Tomorrow’s Child Passes…Bye Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger passed away yesterday. Back in 2010, I was lucky enough to interview him on his Grammy-award winning album Tomorrow’s Children. Here’s the interview:

After years of activism on behalf of the average Joe and Jane, this 91-year-old national treasure still swings a heavy hammer, and his amazingly thoughtful insights are presented here just in time for Labor Day. In this recent interview, Pete Seeger discussed his new album Tomorrow’s Children, American history, communism, Woody Guthrie, and more.

A Conversation with Pete Seeger

Mike Ragogna: I wanted to talk about your new record Tomorrow’s Children.

Pete Seeger: This record belongs to a whole lot of people. My name and reputation may help sell it, but the record would never have started without an unusual teacher. She has been teaching for only a few years in the school, but she would start off every September by saying to her students, “Now children, my name is Terry Udell. I hope, next week, I will know every single one of you by your first and last names. But right now, we are going to sing a song. I always like to start off the day with a song, so what would you like to sing.” After a minute or two, they would decide whether they wanted to sing “You Are My Sunshine” or “This Land Is Your Land.” After they sing their songs, she would say to the class, “Now if we get our lessons done on time, we will have time for more songs at the end of the day.” So, her class got to be known as a singing class. The other teachers would say to her that the singing was disturbing their lessons. The poor teacher got in trouble as she did such a good job. Her classes were always passing their tests near the top.

We had them sing at the Clearwater Revival. A local Caribbean drummer has a recording studio in his house, he suggested that they make a record and I am their accompanist. One of the songs on the record is me singing with my very rusty 91-year-old voice. The kids like to sing out, they don’t have pearl-shaped tones. These kids are encouraged to sing as loud as they want. As a matter of fact, one of the songs they made up is “We Sing Out Because We Want To Be Heard.”

MR: David Bernz is on there with you?

PS: Yes.

MR: You also had Dar Williams with you on “Solartopia.”

PS: The studio does a modern way of recording where they will record the voices first and then add the drums, and then another person, and they add other things. I never made a record like this in my life, I couldn’t quite figure out what it was all about.

MR: Can you tell us about the live performance?

PS: There is an annual Clearwater festival called The Clearwater Revival, The Hudson River Revival. It’s always the third Saturday in June. There are a lot of different things going on with stories here and songs there, and speakers and dancers there. The best part of the festival are the bands on the stage. There could be a Latino or a string band or jazz band, and a whole lot of people dancing. My wife asked the carpenters years ago to make her a crisscross of 2 x 4 beams and make them so they can be propped up and wedged so they are absolutely level and straight and it makes a nice dance floor.

MR: A lot of the folk songs these kids performed have a very deep message. Do you feel that they are getting the root of the message of a lot of the more social material?

PS: I am sure they don’t understand everything, but neither does every grownup. (laughs) A song is not a speech, and it bounces back new meaning as it bounces experiences on it. When I first heard the song “John Henry,” I thought it was about a very strong man, and then I got the tragedy side of it and then the bawdy side of it. The “shaker” is the man who holds the drill between his legs sticking up for the hammer to come down.

MR: Your song “Take It From Dr. King” is beautiful, and it involves many issues. How good of a job do you think we’re doing these days educating our children on fundamental issues?

PS: I am afraid I disagree with people who want education to be mainly about science. I think it should be around history, and science would figure into it. I don’t know if you heard of my book called Where Have All The Flowers Gone. It’s subtitled A Singalong Memoir, and there is a disk in the back of the book, so you can hear the melodies so you don’t have to puzzle out what the heck the notation means. The book came out almost 20 years ago, but it was so full of mistakes, I told this little magazine don’t reprint it and I will try and revise it. It took 15 years to revise it, and finally, I did, and it came out with a co-publisher, W.W. Norton. It has 14 new songs in it and a few of the old ones I cut out, so it is really quite a different book. I also corrected hundreds of little mistakes and a few very, very big mistakes. I know you don’t get everything in the song right away, but the kids do get a lot of it. And they sing out strong. They don’t just mumble.

MR: “Turn, Turn, Turn” is a song that just about every kid knows, and the versus are from Ecclesiastes.

PS: The man’s name was originally Qoheleth, and it means someone who pulls someone together to speak. He lived about 250 years B.C.E., so those words are 2,500 years old and I simply changed the order of the versus a little so they would sound better and added six words of my own. The first one says, “Time of peace,” and I add, “I swear it’s not too late.” Those are my additions.

MR: Everyone has heard The Byrds’ version, Judy Collins’ version, and your version, and you don’t think of a recording artist as the song is so eternal and classic as far as its message.

PS: I am very proud that The Byrds made it such a beautiful record and spread it around the world. I don’t travel any more or give two hour concerts like I used to, I occasionally go to New York and be part of a larger program and do two or three songs.

There is a new song I helped put together two or three weeks ago, and now, I am singing it everywhere and it goes something like this: “Yes, when drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill, everybody knows what that’s about.”

MR: The song “Solartopia” with David Bernz and Dar Williams is very relevant to us here in Fairfield, Iowa, because we have a solar-powered radio station, the only one in the Midwest.

PS: Well, well, well.

MR: I wonder why most stations, especially in the Southwest, aren’t doing this.

PS: Well, it does cost a little money, and their shareholders say, “We want profits,” so if you want to keep your job, you give them some profits. I always thought that President Rutherford B. Hayes was the worst President we ever had because he withdrew Federal troops from the South, and that was the end of reconstruction. During reconstruction, many of the ex-slaves could vote. They were elected to local and national offices, and one became a senator. But, I thought Hayes was the worst President because he withdrew the troops and the KKK took over the South. It seems there had been a lot of scandals in Grant’s second term before Hayes. Grant was honest, but apparently, the people around him he appointed were not always. There was one scandal after another after another, and the Republican could not win the next election unless they found somebody squeaky clean. They found it in a three term Governor from Ohio, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes. He said he would be willing to run for one term but refused to run for a second term.

I love my wife and family, and I don’t want to subject them to this pressure for more than four years. The election was held, and there was a dead tie in the electoral college. The election was thrown into the House, and it was a dead tie, and the Republican found one Democrat that would switch and vote for Hayes if he would withdraw the federal troops. So, they shook hands on the deal and Hayes was told what he had to do. It’s very possible that he said I am going to resign right now and they would withdraw the troops anyway. He was a lawyer and thought that this kind of job should be done by talking and not by guns.

He knew the Governor of Louisiana, they both felt that with proper schools, slaves would learn to read and then vote. It didn’t work. The KKK took over and was too strong; people who tried to start schools for slaves got lynched. Hayes liked to give speeches, and after he was president, he would jump into that new invention called a “railroad” and go and make a speech.

Eight years after he left office, in 1888, The Supreme Court handed down a now famous decision. They said there is no capital punishment for corporations. Up until that time, a state could hand out a charter to a corporation, but they could take the charter away if they didn’t like what the corporation was doing. The Supreme Court said, “No, you can fine a corporation if they do something illegal, but you can’t take away their right to live.” Hayes made a speech saying, “We no longer have a government of the people, for the people, by the people as Lincoln said at Gettysberg. We have a government of corporations, for corporations, by corporations.”

Here was a guy from the establishment saying it. The only other guy to say something like that is Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. He said, “Behind the ostensible government of our country, we have a secret government that owes no allegiance to the people. To destroy this secret government and destroy the connection between corrupt politics and corrupt government and business should be the chief task of responsible Statesmen.” Franklin Roosevelt said we have economic royalists–people who inherit their jobs and inherit their power. By and large, the media doesn’t say it. They know where the money comes from. Whether it’s the print media or the air media, the average American just assumes we have a completely democratic government.

MR: How do you feel about your activism after all these years?

PS: Well, I’ve done lots of dumb things. It wasn’t until I moved up to the country that I drifted out of the Communist Party, and I suppose you know about nine out of ten people dropped out of the party after Krushchev made his famous speech in 1956. He said he knew that Comrade Stalin was a very strong leader who lead us to victory over Hitler in the great patriotic war, but he was also very cruel and he sent millions of people off to Siberia to die without any chance to defend themselves. Then someone from the audience shouted, “Why didn’t you speak up?” His entire demeanor changed and he yelled, “Who said that?” There was dead silence. Then he says, “Now you know why I didn’t speak up.” Then soon after that, the Communist Party in this country dropped from about 100,000 to less than 10,000.

MR: Was Woody Guthrie a member of the party?

PS: Well, he applied and was turned down. He and I weren’t regular people who took on assignments. We sang our songs and I guess the party was glad we sang them. We sang peace songs from August 1939 through June 1941, about 2 years. Woody Guthrie had been out West singing songs about the Grand Coulee Dam, and he hitchhiked east because I wrote him a letter and said, “Woody, I am singing with two other guys. We call ourselves The Almanac Singers, and we sang in Madison Square Garden, and I had the crowd singing your song. ‘Oh you can’t scare me I’m sticking to the Union.'”

So, Woody deserted his wife and kids one too many times so his wife went back to Texas to get a divorce, but he knocked on our door on June 23rd, one day after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. First words out of his mouth were, “Well, I guess we won’t be singing any more peace songs will we.” And I said, “You mean we have to work with Churchill?” And he said, “Yup, Churchill says all aid to the gallant Soviet Allies.” And I said, “Is this the same Churchill who in 1920 said ‘we must strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle.'” And Woody said, “Yup. If Churchill flip flopped, we get to flip flop.” And he was right. A few months later he wrote a song called “The Sinking Of The Reuben James,” which is still such a great song. He wrote about twenty verses, and he wanted to put in the names of every single person who had drowned and we said, “Woody, nobody but you is going to sing that song. At least give us a chorus we can join in on.” He grumbled and grumbled and it took him a week, and he came back with that great chorus “What were their names, tell me what were their names, did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?” It was a destroyer sunk off Greenland. And he did a good job of shrinking down his twenty verses to five verses. The song is still sung sixty years later.

MR: How do you look at the Pete Seeger who was in The Weavers and before and the man you are now?

PS: I realize I have had some songs that have been good enough to have been picked up by millions and good enough to be translated into other languages. And I have also been a damn fool, enough to make some mistakes. I apologize for some of the songs I wrote. On page 22, I apologize in my new book and I said, “Should I apologize for all this? I think so.” At any rate, I will apologize for thinking that Stalin was simply a hard driver. I realize now he was a very cruel misleader. Of course Christians can apologize for the inquisition, Protestants for burning people at the stake, for Crusaders massacring Jews and Arabs. And I guess, of course, Mongolians can apologize for Genghis Khan.

MR: You are apologizing for mistakes, but your contributions to society far outweigh any self-perceived mistakes.

PS: The most important thing is that I did not want to become rich, not become a part of the establishment.

MR: Do you have any advice for young people?

PS: I give out advice all the time, and one is to get as much information as you can whether it’s from books or the internet because the information revolution may save the human race.

Nobody knows what the future is going to be. Kurt Vonnegut felt there was a chance of a snowball in hell of the human race being here in 100 years. Scientists do a lot of stupid things and invent things they shouldn’t invent. Einstein once said there are two infinite things, one is the universe and the other is human stupidity.

MR: And might you have any advice to new artists?

PS: Sing in front of as many different kinds of people as you can. Old folks, middle age folks, kids, infants, and sing for people you disagree with too. Learning how to communicate with people we disagree with is something the whole world has to learn.

Tracks

1. Quite Early Morning — with Spoken Introduction

2. We Sing Out

3. There’ll Come A Day

4. Solartopia – with Dar Williams & David Bernz

5. Down By The River

6. River

7. Mastinchele Wachipi Olewan (The Rabbit Song)

8. The River That Flows Both Ways

9. I See Freedom

10. Take It From Dr. King

11. De Colores

12. It Really Isn’t Garbage

13. English Is Cuh-Ray-Zee

14. River Song (Back And Forth The Hudson Flows)

15. It’s A Long Haul

16. We Shall Not Be Moved

17. Turn, Turn, Turn

18. Tomorrow’s Children

19. Quite Early Morning