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The Protest Singer The New Yorker, April 17, 2006 P. 44

PROFILES about folk singer Pete Seeger. It was the ambition of singer and songwriter Pete Seeger, as a child, to be an Indian, a forest ranger, etc. He attended Harvard and studied sociology, but near the end of his second year he left. In the 1940s, he was a member of a group called the Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie. After they broke up, Seeger joined the Weavers, which quit playing in 1952, after an informant told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that 3 of the 4 Weavers, including Seeger, were Communists. Seeger began appearing on the radio in whatever town he was performing, playing his concert that night, and then disappearing before anyone had time to object. Mentions biographer David Dunaway. The Weavers reunited in 1955, but Seeger left them in 1957. Mentions Bruce Springsteen's new album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” which contains versions of folk songs Seeger recorded and which will be released on April 25th. Springsteen began listening to Seeger in 1997. Seeger is 86-he was born in May of 1919. He and his wife, Toshi, who is half Japanese, live in Beacon, New York, about 60 miles north of Manhattan; they've been married for 63 years. Seeger never aspired to a career as a singer, and he dislikes being so well known. As a young man, he embraced the conviction that songs are a way of binding people to a cause. He did more to make people aware of folk music in the middle of the 20th century than any other performer. Purists, however, often resented Seeger's influence. He hasn't made a record or sung a concert by himself for several years, but he still plays banjo and guitar, and he continues to sing for schoolchildren. Describes how the Seegers purchased their land in Beacon. In the summer of 1949, Seeger performed at a concert with Paul Robeson, after which racist and anti-Communist men, women, and children threw rocks at their car and shouted obscenities at them. Describes how Seeger built the log cabin he and Toshi currently live in. Tells about Seeger's father, Charles, who was also a musician and a big influence in his life. As a child, growing up in Nyack, NY, Seeger read novels by Ernest Thompson Seton, who helped start the Boy Scouts. When he was 8, his parents separated, and, after his father remarried, they moved to Maryland. In 1932, he enrolled at Avon Old Farms, a boys' school in Connecticut. His father, Charles, was part of a musicians group called the Composers' Collective, which included Aaron Copland. Charles believed that music's most important purpose was social; he wrote out the “ten purposes” of music. In all of Seeger's years of activism, through the workers' rights and civil rights movements, the movement against the Vietnam War, and the ecological movement, in all of which he figured prominently, there is no conceit he has more emphatically embraced than that all human beings are created equal. In the early and middle part of the 20th century, such a conviction made a person a socialist. When Seeger moved to the country, he held a couple of Communist meetings, then quit the Party. In 1955, he was called to testify before HUAC. Describes his refusal to answer questions based on the First Amendment. In 1961, he was found guilty of contempt and sentenced to a year in jail; an appeals court overturned the conviction in 1962. After his confrontation with HUAC, Seeger became a figure of undeniable stature. Mentions his holding up a sign along Route 9 outside Beacon, with the word “PEACE” written on it, during the Iraq War, in 2004.



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