The boss asked me to post this. He’s taking a brief break from taxes.
Most of the world noted the passing of Pete Seeger earlier this week. A friend who is having a bit of a health crisis in Connecticut posted the NYT obit on his Facebook page. I pointed out, to not much notice, that my friend and Pete were both alumni of the Avon Old Farms school in Connecticut. I resolved to do a Pete Seeger post sometime, but thought that it should wait until Joe Briggs Place had marked the passing of other notables like Eric Hobsbawm and Andre Schiffrin.
However, when I opened the Star this morning, Rick Salutin suggested a way—a homage to the sing-along as art form and political practice. The only time I saw Seeger in person was about thirty-odd years ago at Convocation Hall in Toronto. It was at the beginning of the Reagan years. Seeger had kind words for the Sandinistas, who, he thought, had got most things right. He also wanted to tell about his efforts to clean up the Hudson River and got the whole audience to sing along with a new song he had written about the sloop, Clearwater. It was moving in a way that was hard to define. It was also plainly clear that one Hudson River sloop and the Sandinistas were not going to prove much of an obstacle to Reagan and company. They would swamp everything in the years to come.
My own favourite campfire sing-along moment in the years after that was Randy Newman's effort at audience participation during a Rider in the Rain sing-along at a Berlin nightclub in 1994 that you can view below. I used it to announce my retirement from active political work in the spring of 2011:
As devastatingly funny as this was, the weasels have persisted, building a new Gilded Age and anointing pseudo-populists as its foot soldiers. (Real populists knew how to add, but that’s another, longer story.) Liberals have had practically nothing to say, other than to round on familiar targets like "naive" leftists. You can see Hendrik Hertzberg's 2008 New Yorker effort to wave the tattered liberal cold warrior bloody shirt at Seeger one more time here. That's what happened when you dropped by the Crimson office to play a tune about what the young newspaper geniuses of that era might encounter in the real world of newspaperdom. "Ew! So old school pop front, such a fellow traveller! We're much smarter than that!" Right. (By way of comparison, take a look at what this generation of the Harvard Hasty Pudding folks managed to get Dame Helen Mirren to do recently at a "humorous" pseudo-award ceremony. You stay classy, Harvard.) The Times also does its mandatory, but tastefully restrained version of the cold war dance in its obit. The New Yorker also made available a much better article on Seeger and his politics by Alec Wilkinson from its archive (the link probably won't last forever). However, the world does move forward. The Times did find some footage with Seeger from 2007 on climate change for the obit, which is pretty good. There's lots of Seeger material on YouTube. As well, there's a link in the obit to a pretty astounding Seeger singalong moment at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2008. Our friend from Connecticut was there:
Seeger persisted. There's another version of This is Your Land that he performed at Farm Aid 2013 last September. Though frail, he had another new verse for people to sing. Neil Young, who was there to sing along at Farm Aid, recently pulled into Toronto this month and was a tad-Seegerlike when he met the press. Jian Ghomeshi got his hair mussed, which is always a good thing. And now it's back to taxes.
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