Pete Seeger
Appearances
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It's hard to say. Talk about freedom and justice, maybe. It's hard to say, hard to say. If you tried to pin people down, they'd just say, that's one of these Kame songs. I'm sure in the southern states, the segregationist leaders would have said, oh, let's talk about all my brothers and sisters. Only the Kame's talk that way. Only the race mixers talk like that. My gosh.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
People today can't realize, though, how much America has changed as a result of the civil rights movement and one thing after another, the women's movement. we didn't win all the victories we hoped we would win, but we won some victories. And maybe that's the way the world moves forward. One of my favorite songs these days is, oh gosh, I love it, but don't have a guitar with me.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Your Honor, you may know a friend of mine, Woody Guthrie. Great songwriter and a great American, and Woody's not well. But he's been much on my mind as I've been going through this because Woody once said that a good song can only do good. And the song I'm in hot water for here, it's a good song. It's a patriotic song, in fact.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder Brothers, sisters
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I sang it way down low the way you might sing it if you were singing a child to sleep. That's a great song. It was made up by people in slavery, but it's, I think, one of the most scientific songs in the world. Revolutionists as well as religionists often forget that heaven doesn't come in one big bang. It comes in many steps.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
No, I would have known it was a lie. My main purpose as a musician has been to get people singing and get people to make their music by themselves. And it's the only reason I keep singing is because I'm a skilled song leader now. My voice is 50% shot. I can still shout in the high notes, but my low notes are very wobbly. But I can still get a crowd singing.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And so when they're singing, they don't bother listening to me. They're having a lot of fun. And that's my main purpose. I want to show people what a lot of fun it is to sing together.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And I thought maybe you'd like to actually hear the words and I can play it for you.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
When you go to work, well, you work like the devil. At the end of the week, you're not on the level. Payday comes, you ain't got a penny. Because when you pay your bills, you got so many. I'm going to starve and everybody will. Because you can't make a living in a cotton mill. When you buy clothes on easy term, collect to treat you like a measly worm.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
One dollar down and then Lord knows if you can't make a payment they take your clothes. I'm gonna starve and everybody will cause you can't make a living in a cotton mill.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Woody showed me how to hitchhike and how to ride freight trains, how to sing in saloons. I said, what kind of songs did you sing? Well, he said, this year, here's five or six tunes that are nearly always worth a nickel or a quarter. Makes no difference now what kind of life fate hands me. I'll get along without you now. That's plain to see. It's a Gene Autry hit. Was in 1940.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
No. For a man, of course, for a woman it would be much more difficult. The danger of being assaulted by men who assume that any woman who would travel that way is open to his advances. Woody said, you wait in the outskirts of town, and when the train is picking up speed, it's still not going too fast. You can grab a hold of it and swing on.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Getting off the first time, I didn't know how to do it, and I fell down and skinned my knees and elbow and broke my banjo. Fortunately, I had a camera with me, and I hocked it in a local pawn shop and bought a very cheap guitar. I knew a few chords, and I got through the rest of the summer playing the guitar. Woody was a direct actionist.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
When he was singing once to raise money for war bonds during World War II, he and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee were in Baltimore. And they said, Mr. Guthrie, we have a seat for you at the table and your friends, we have some food for them in the kitchen. He said, what do you mean?
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
He tipped the whole table up in a big crowded dining hall, dumped a whole table full of plates and everything on the floor and tipped another table up. Finally, he was restrained. And Brownie says, Woody, you're going to get us all in trouble. I'm lame and Sonny's blind. And they let him out. He was absolutely furious. That was Woody Guthrie.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Well, long discussion. When I met Lee Hayes, I met one of the few geniuses I've met in my life. We were always talking and thinking what kind of songs were needed. We'd be trying out this and trying out that. Sometimes one person would start a song and another person would finish it. That's how it was with the song Talking Union. We'd heard Woody singing, you know, the old talking blues.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
If you want to go to heaven, let me tell you what to do. Got to grease your feet with a little mutton stew. Slide out of the devil's hand. Ooze over in the promised land. Take it easy. Go greasy. Go greasy. So on. And I don't know whether it was Lee or Mill or me who thought of, you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do. Got to talk to the workers in the shop with you.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Got to build you a union. Got to make it strong. But if you all stick together, boys, it won't be long. It gets shorter hours. Better working conditions. Vacations with pay take your kids to the seashore. I got the idea across that in spite of all the things that could go wrong, all the attacks that would be made on a group of working people, that you could win if you stuck together.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I sang, if I had a hammer and tea for Texas, I forgot what else. We shall not be moved, maybe.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And we had stones thrown at us. It was a pretty horrifying day. A lot of people thought this is the beginning of American fascism. This is how Hitler got started. I was just one of 10,000 people there or 20,000. It was a huge crowd. Came to hear Paul Robeson. But the Ku Klux Klan had infiltrated the police force of the county and maybe the state for all I know, and the city.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I don't know the details, but it was the Ku Klux Klan that initiated the attack. And they had the concert surrounded with walkie-talkies like a battlefield. And after the concert was over, everybody who attended it was directed down one road. There were three roads you could have gone, to the left or straight ahead or to the right. Now, I wanted to go to the left because my home was...
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
But the police said, no, all cars down here. And they directed us as though we were going to run the gauntlet. And there were some 15 piles of stones about the size of a baseball, which had been waist high, these stones, thousands of stones. And every car that came by got a stone, wham, at close range.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
There was a policeman standing about 80 feet away, and I said, Officer, aren't you going to do something? And he said, Move on, move on. Then I look around. The guy in back of me was getting stone after stone because he couldn't get past me. I was stopped. So I moved on. Funny, about a year and a half ago, I was out west. The man says, Pete, you were at Peekskill, weren't you? Yeah, I said.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
He says, Do you remember the time you stopped and spoke to a policeman? And I said, Yeah. And there was a car in back of me. He says, I was in that car. I said,
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Well, I'm sure that in retrospect, you can think of things we did wrong. But knowing what I knew then, why I think we did the right thing, and I was of the opinion then that the average American wouldn't go in for that kind of fascist approach. You see, their signs went up in Peekskill. Somebody printed them up. They were put on bumpers, bumper stickers.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
They were put in windows of apartments and houses. I saw them in bars. They said, wake up, America. Peekskill did. Now, there's all America to do the same thing. You find these commie so-and-so traitors, whatever you think they are, and you show them what's going to happen to them. They either get out of this country. That's the whole idea of America, love it or leave it.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Yet within about a month, those signs were taken down. Now, nobody knows exactly why those signs came down, but I'm convinced that within Peekskill, there were many arguments within families. It might have been a grandparent that would say, you mean you threw stones at women and children? Well, we don't like these people either, but still, you don't throw stones at women and children.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I mean, is that what Abe Lincoln would have done? Is that what Thomas Jefferson would have done? Anybody you admire, is that what Jesus would have done? And it's significant that those signs did not stay up in Peekskill. And you'll be interested, as of last month, Peekskill has a black mare.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
That was a soul-searching decision. In one sense, I felt it was going into enemy territory. Why should I want to contribute to the nightclub scene, which I thought was anathema? I come from old New England Puritans who thought nightclubs were dens of iniquity and never have been much of a drinker myself. But I want to reach people.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And I remember Woody telling me, Pete, it's a good experience to sing in a bar. You ought to do it occasionally. So I did. But to take a job at a nightclub and work there six nights a week. But we took it, and it was a very valuable experience. We learned a hell of a lot. In six months, the Weavers had had six months of rehearsals and were ready to make some records.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Yes, we never expected to get on the hit parade. And to everybody's surprise, including the head of Decca Records, Good Night Irene sold two million copies in the summer of 1950. the biggest seller since World War II, along with one of Bing Crosby's songs. Sam's song was the big seller. But Goodnight Irene was on every jukebox in the USA in the year 1950. You couldn't escape that song.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It floated out from every filling station, from every diner.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I thought the blacklisters would be after us a lot sooner. It took them a couple years to chop us down. And it was a full five years before they got around to calling me up before the Committee on Un-American Activities. I was surprised it took so long.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I think I did. They questioned me about a song. I said, oh, that's a good song. I'll sing it to you. Oh, no. They didn't want me to sing it. They wanted to know where I had sung it at the following place. I said, well, I have a right to sing a song anywhere I want to, whether I agree with the people or don't agree with them. I'm not interested in telling you that.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
They said, we direct you to tell us. No. He said, you are liable to be under contempt of Congress. Do you use the Fifth Amendment as your defense? No, I said, I just don't think these are questions any American should be asked, especially under threat of reprisal if they give the wrong answer. So in effect, I was defending myself on the basis of the First Amendment.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
The Fifth Amendment, in effect, says you have no right to ask me this question. But the First Amendment, in effect, says you have no right to ask any American such questions.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
I think it's been harder for the friendly witnesses. History has not been kind to the Un-American Activities Committee. It feels, as I felt, that these people didn't love America so much as their own particular version of America, which was somewhat limited, shall we say. And so those who cooperated with the committee, I wish they could forget it all.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Those who stood up to the committee, as Lee says, if it wasn't for the honor, he'd just as soon not been blacklisted. It was an honor.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
Well, I was mad. I wrote some articles in Sing Out magazine warning people that this ABC television show called Hootenanny would be kind of a travesty on what a real hootenanny would be. A real hootenanny was a bunch of people who hoped that music could
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
It could bring people together to bring a peaceful world, a world without racism, a world where you had a right to join a union, a world without sexism. And instead, it was a second-rate vaudeville show. Some good folk music got played on the air but there was an awful lot which was kept off the air. Why? Because it wasn't cheerful, happy music.
Fresh Air
Pete Seeger / Bruce Springsteen
And yet, to my mind, some of the greatest tragic music in the world are the tragic songs that I've heard sung by American working people.