Pete Seeger was a goddamn mensch who chopped his own firewood into his nineties, who pled the First Amendment in front of HUAC, who inscribed "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" on his banjo, who quit his band when they wanted to record a cigarette jingle...in 1958. This much you can read on any news site this week. And while I'm in awe of the man on a political and historical level (How many of that steely-eyed Old Left are still with us? How many still living worked with Woody Guthrie in his prime?), I am most grateful for Pete the musician.
These days we like our folk music rough-hewn, we like Dylan and John Fahey and Joanna Newsom, grainy 78s--music with nettles to ward off the would-be convert. Not so with Pete. His interpretations have a polished, crystalline quality. Their beauty is wide open to the listener, any fool can hear it. Listen to his version of "Dink's Song." Listen to it a few times, it's short:
He was a hell of a banjo player, but here he does the absolute simplest thing, just brushing his fingers across the strings in an arpeggio, up, then down, then up again. It's something you'd do idly, waiting for a bus at a dusty crossroads.
But his voice. The melody is a slip of a thing, and it's just repeated over and over, but listen to how he gently nudges it from verse to verse, so that there is a progression and emotion. Listen to him sing "you'll call my name / and I'll be gone." He phrases it like Miles Davis might play it, shadowboxing the meter, or plain ignores it like old folkies do. Listen to how he kneads a little microcosm of emotions into each syllable. I love the way his voice cracks ever so slightly around 1:50. This kind of casual virtuosity is what I love about Pete. "It's the singer, not the song," is what they say in jazz, and it's even truer in folk, but Pete seemed totally uninterested in showing off his own chops. I'd imagine he'd prefer to see his performances as an unsmudged window through which the listener might see the songs themselves, as if such a thing existed. Now there's idealism for you.
(Readers--for I'm told there are a few--if you haven't met Pete than run, don't walk, to the two-disc reissue of We Shall Overcome: Live at Carnegie Hall, a recording of a 1963 concert that shows what he could do all alone on stage.)
