Peter Pete Seeger (born May 3, 1919) is an American folk singer and an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Leadbelly's Goodnight, Irene, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of The Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, and environmental causes.

As a song writer, he is best known as the author or co-author of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), (composed with Lee Hays of The Weavers), and Turn, Turn, Turn!, which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. Flowers was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). If I Had a Hammer was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized Turn, Turn, Turn! in the mid-1960s, as did Judy Collins in 1964. Seeger was one of the folksingers most responsible for popularizing the spiritual We Shall Overcome (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters" episode Pete Seeger, The Power of Song, Seeger states it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional We will overcome to the more inspirational We shall overcome.

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Seeger was born in French Hospital, Midtown Manhattan, the youngest of three sons. He came from a distinguished, prosperous family, which he described as enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition. His father, Charles Louis Seeger Jr. was a violinist and composer who had studied music at Harvard. His mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, also came from an excellent family, was a classical violinist and teacher, raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School.

Soon after their 1911 wedding, the couple had moved to Berkeley, California, where Charles Seeger took up a position as professor of music. Facing opposition from his university colleagues, he became a pioneering ethnomusicologist, investigating both Native American and American folk music. In 1914, Charles Seeger, who had previously been apolitical, had a political awakening when he became aware of the lives of migrant workers in California. His subsequent left-wing activism, which included opposition to World War I, led to deteriorating relations with the university, and in September 1918, he took a sabbatical; the entire family, including a pregnant Constance, moved back to the Seeger family home home in Patterson, New York.

His parents divorced when Seeger was seven. His stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was one of the most significant female composers of the twentieth century. His eldest brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older brother, John Seeger, taught in the 1950s at the Dalton School in Manhattan and was the principal from 1960 to 1976 at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx. His uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted poet, was killed during the First World War. His half-sister, Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, was married for many years to British folk singer Ewan MacColl. Half-brother Mike Seeger went on to form the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, was married to Pete's other half-sister, singer Penny Seeger, also a highly talented singer.

In 1943, Pete married Toshi-Aline Ota, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. Pete and Toshi have three children: Daniel (an accomplished photographer and filmmaker), Mika, and Tinya, and grandchildren Tao, Cassie, Kitama, Moraya, Penny, and Isabelle. Tao is a folk musician in his own right, singing and playing guitar, banjo and harmonica with the Mammals. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the PBS documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Seeger lives in the hamlet of Dutchess Junction in the Town of Fishkill, New York and also has a residence in Patterson, New York, the town in which he grew up. He remains very active politically and maintains an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley Region of New York, especially in the nearby City of Beacon, New York. He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949 and lived there first in a trailer, then in a log cabin they built themselves, and eventually in a larger house.

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Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Though Pete Seeger's parents were both professional musicians, they didn't press him to play an instrument. On his own, Pete gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it, while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina in 1936, while traveling with his father (then a director of Roosevelt's Farm Resettlement program). It changed his life forever. He spent much of the next four years trying to master the instrument.

Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but, as he became increasingly involved with radical politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938. He dreamed of a career in journalism and also took courses in art. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. He polished his performance skills during summer stint of touring New York State with The Vagabond Puppeteers (Jerry Oberwager, 22, Mary Wallace, 22, and Harriet Holtzman, 23), a traveling puppet theater inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico. One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers. The group reprised its act in October in New York City. An article in the October 2, 1939 Daily Worker reported on the Puppeteers' six-week tour this way:

    During the entire trip the group never ate once in a restaurant. They slept out at night under the stars and cooked their own meals in the open, very often they were the guests of farmers. At rural affairs and union meetings, the farm women would bring suppers and would vie with each other to see who could feed the troupe most, and after the affair the farmers would have earnest discussions about who would have the honor of taking them home for the night.

    They fed us too well, the girls reported. And we could live the entire winter just by taking advantage of all the offers to spend a week on the farm.

    In the farmers' homes they talked about politics and the farmers problems, about anti-Semitism and Unionism, about war and peace and social security, and always, the puppeteers report, the farmers wanted to know what can be done to create a stronger unity between themselves and city workers. They felt the need of this more strongly than ever before, and the support of the CIO in their milk strike has given them a new understanding and a new respect for the power that lies in solidarity. One summer has convinced us that a minimum of organized effort on the part of city organizations, unions, consumers bodies, the American Labor Party and similar groups, can not only reach the farmers but weld them into a pretty solid front with city folks that will be one of the best guarantees for progress.

That fall Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to help Lomax sift through commercial race and hillbilly music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938-53). Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940-41) alongside of Josh White, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast, which made news when it performed in March 1941 at a command performance at the White House organized by Eleanor Roosevelt called An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers, before an audience that included the Secretaries of War, Treasury, and the Navy, among other notables. The show was a success but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast. During the war, Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin.

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As a self-described split tenor (between an alto and a tenor), Pete Seeger was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups: The Almanac Singers and The Weavers. The Almanac Singers, which Seeger co-founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays, was a topical group, designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement, racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, Baldwin Butch Hawes, Sis Cunningham, Josh White, and Sam Gary. As a controversial Almanac singer, the 21-year-old Seeger performed under the stage name Pete Bowers to avoid compromising his father's government career.

In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as The Weavers, named after the title of a 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann about a workers' strike (which contained the lines, We'll stand it no more, come what may!). Besides Pete Seeger (performing under his own name), members of the Weavers included charter Almanac member Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and later, Frank Hamilton, Erik Darling and Bernie Krause. In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare, the Weavers' repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language, arguably rendering it even more powerful. The Weavers even on occasion performed in tuxedos (unlike the Almanacs, who had dressed informally) and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues. Because of this, the somewhat hokey string orchestra and chorus arrangements on a few of their hit numbers, and, no doubt also because of their considerable, if temporary, financial success, the Weavers incurred criticism from some progressives for supposedly compromising their political integrity. It was a tricky dilemma, but Seeger and the other Weavers felt that the imperative of getting their music and their message out to the widest possible audience amply justified these measures. The Weavers' string of major hits began with On top of Old Smokey and an arrangement of Leadbelly's signature waltz, Goodnight, Irene, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950 and was covered by many other pop singers. On the flip side of Irene was the Israeli song Tzena, Tzena, Tzena. Other Weaver hits included, So Long It's Been Good to Know You (by Woody Guthrie), Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (by Hays, Seeger, and Lead Belly), the South African Zulu song, Wimoweh (about the lion, warrior chief Shaka Zulu), to name a few.

The Weavers's performing career was abruptly halted in 1953 at the peak of their popularity when blacklisting prompted radio stations to refuse to play their records and all their bookings were canceled. They briefly returned to the stage, however, at a sold-out reunion at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and in a subsequent reunion tour, which produced a hit version of Merle Travis's Sixteen Tons as well as LPs of their concert performances. Kumbaya, a Gullah black spiritual dating from slavery days, was also introduced to wide audiences by Pete Seeger and the Weavers (in 1959), becoming a staple of Boy and Girl Scout campfires.

In the late fifties, the Kingston Trio was formed in direct imitation of (and homage to) the Weavers, covering much of the latter's repertoire, though with a more button-down, uncontroversial and mainstream collegiate persona. The Kingston Trio produced another phenomenal succession of Billboard chart hits, and, in its turn spawned a legion of imitators, laying the groundwork for the 1960s commercial folk revival.

In the documentary film Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007), Seeger states that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial.

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In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He went on to invent the Long Neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo. Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region, the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Seeger's championing of and improvements to it. According to an unnamed musician quoted in David King Dunaway's biography, by nesting a resonant chord between two precise notes, a melody note and a chiming note on the fifth string Pete Seeger gentrified the more percussive traditional Appalachian frailing style, with its vigorous hammering of the forearm and its percussive rapping of the fingernail on the banjo head. Though what Dunaway's informant describes is the age-old droned frailing style, the implication is that Seeger made this more acceptable to mass audiences by omitting some of its percussive complexities, while presumably still preserving the characteristic driving rhythmic quality associated with the style.

From the late 1950s on, Seeger also accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin that had been associated with Lead Belly who had styled himself the King of the 12-String Guitar. Seeger's distinctive custom-made guitars had a triangular soundhole. He combined the long scale length (approximately 28) and capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop-D (DADGBE) tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks.

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To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger had gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps and traveled the college campus circuit. He also recorded as many as five albums a year for Moe Asch's Folkways Records label. As the nuclear disarmament movement picked up steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger's anti-war songs, such as, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (co-written with Joe Hickerson), Turn, Turn, Turn, adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and The Bells of Rhymney by the Welsh poet Idris Davies (1957), gained wide currency. Seeger also was closely associated with the 1960s Civil Rights movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall Concert, featuring the youthful Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This event and Martin Luther King's March on Washington in August of that year, in which Seeger and other folk singers participated, brought the Civil Rights anthem We Shall Overcome to wide audiences. A version of this song, submitted by Zilphia Horton of Highlander, had been published in Seeger's People's Songs Bulletin as early as in 1947.

By this time Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village, as a longtime columnist in Sing Out!, the successor to the People's Songs Bulletin, and as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine. To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers, he coined the phrase Woody's children, alluding to his associate and traveling companion, Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. This urban folk revival movement, a continuation of the activist tradition of the thirties and forties and of People's Songs, used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics to effect social change, a practice that goes back to the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies' Little Red Song Book, compiled by Swedish-born union organizer Joe Hill (1879-1915). (The Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie's, who was known to carry it around.)

Pete Seeger made two tours of Australia, the first in 1963. At the time of this tour, his single Little Boxes (written by Malvina Reynolds) was number one in the nation's Top 40s. In 1993 the Australian singer/playwright Maurie Mulheron assembled a musical biography of Seeger's, and friends', work in a stage production One Word WE!. It enjoyed a long and sold-out season at the New Theatre in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was reprised in 2000 and 2009, and the company has also taken the show on tour to folk festivals at Maleny and Woodford in Queensland, and Port Fairy in Victoria.

The long television blacklist of Seeger began to end in the mid-1960s when he hosted a regionally broadcast, educational folk-music television show, Rainbow Quest. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Donovan, Richard Farina and Mimi Farina, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, The Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, Malvina Reynolds, and Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine hour-long programs were recorded at WNJU's Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi, with Sholom Rubinstein.

An early booster of Bob Dylan, Seeger, who was on the board of directors of the Newport Folk Festival, became upset over the extremely loud and distorted electric sound that Dylan, instigated by his manager Albert Grossman, also a Folk Festival board member, brought into the 1965 Festival during his performance of Maggie's Farm. Tensions between Grossman and the other board members were running very high (at one point reportedly there was a scuffle and blows were briefly exchanged between Grossman and board member Alan Lomax). There are several versions of what happened during Dylan's performance and some claimed that Pete Seeger tried to disconnect the equipment. Seeger has been portrayed by Dylan's publicists as a folk purist who was one of the main opponents to Dylan's going electric, but when asked in 2001 about how he recalled his objections to the electric style, he said:

    I couldn't understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, Maggie's Farm, and the sound was distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, Fix the sound so you can hear the words. He hollered back, This is the way they want it. I said Damn it, if I had an axe, I'd cut the cable right now. But I was at fault. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, you didn't boo Howlin' Wolf yesterday. He was electric! Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term. (wikipedia)

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Originally released between 1957 and 1962, Pete Seeger's five-volume series, American Favorite Ballads, brought the nascent folk revival into the cultural mainstream. The songs in this collection narrate tales of ordinary people and their extraordinary deeds, and show Pete at the crossroads of the past and the future putting his own stamp on America's folk song heritage while bequeathing it to generations to come.

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Pete Seeger - American Favorite Ballads 1957-1962
(5CD Folkways 2009)

    Disc 1:

     1. John Henry
     2. Shenandoah
     3. Blue-Tailed Fly (Jimmie Crack Corn)
     4. Black Girl
     5. Skip to My Lou
     6. Big Rock Candy Mountain
     7. Clementine
     8. Yankee Doodle
     9. Home on the Range
    10. John Brown's Body
    11. Goodnight, Irene
    12. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
    13. Oh, Susanna
    14. Wayfaring Stranger
    15. Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep
    16. Down in the Valley
    17. Wabash Cannon Ball
    18. On Top of Old Smoky
    19. Frankie and Johnny
    20.  I Ride an Old Paint
    21. Wreck of the Old 97
    22. Wagoner's Lad (My Horses Ain't Hungry)
    23. Old Dan Tucker
    24. I've Been Working on the Railroad
    25. Cielito Lindo
    26. So Long, It's Been Good to Know You (Dusty Old Dust)
    27. America the Beautiful
    28. This Land Is Your Land

    Disc 2:

     1. Barbara Allen
     2. Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn
     3. Midnight Special
     4. House of the Rising Sun
     5. Careless Love
     6. Oh, What a Beautiful City
     7. Poor Boy
     8. Sally Ann
     9. Riddle Song
    10. Go Tell Aunt Rhody
    11. Water Is Wide
    12. Fox
    13. Keeper and the Doe
    14. Pretty Polly
    15. Jesse James
    16. Stagolee
    17. Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair
    18. Camptown Races (Gwine to Run All Night)
    19. Blow the Man Down
    20. Froggie Went a Courtin' (the Frog and Mouse)
    21. I Had a Rooster (Barnyard Song)]
    22. Putting on the Style
    23. Farmer's Curst Wife
    24. Hard Travelin'
    25. Alabama Bound
    26. Wimoweh (the Lion Sleeps Tonight)
    27. Dink's Song

    Disc 3:
     1. Gypsy Davy
     2. Deep Blue Sea
     3. New River Train
     4. St. James Hospital
     5. E-Ri-E Canal
     6. St. Louis Blues
     7. Boll Weevil
     8. Girl I Left Behind
     9. When I First Came to This Land
    10. Titanic
    11. El-A-Noy
    12. Lady of Carlysle
    13. My Good Man
    14. Golden Vanity
    15. Ain't It a Shame
    16. Swanee River
    17. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
    18. Boys from County Mayo
    19. No Irish Need Apply
    20. Paddy Works on the Railroad
    21. Arkansas Traveler
    22. When I Was Single
    23. Wond'rous Love
    24. Ground Hog
    25. Old Blue
    26. She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain
    27. Erie Canal

    Disc 4:

     1. Banks of the Ohio
     2. You Are My Sunshine
     3. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
     4. Foggy Dew
     5. Molly Malone
     6. Old Maid's Song
     7. Oh, How He Lied
     8. Where the Old Allegheny and the Monongahela Flow
     9. Leatherwing Bat
    10. Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier
    11. Farther Along
    12. Go Down, Moses
    13. All My Trials
    14. Monsieur Banjo
    15. No More Auction Block
    16. Hole in the Bucket
    17. What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor
    18. Army Life
    19. Blue Mountain Lake
    20. Lady Margaret
    21. John Hardy
    22. Johnson
    23. John Riley
    24. Washer Lad
    25. Talking Blues
    26. Lolly Too Dum
    27. T. B. Blues
    28. Summertime

    Disc 5:

     1. Trail to Mexico
     2. Red River Valley
     3. Old Joe Clark
     4. St. James Infirmary
     5. Green County Bachelor
     6. Ox Driver's Song
     7. Buffalo Gals
     8. Joe Bowers
     9. Texian Boys
    10. My Sweetheart Is a Mule in the Mines
    11. Johnny Gray
    12. Cowboy Yodel
    13. Sioux Indians
    14. Ida Red
    15. Holler
    16. Cumberland Gap
    17. Wake Up, Jacob
    18. Sweet Betsy from Pike
    19. Buffalo Skinners
    20. Whiskey, Rye Whiskey
    21. Stewball
    22. Whoopie Ti-Yi-Yo, Get Along, Little Dogies
    23. Strawberry Roan
    24. Jay Gould's Daughter
    25. Play-Party
    26. I Never Will Marry
    27. Riflemen of Bennington
    28. Kingdom Coming (Year of Jubilo)
    29. Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase