The first time I spoke to Pete Seeger was after a concert he gave at Lewisohn Stadium, at the City College of New York, in 1967. My friend José Gumero and I ran up to him, asking for a word of wisdom. “Take it easy, but take it,” replied Pete, quoting Woody Guthrie’s “Talking Union Blues.” (I was 13.) The next time I spoke to the minstrel was 2004, when we performed together at The Colony Café in Woodstock, New York. Chatting with him, I was shocked to discover that Pete Seeger in person is exactly like Pete Seeger onstage: generous, folksy, cheerful — but more curious than I expected. He went for a stroll in the woods around Larry Beinhart’s house, noticing stone walls built by 19th century farmers. I asked Pete if George W. Bush was a fascist. “I would call him a corporatist,” he replied. “Everything he does is for the benefit of corporations.” Here’s another quote from Woody Guthrie: “Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.” That’s what Pete could do; he got to the heart of a song, or an idea.
It was as a political philosopher that I most loved Pete. He transformed the Stalinism of the 1930s into a revolutionary nature-loving pacifism, without “selling out” to the Crap American Culture. By the end, Pete was inventing a new American Buddhism, with roots in Black gospel music, Irish joke-songs, harmonic crowd-singing and Punk-style banjo. No one else could inspire a crowd of strangers to sing in perfect harmony. Pete’s real instrument was not the banjo
