Turn, Turn, Turn!
Pete Seeger passed away this last week and something akin to irreplacability died with him! Seeger could remember the days when Woody Guthrie and his “instrument that kills fascists” roamed the nineteen thirties and forties American countryside playing troubadorial music for anyone who cared to listen. There is simply no one left with that kind of connection to our past. It would seem to us that we are losing so many connections to our past and folk music is one of the greatest and most informative of all of them. From “Green sleeves” forward to the present time, folk music has united and lifted up generations and bound them together as few other mediums have done.
Pete Seeger was not one of the musicians that we personally followed on the folk scene simply because he was so far removed from us in age that his time had already come and gone for the likes of people like me who became aware of folk music in the middle nineteen sixties. We followed the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary and Joan Biaz, and later, Arlo Guthrie when he was young and in his micro bus with all of his friends in the cult movie “Alice’s Restaurant.” We always worried about Arlo because we knew that Woody had died of Huntington’s Chorea and we wondered when that might afflict Arlo too. So far as we know, it has not.
Although Pete Seeger was not one of our sixties favorites, some of the music that he either authored or helped to author has been with us ever since that time. The Byrds “Turn, Turn, Turn” is one of our all time personal favorites and we can never hear it enough. Seeger wrote that song along with many other standards that will be with ourselves and many others until our time of passage comes. In many ways, “Turn, Turn, Turn” is emblematic of Seeger himself. The words come from the book of Ecclesiastics in the Christian Bible and Seeger only took credit for writing six words of the song. Pete Seeger spent his life following the beat of his own drummer and held a series of life beliefs that were cast in the forge of a charactorial steel that only hardened and shown ever more as his long life wore on. It was in the nineteen fifties that he was brought before the House Committee for un-American Activities where he expounded on everything including vegetarianism. Seeger had flirted with communism in the forties but, by the fifties, had begun to characterize himself as a small “c” communist Never the less, he was banned from network television for over a decade and did not reemerge until the latter portion of the nineteen sixties when his start and his mass appeal had already, mainly due to age, already passed him by. It is interesting to note that Seeger spent his years off of the national airwaves touring and singing with a group of others at colleges large and small who were always thrilled to have him present and in their midst.
If folk music in American has a definition, then the twentieth century portion of it was, to a great degree, authored by Pete Seeger. Musicians lead a hard life often marred by drugs and alcohol and constant travel and an abusive life but Seeger seemed to avoid so much of that. He had such a simple purity about his six foot two lanky frame that it translated well to the in person audiences that loved him so. He always had his audiences sing along with the old familiar songs and during his later years, it masked the fact that the high and low range of his voice had disappeared with the ravages of time. It is interesting to note that he was married to the same woman for over sixty years.
Pete Seeger was always one of those who protested “against the machine” and one of his last great efforts occurred in 2011 when, hobbling along on crutches at 91, he led one of the great protest marches of the all too brief Occupy Wall Street movement. Although we are sure that Seeger had probably been arrested in protest movements many times across his long career, the New York police who saw him that day merely shook his had and wished him well along his way.
No one really knows how long ago the book of Ecclesiastes was written but Pete Seeger merely revitalized a part of it for all of us for generations to come. So many who read the Bible are now reminded when they read that passage, that a man named Pete Seeger cared enough to put it to music and pass it along in the cause of world peace at a time when world tensions were so very, very high. Pete Seeger saw us through Hitler and Communism and so many other significant things but it is interesting to note that he passed at the height of something that he would have deeply abhorred--the war between the classes over money and greed. Seeger’s grandson stated that ten days before he died in a New York City hospital, he was out chopping wood on his New England homestead.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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