Seeger performs at Hunts Point Riverside Park on September 3, 2009. (Getty)
Beloved musician and political activist Pete Seeger—"the father of American folk music," as Bruce Springsteen once called him—passed away last night at the age of 94. He died of natural causes at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for the past week. His grandson Kitama Cahill Jackson confirmed his death to the AP, also noting it was unrelated to Seeger's heart surgery in December.
The folk pioneer was born in Manhattan in 1919, eventually moving to Beacon, NY (after purchasing 17 acres there in the 1940s), where later in his life he could often be found with his banjo and a handful of other musicians playing on the streets on Saturdays. He was active in the community up until his death, even visiting the elementary school for sing-a-longs.
And it was at schools where his music career started—in the late 1930s, Seeger once recalled, "I was looking for a job on a newspaper and not getting one. I had an aunt who said, 'Peter, I can get five dollars for you if you come and sing some of your songs in my class.' Five dollars? In 1939, you would have to work all day or two days to make five dollars. It seemed like stealing. Pretty soon I was playing school after school, and I never did work on a newspaper."
By the 1940s, Seeger was performing with The Almanac Singers (later reformed as The Weavers), the influential folk group of which he was a founding member. Woody Guthrie was also, at times, in the band.
In 1948 Seeger wrote the book on banjo-playing, How to Play the Five-String Banjo, and then invented the Long Neck banjo, or Seeger banjo.
The first time he was almost jailed was in the 1950s, when he opposed Senator McCarthy's witch hunt—during this time he was blacklisted and indicted for contempt of Congress as a member of the Communist Party (which he had actually left by that time). According to the NY Times, "The pressure broke up the Weavers, and Mr. Seeger disappeared from television until the late 1960s. But he never stopped recording, performing and listening to songs from ordinary people." He had become a prominent advocate for civil rights, and in 1963 he performed (and released a recording of) "We Shall Overcome" at a concert at Carnegie Hall—a show described as "a launch event for the entwining of the music and politics of the 1960s."
He also stood up for keeping it real—the Times delivers this amazing anecdote, "Along with many elders of the protest-song movement, Mr. Seeger felt betrayed when Bob Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud electric blues band. Reports emerged that Mr. Seeger had tried to cut the power cable with an ax, but witnesses including the producer George Wein and the festival’s production manager, Joe Boyd (later a leading folk-rock record producer), said he did not go that far. (An ax was available, however.)"
Later in the '60s Seeger became a vocal critic of the Vietnam War. Taking inspiration from Woody Guthrie, whose guitar bore a sticker declaring, "This machine kills fascists," his banjo had the words: "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender."
It was in the late '60s that he also began trying to clean the Hudson River, and he remained an ardent environmentalist throughout his life... a life too big for any obituary. In 2009 he declared: "My job is to show folks there's a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet."
Last year Seeger did an interview with Democracy Now, one month after his wife Toshi (whom he met square dancing in NYC) died, and just before their 70 year anniversary.
