New York - It was a high point of a spectacular open-air
concert held as part of the inauguration ceremony for US President
Barack Obama. Together with Bruce Springsteen, folk singer Pete
Seeger led half a million of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington in a rendition of Woody Guthrie's classic This Land is
Your Land.
Wearing a colourful pointed cap and sporting a while beard, Seeger
thrilled the crowd with his banjo playing.
On Sunday the titan of American folk music will celebrate his 90th
birthday. To mark the occasion, 40 musicians, including Bruce
Springsteen, Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Eddie
Vedder and Taj Mahal, are to serenade him at a party in New York's
Madison Square Garden.
Proceeds from the concert will go to Clearwater, an environmental
organization that Seeger co-founded.
The musician, peace activist, political rebel and environmentalist
is known mostly as a song writer. His Where Have All the Flowers Gone
was an anthem of the peace movement in the 1960s. Marlene Dietrich,
Hildegard Knef, Nana Mouskouri and many others did their own
interpretation of the song, contributing to its worldwide success.
Other unforgettable political protest songs that Seeger co-wrote
include If I Had a Hammer and the Gospel song We Shall Overcome,
which Baez made immortal. He also wrote the music for the song Turn,
Turn, Turn!, based on the Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes.
Born into a musical family in 1919 in New York, Seeger became a
key figure in the rediscovery of American folk music in the 1940s and
'50s. He was a co-founder of the influential groups The Almanac
Singers and The Weavers, and launched the US folk music organization
People's Song. He also worked on the folk music magazine Sing Out.
Compared with the triviality of most pop songs, the lyrics of folk
music have the substance of life, Seeger once said.
He lost his temper when Bob Dylan became the first musician to
bring an electric guitar to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, which he
co-founded. The die-hard 'unplugged' fan said he would have cut the
cable to Dylan's instrument if he had had an axe.
The audience booed Dylan because of poor sound quality. Though he
went on to stardom, 37 years passed before he returned to Newport. To
be on the safe side, he jokingly wore a wig and fake beard for that
2002 appearance.
Seeger's career suffered an abrupt halt during the 1950s McCarthy
era marked by anti-communist investigations. Long a thorn in the side
of the US political right, he was called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee in 1955 because of his feisty lyrics and his
earlier membership in the communist party. He refused to appear and
was found guilty of subversive activity along with author Arthur
Miller and six other writers.
For years afterwards the US commercial media boycotted him and he
had to eke out a living by performing in private schools, churches
and summer theaters - 'a cultural guerrilla tactic,' as he called it.
In 1967 his Vietnam War protest song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy was
cut from a programme by the CBS television network.
'How Can I Keep From singing?' is the title of a Seeger song and
it is also his motto in life, even if his voice is somewhat frail.
Just last year a new studio album - Pete Seeger at 89 - was released.
And he remains politically active and says songs help express ideas
and encourage common action.
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