Oh no! Did I forget Pete Seeger’s birthday? Silly me—that’d be almost as bad as disremembering the 80 million innocents murdered by his sponsors Mao and Stalin. Tsk, tsk.
Sure, Seeger’s unwavering public stance of defiance and dissent were admirably All-American, taking on HUAC with unblinking, stoic resolve, but do not forget that he was also rabidly pro-Stalin, even as the dictator spooned with Hitler for the Non-Aggression Pact and beyond, right through the entire nightmare of Stalin's very bloody rule.
That's just the beginning with this schmuck who was, above all else, a complete phony and, worse, a thundering bore.
Born to a wealthy family, educated at private New England boarding schools, Seeger, in public life, deceptively played the fictional role of a horny-handed son of the soil.
Was he really a Communist? Who cares? Personal political views are an inalienable right, but it's worth mentioning that he was quite often on the wrong (dare we say it?) and distinctly deplorable side of history.
Seeger nobly went to China in 1949, when Mao's troops were butchering the populace. He was there to “collect songs of the Red Army,” at least one of which (“Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention”) he kept in his repertoire for decades, breezily relating its origin as if it were a traditional laborer's chant rather than a war-time dictum of military indoctrination.
Again, just as with Stalin, the cynical Seeger didn't only turn a blind eye to the greatest war crimes of the 20th century, he openly supported these evil regimes. Even later in life, he couldn't really bring himself to make a heartfelt apology about Stalin.
The previous year, Seeger had shilled for Progressive party presidential nominee Henry Wallace. During the campaign, Wallace, FDR’s former veep, “colluded with Stalin to undermine U.S. foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech. It was not until 1950 that Wallace began to acknowledge his misapprehensions regarding the Kremlin’s aims and conduct.”
Our ever-circumspect Peter apparently shared no similar ‘;misapprehensions.’
Then there was the manufactured 1965 Newport Folk Festival kerfuffle, a flackman’s wet dream where Dylan was booed for playing an electric guitar. Seeger is said to have “been upset,” and to have tried to cut electric power cables to the amps. Much later, Seeger, “almost apologetic,” denied the incident ever occurred. Like everything else in this charlatan’s bio, it probably didn’t.
But Seeger's greatest shortcomings, by far, were as a musician and performer. He was a marginal talent, whose scant handful of original compositions tended to the forgettable and simplistic. Seeger's painfully manicured on-stage presentation was chronically cloying, cute and colorless.
The New York Times' fawning obit characterized his voice as “a hearty tenor.” Oh, sure. Hearty like a bowl of oatmeal. The truth is, he could barely hit the notes, and scarcely learned to play the banjo, to boot—Earl Scruggs he was not.
In the end, Seeger's legacy was propped up largely by Manhattan’s activist elite who weren't at all interested in American music, folk or otherwise. Seeger may have enjoyed the institutionalized immunity reserved for darlings of the American ruling class (naturally, since he was one of them) but the reality of his cultural contribution came sharply into focus when he performed at the Occupy Wall St. encampment in New York's Zucotti Park in October, 2011.
As he and Arlo Guthrie exhorted the crowd to sing along, they were rewarded with near silence. Almost no one knew or cared who they were, let alone their songs. Deservedly, Seeger’s true legacy is irrelevance.
First I heard about Arlo and Pete bombing at Occupy Wall Street. Funny.
Saw the equally unbearable Tom Morello try to play the proletarian bard with an acoustic guitar at Occupy Los Angeles, and nobody much cared who he was, either.
Exactly, just another wealthy charlatan carrying around guilt for being a rich kid who doesn't get it that he and his followers would be the first to be discarded and murdered by the Marxists he so adored if they ever came to power!