Pete Seeger
Folk Revival
Pete Seeger was the tireless troubadour of the American folk revival—a five-string banjo player, songwriter, and activist whose songs and singalongs carried topical folk music from union halls to the civil-rights movement to the mainstream pop charts. Over some seven decades he wrote or co-wrote a handful of the century’s most enduring anthems, mentored generations of pickers, and turned the audience singalong into an art form, insisting always that folk music belonged to everyone.
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- Born May 3, 1919, in Manhattan into a musical family: his father, Charles Seeger, was a pioneering musicologist, and his stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a noted composer. His younger half-siblings Mike Seeger and Peggy Seeger both became important folk musicians in their own right.
- He dropped out of Harvard in 1938 and soon apprenticed under folklorist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, cataloging field recordings—an immersion in traditional music that shaped his life’s work.
- In 1940 he met Woody Guthrie, and the two joined the topical, union-minded Almanac Singers (with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell), pioneering the protest-song format that would define Seeger’s career.
- Popularized the long-neck “Seeger” five-string banjo and, in 1948, self-published How to Play the 5-String Banjo, an instruction manual that taught countless players and helped fuel the postwar folk revival.
- In 1948 he co-founded The Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman. Their 1950 recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” topped the charts for 13 weeks, and hits like “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” brought folk music to a national pop audience.
- The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy era for the members’ leftist politics, and the group disbanded in 1952 as bookings dried up.
- Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, Seeger refused to answer questions—invoking the First Amendment rather than the Fifth—and was indicted for contempt of Congress; convicted in 1961, he saw the conviction overturned on appeal in 1962.
- Co-wrote several standards of the era: “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” (1949, with Lee Hays), “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (1955), and “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” whose lyrics he adapted almost entirely from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
- His songs became hits for others in the 1960s: Peter, Paul and Mary took “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” up the charts, and The Byrds carried “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to No. 1 in 1965.
- He was central to adapting and spreading “We Shall Overcome,” teaching the song widely until it became the anthem of the civil-rights movement; his 1963 album We Shall Overcome, recorded live at Carnegie Hall on June 8 that year, documented that moment.
- A co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, he was a pivotal figure in the folk revival and famously dismayed by Bob Dylan’s electric set there in 1965.
- Helped found the magazines Sing Out! and Broadside, which nurtured the topical songwriting of a new generation, Dylan among them.
- His antiwar song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” was famously censored from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 before he was invited back to perform it in 1968.
- In 1966 he founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization and helped launch the sloop Clearwater in 1969, spearheading a decades-long campaign to clean up the polluted Hudson River—a landmark of the environmental movement.
- Honors accumulated across his later decades: the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1993), the National Medal of Arts (1994), Kennedy Center Honors (1994), and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1996). He won competitive Grammys for Best Traditional Folk Album for Pete (1996) and At 89 (2008), and Best Musical Album for Children for Tomorrow’s Children (2010).
- At 89 he performed “This Land Is Your Land” with Bruce Springsteen at Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural concert. Seeger died January 27, 2014, in Manhattan at age 94, remembered as the conscience and communal voice of American folk music.
