Few individuals have enriched our musical
lives in as many ways, and for as many years, as Pete Seeger. As a young
Harvard dropout in the late '30s, he collected songs with Alan Lomax;
in the '40s, he hardwired folk music and politics with Woody Guthrie
and the Almanac Singers; in the '50s, he helped spark the folk revival
with the Weavers; and he's piped up at countless concerts and rallies
around the world ever since. Along the way, he's written, adapted, popularized,
or otherwise spread an incredible array of songs ("Where Have All the
Flowers Gone," "Wimoweh," "Turn! Turn! Turn!," "If I Had a Hammer,"
"We Shall Overcome," "Guantanamera". . .) and inspired generations of
pickers with his high-energy 12-string guitar and banjo work. And he
has taught us how it's done, from his pioneering 1943 book How to Play
the Five-String Banjo to his lucid explanations of Leadbelly's guitar
style, how to make and play steel drums, and much more. Through all
this, Seeger's mission has not been to bask in the spotlight but to
shine it on us, offering us the tools and encouragement to raise our
voices in song and protest.
As Seeger strides ahead in his 80s, a
rack of recent releases testifies to the vitality of his music and life.
To name a few: two volumes of The Songs of Pete Seeger collect tributes
by artists from Ani DiFranco to Bruce Springsteen; a reissued/expanded
Greatest Hits set brings us his own classic performances from the '60s;
and Pete Seeger's Storytelling Book shares some of his favorite yarns,
including several that he starts and, in typical fashion, asks us to
finish. And the man once indicted by Congress and blacklisted from national
television and major concert venues finds himself honored by the Kennedy
Center and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, recognized
as a pillar of American music and society.
For all of his activities and activism
in so many fields, Seeger truly lives in song, and he seems incapable
of talking for more than three minutes without breaking into one. I
reached him at his home in Beacon, New York, alongside a Hudson River
much cleaner thanks in no small part to his efforts.
You are closely associated with the
banjo, but you've also made a big contribution to guitar music. How
did you learn to play?
Seeger
When I was around 21, I jumped off a freight train and broke my banjo,
and the only cheap instrument I could get—it was five dollars at
a local hock shop—was a small guitar. And I quickly learned the
chords so I could play in a few primary keys. I used a flatpick—bass/chord,
bass/chord, that's all I knew—and discarded that guitar as soon
as I could get a good banjo again.
But when I was around 30, Leadbelly died,
and I and many people said, "Gee, why didn't we learn how he played
the 12-string?" A friend got me started with Travis picking, so I learned
a bit about Leadbelly's guitar style and about Travis picking. Leadbelly
didn't play fancy chords, but boy, what beautiful bass lines he made
up.
I also went down to the Bahamas once and
looked up Joseph Spence. He was a very cordial man, and he played everything
in dropped-D tuning. I'd played in dropped D occasionally, but I found
out how nice it was to play all the time. I guess I must play 95 percent
of the time now in dropped D.
Was it long after Leadbelly died that
you began working on the book A Folksinger's Guide to the 12-String
Guitar as Played by Leadbelly?
Seeger
Oh, yeah, long after he died. You know, my basic philosophy in life
is that I'm a teacher trying to teach people to participate, whether
it's banjos or guitars or politics or whatever.
What initially attracted you to the
banjo?
Seeger
I love rhythm. It was vigorous, and I was young and full of vigor. I
just loved "John Henry" and "Old Joe Clark," nice, sparkling songs like
that. As the years go by I find, of course, that I also like other songs.
I find myself playing the slow, two-part melody out of Beethoven's Seventh
Symphony.
How did you learn to play?
Seeger
Well, old Bascom Lunsford, who was a country lawyer in Asheville, North
Carolina, put on one of the first outdoor Appalachian festivals, the
Asheville Mountain Song and Dance Festival–this was 1936. That's
where I heard Aunt Samantha Bumgarner in her rocking chair, rocking
and picking a banjo and singing old ballads and having so much fun,
with a big grin on her face. Bascom later found I was playing a tenor
banjo; he says, "Oh, you should play a five-string, and here's what
you do: you pluck up on that middle string, now you pluck up on that
first string, and now you put your thumb on that little fifth string,
and you get this pattern: boom pick-a, boom pick-a, boom pick-a, boom."
And so in five minutes he taught me the basics.
In 1940, I took the whole summer hitchhiking
west and south. A teacher in New York had said, "My cousin Rufus in
Kentucky can show you a lot about the banjo," so I aimed for his house,
and that's where I learned a little clawhammer playing.
Did those patterns apply to the guitar?
Seeger
They certainly helped my dexterity; however, I had to learn a lot about
syncopation and so on before I was able to play "Freight train, freight
train, goin' so fast." My brother and sister learned directly from Libba
[Elizabeth Cotten, who worked for the Seegers as a maid]. I would go
down to visit them in Washington [D.C.] and marvel at what she was doing,
but I couldn't figure what it was. Ten years later I got it. However,
I once played it to her, and she said, "You're not playing it right
at all! You're playing it in D; I always do it in C." I played it in
dropped D. I still like it in dropped D—you get a lot of open strings.
Your banjo book introduced a new way
to teach music, reviving tablature and coining now-standard terms like
hammer-on and pull-off. How did you arrive at your approach?
Seeger
I was in the army 55 years ago when my father says, "Peter, do you realize
that not many people have your knowledge of writing as well as knowledge
of the banjo? Have you ever thought of putting out a banjo manual?"
I really didn't know a thing about banjo manuals, except that I didn't
like the ones I had seen, which were too technical. And they weren't
very funny, didn't entice you to read further. So I took some students,
and for about ten weeks we had a weekly lesson. One of the students
was Eric Weissberg [who recorded the Deliverance theme "Dueling Banjos"],
and within a month or two he was playing rings around me. His father
was a photographer, took a picture of him with an astronaut's hat on,
a space suit, and holding a picture of the Weavers in his hand. Eleven-year-old
Eric Weissberg.
After teaching them, I was off to try
and help Henry Wallace get elected president, a spectacular failure.
But in the hotels I had hours to sit around every day while Mr. Wallace
was being interviewed, so I typed up mimeograph stencils, and the original
banjo book was, I think, 59 pages. I mimeographed 100 copies, and they
sold in four years.
You used tablature in that book, yet
you've taught standard notation elsewhere.
Seeger
Yeah, I wrote a book called Henscratches and Flyspecks, persuading people
that it's not really that hard to learn how to read music. You don't
need to be scared of it. My mother, who was a violin teacher, tried
to get me to learn music at an early age, but I rebelled, as did my
older brothers. When I came along, my father sensibly said, "Oh, let
Peter enjoy himself." What she did was leave musical instruments around
the house–not just a piano and an organ but a squeeze box with
buttons and a pennywhistle in C and a marimba, a wooden marimba with
mallets that I could go plinkety-plunk. By the time I was five, I could
pick out a tune on all these instruments, and I knew what made a major
chord different from a minor chord, even though I didn't have a name
for it. And that if you raised the fifth note of your major chord you
got a strange new thing. My mother said, "That's called an augmented
chord." I didn't bother calling it that; I just played it. I was eight
years old when I learned Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," and that great
augmented chord comes in the second bar.
So I knew a hell of a lot about music
without knowing the names for anything. I could tell you all the pop
songs of 1927, '28, '29, '30. My mother gave me a ukulele in '27. [Sings]
"He's just a sentimental gentleman from Georgia, Georgia / Gentle to
the ladies all the time / And when it comes to lovin'/ He's a real professor,
yes sir / Just a Mason Dixon Valentine" [laughs]. I knew the words were
silly, but I was intrigued by the cleverness of the harmonies; and then
later I realized that cleverness is not enough in this world. I loved
these old folk songs that had one or two or, at most, three chords.
That's when I met Woody Guthrie, and he was leery of trying a lot of
chords. Even songs that demanded that double dominant, he would not
do it. Like "Do Re Mi," he used the tune of a country song [sings],
"Hang out the front door key, babe / Hang out the front door key," and
if you're playing in G, you should hit an A major seven there. Woody
refused to. He was rebelling against all that cleverness, and he would
hit a plain D7.
Did your interest in folk music lead
you to songs with political content, or did the two go hand in hand?
Seeger
It really went hand in hand. We had an idea that working people were
going to be the saviors of the world, and we should learn more about
working people's music. And the most honest working people's music was
the old country songs, even when they weren't strictly working people's
. . . I mean "Greensleeves" is obviously not a working person's song.
It was a pop song of the 16th century.
What did you, as a musician, learn
from Woody?
Seeger
I learned the genius of simplicity. He didn't try and get fancy, he
didn't try to show how clever he was. He had done a lot of thinking,
and he read voraciously. I remember the time he got hold of Rabelais
and got through it all in one or two days, and in the following weeks
you could see him trying some of the same stylistic tricks of piling
on adjective after adjective. However, he once said, "I must steer clear
of Walt Whitman's swimmy waters." I think he decided that if he was
going to write songs, he wanted the lines to rhyme, and he liked things
to be in meter.
Woody Guthrie wrote some of the country's
most truly great songs. Not just "This Land Is Your Land," but "So Long
(It's Been Good to Know You)" and "Do Re Mi" and the one that I think
may be widely sung in the coming century in Spanish, "Deportees." A
Chicano in California, a Puerto Rican, and now somebody in Ecuador,
I understand, have made translations of it. The metaphor comparing throwing
food away to throwing people away—get rid of those people, we don't
need them.
Woody wrote songs at such an incredible
rate. How did that affect you?
Seeger
I was deeply envious to see how quickly he could write songs. Once we
flew to Pittsburgh in '46 to sing for the Westinghouse workers on strike;
while Lee [Hays] went to sleep and I read a magazine, Woody made up
verse after verse after verse about the towns we were flying over, wondering
what life was like in those towns, and then looking at the pretty stewardess
and wondering what her life was like, and then he gets up and leaves
these pages in the seat. He literally wrote verses everywhere he was
every day. When Alan Lomax met him, he said, "Woody, do you realize
you are like the person who wrote the ballads of Robin Hood? Your job
in life is to write ballads—don't let anything distract you from
writing ballads."
Had you written songs before meeting
Woody?
Seeger
Nope. When my mother once asked me to write a song for her father, my
grandfather, who died, I was surprised. "Why does she think I know how
to write a song?" I wrote poems occasionally for the school magazine,
but they weren't worthy of being songs. But I met Woody and got the
idea you could write songs. I first tried putting new words to old tunes,
which is what he did, and found that I was better at putting new tunes
to old words.
From your perspective, is songwriting
more about borrowing and rearranging than pulling something entirely
new out of the air?
Seeger
Have you heard the latest song that I sing everywhere called "Arrange
and Rearrange"? It has a four-letter word in it, and I am delighted
I am able to get huge audiences to sing shit. It's right in the chorus,
[sings] "Oh-wee, oh-wye, and only have to shit a little shit." I had
3,000 Quakers singing it a few years ago.
You get an idea for a song, and nobody
knows where it came from. I guess psychologists have said there are
right and left halves of the brain, and sometimes the brain puts things
together that you could never have done consciously, whether it's a
melody or phrase. On the other hand, I quote Edison's dictum, "Genius
is five percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration." I got the
idea for the last line of "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" ("and the big
fool says to push on") all at once. It came to me in a flash when I
was looking at a picture of American troops wading across the Mekong
River. It was such a good idea, I couldn't let it go. But I struggled
with it for two or three weeks before I got a usable song.
As far as instrumentals go, you've
said that "Living in the Country" is one guitar piece that stands out
for you.
Seeger
I am really proud that Leo Kottke did it, and I understand that some
piano players made a record of it too. I just improvised it. I was trying
to play "Pay Me My Money Down," which my sister Peggy had been singing,
and all of a sudden I had a new tune. And, as of last month I have put,
of all things, words to it—not to my tune, but to what Frank Hamilton
improvised. We made a Folkways record years ago called Nonesuch, and
on a steel-string guitar, he played three notes above the melody of
"Living in the Country," and it was a melody all on its own. So I am
now sending this to my long-suffering publisher and saying melody by
Frank Hamilton, words by Pete Seeger. [Sings] "If you would be patient
and teach me I think that I could learn to dance." It's the best love
song I've ever written. I wrote those words ten years ago, but I couldn't
figure what to make of the rest of it until just three weeks ago.
Are there things that have happened
to songs you wrote or popularized that have particularly surprised you?
Seeger
It happens all the time. I was particularly surprised that anybody did
anything with "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." I only had three verses,
and I sang it as a slow air, with two other very short songs; I called
them my "Short Shorts." After a year, I went on to other songs and stopped
singing it—it was a nice song, but I didn't think it was that great.
What happened was that Joe Hickerson heard
my song on a Folkways record and sang it at summer camp to see what
the kids thought of it. The kids started kidding around with him, "Where
have all the counselors gone? Broken curfew every one," and by the end
of the summer, the two verses that Joe added, "Where have all the soldiers
gone?" and "Where have all the graveyards gone?" seemed to make a nice
circle out of it. That's the way the kids took it back to New York,
and that's where Peter, Paul, and Mary started singing it, thinking
it was an old folk song, and that's where the Kingston Trio got it,
thinking it was an old folk song.
I gave Joe 20 percent of the royalties–it
was lucky I didn't give him 50 percent, because I now think I should
send 20 percent to Russia, because that's where the original idea came
from. The three verses were out of the middle of an old Russian song,
"Koloda Duda." I am now trying to figure how to send some money to the
Archive of Folk Song, whether they are in St. Petersburg or Moscow.
All around the world, songs are being
written that use old public domain material, and I think it's only fair
that some of the money from the songs go to the country or place of
origin, even though the composer may be long dead or unknown. That's
why 50 percent of the story-song "Abiyoyo" is going to South Africa,
because "Abiyoyo" is an old lullaby. And with "Turn! Turn! Turn!" [based
on Ecclesiastes in the Bible], I wanted to send 45 percent, because
[in addition to the music] I did write six words and one more word repeated
three times, so I figured I'd keep five percent of the royalties for
the words. I was going to send it to London, where I am sure the committee
that oversees the use of the King James version exists, and they probably
could use a little cash. But then I realized, why not send it to where
the words were originally written? So we're sending some money to help
the Israeli Committee for Arab Home Defense, which is trying against
all logic to persuade Arabs that not all Israeli Jews are evil, selfish
people.
Isn't a song's origin often hard to
pinpoint?
Seeger
Well, yeah, you're quite right. "Abiyoyo" might have been made up by
another tribe, not the Xhosa people, a thousand years ago, and who knows?
I want to persuade the rest of the Weavers that we should send some
money to the Irish folk song archives for the song "Kisses Sweeter than
Wine." It's an old Irish song: [sings] "Mush-a sweeter than thou." It
was a song about a dead cow. This Irish artist sang it to Leadbelly,
and Leadbelly started singing it, but he put an African rhythm to it.
And along comes Lee Hays and puts words to it, and it's still being
sung after all these decades. I sing it at every wedding I'm at.
Do you think that given the way communication
and immigration happens these days, music travels around the world in
a different way?
Seeger
Undoubtedly it is happening faster, and over broader distances than
ever before. You can only laugh if you don't cry. The rich are getting
richer and the poor are being left behind the eight ball and getting
more and more angry. I don't think there will be a human race here in
100 years unless the rich countries realize it's in everybody's interest
that everybody in the world have a job and be decently fed and clothed.
And when some people have billions, so their only worry is, "How can
I make more billions?" or "How am I going to give away all my billions?"
that becomes a big problem. It's a very bad situation. In an upside-down
way, maybe out of this terrible tragedy in New York–I know two
people who were killed there–maybe the better nature of the USA
will come to the surface and say, "No, dropping more bombs is not going
to solve this problem. It's just going to make people angrier. What
will solve it is finding out why they are so angry and finding ways
to stop the anger."
Do you know Granny D.? At age 88, she
told her son, "Drive me to Los Angeles," and she started walking to
Washington ten miles a day. Her most recent letter comes out with this
statement; I xeroxed it and carry it around in my pocket. Listen: "We
cannot kill our way to love and respect, where our only true security
resides." Well me, at nine years younger than she is, I say, amen.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, July 2002,
No. 115.
