He was a folk-singer, songwriter and political activist born in Patterson, New York, to a family where his father, Charles, was a musicologist and investigated non-Western music. He is the half-brother of Mike Seeger who formed the New Lost City Ramblers and influenced Bob Dylan and Peggy Seeger, who is a folk singer who lived with the songwriter Ewan MacCollfor over 30 years. His uncle Alan Seeger was a known poet who was killed during WWI.
He was a scholarship student at Avon Old Farms and Harvard University where he studied journalism and he worked at the Archives of American Folk Music in New York where he met Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, with whom he would collaborate.
He had seen the five-string banjo played in 1936 and in 1948 he wrote the first version of his book How to Play the Five-String Banjo. He married Toshi-Aline Ohta in 1943 and they had three children and 6 grandchildren. His grandson Tao is a folk musician with The Mammals.
He was a founder member of The Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, and The Weavers which had major hits in the 1950s prior to being blacklisted during the McCarthy years. He was instructed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused stating that it would violate his First Amendment rights. This led to an indictment for contempt of Congress and he was forced to keep the federal government aware of his movements. After attending trial in 1961 he was sentenced to a year in jail but this was overturned at appeal.
He began his career as a solo artist in 1958 and wrote songs such as “If I Had a Hammer”, “Turn, Turn, Turn” and “We Shall Overcome”. He was a co-founder of Broadside Magazine which Bob Dylan made several recordings for, but he was unhappy by the electronic sound that he had incorporated into his act at the 1965 Newport Festival. He hosted the regional show Rainbow Quest in the mid-’60s and his guests included Johnny Cash and Judy Collins.
In 1966 he funded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater which works to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and clean it. He performed several songs in the late 1960s which were deemed unsuitable for broadcasting and had a performance of “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” cut from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
He appeared in a National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee and in 2006 Bruce Springsteen released the album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
His awards include the National Medal of the Arts, Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Honor, Harvard Arts Medal, a Grammy Award for “Pete” and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
He performed live right up until at least September 2013 when he appeared at Farm Aid. In January 2014 he was taken into the Presbyterian Hospital in New York and died peacefully while sleeping just six days later.
Joan Baez recordings
Guantanamera (Jose Marti/Pete Seeger/Hector Angulo)
(A&M 1516-S, 2634-S) (US 45)
Sources:
- http://peteseeger.net/wp/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger
- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0781517/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
- http://www.biography.com/people/pete-seeger-9542618
- http://www.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/pete_seeger/
- http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/02/pete-seeger-farewell-american-folk-singer-rufus-wainwright