incal­cu­la­ble, how­ever. He’s the rare artist whose music and mes­sage tran­scends time, speak­ing to his chil­dren and their chil­dren and on and on.

The son of a musi­col­o­gist and a vio­lin­ist, he began lead­ing oth­ers in song at 8 and was intro­duced to protest music around 12. Early on, he saw beauty and pos­si­bil­ity in tra­di­tional songs often con­sid­ered regional hokum or race records unfit for an upstand­ing white audience.

His mes­sage found an eager audi­ence in the young gen­er­a­tion of kids who would go on to define rock ‘n’ roll, chang­ing Amer­i­can and world cul­ture in myr­iad ways. He intro­duced Mar­tin Luther King Jr. to “We Shall Over­come.” In his hands, songs like “If I Had a Ham­mer (The Ham­mer Song)” and “Turn, Turn, Turn!” became gal­va­niz­ing anthems.

He remains a voice for the dis­en­fran­chised — the poor of Appalachia and the Mis­sis­sippi Delta and vic­tims of racism and greed.

Kira Moyer-Sims, a 19-year-old par­tic­i­pant in the Occupy Wall Street move­ment, was intro­duced to Seeger’s music on mix CDs from her high-school social stud­ies teacher. Those songs, from a time that seems far away in the age of the iPod, spoke to her with mod­ern urgency and helped push her into the protest ranks.

“Hear­ing this new music for me was huge and made me real­ize totally the impor­tance of our nation’s his­tory and the fact that we can change it if we want to,” she said. “See­ing Pete Seeger there in sol­i­dar­ity with the thing I’ve been liv­ing the past 38 days … was phe­nom­e­nal for me.”

The idea of protest­ing for pro­gres­sive change seemed to have gone out of vogue in the U.S. — or at least dis­ap­peared from pub­lic view. After the flower chil­dren moved on to mid-life and mini­vans, Amer­i­cans turned their focus inward. Fewer peo­ple had time for sim­ple songs with com­plex meanings.

Rodriguez-Seeger said he was attracted to the nascent Occupy Wall Street move­ment when he joined a sup­port march two weeks ago in Las Vegas. He was drawn to the anti-establishment mes­sage but noticed imme­di­ately that some­thing was missing.

“I saw a lot of peo­ple get­ting angry at us for march­ing, get­ting out of their SUVs and giv­ing us the fin­ger and scream­ing obscen­i­ties” and using anti-gay slurs, Rodriguez-Seeger said. “I thought, if we were singing right now my gut tells me they’d be less inclined to behave like that because it’s very dif­fi­cult when you’re hear­ing music to get that angry.”

Davis, a 59-year-old Bronx blues­man who has been friends with the Seegers for 50 years, saw more than a lit­tle some­thing of the grand­fa­ther in the grand­son when he looked over at the pair Fri­day night. Rodriguez-Seeger helped orga­nize the march, which came together in 30 hours and was dri­ven for the most part by social-media sites like Twit­ter, Face­book and now YouTube, where dozens of videos mark the night.

“Pete is see­ing his life come to fruition,” Davis said. “He is see­ing the fruits of his labors. All the years he invested in Tao, all the years I used to see him take Tao around when Tao was just a teenager, have paid off beautifully.”

And the grand­fa­ther doesn’t mind the fact that a new gen­er­a­tion of Seegers is lift­ing its voice, even as he gladly slides into the back­ground. Pete Seeger, in fact, says he’s a lit­tle bemused by all the attention.

“Of course it’s a great honor, but I’d just as soon be anony­mous,” he said. He would like to go down to Zuc­cotti Park, the heart of the move­ment, but he hopes he can just do it on the sly with­out the star power. Maybe next week on Hal­loween. “I won’t be rec­og­nized,” he muses. “Every­body will be in costume.”

Posted by AP News on Oct 24 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.