{"id":11545,"date":"2014-02-06T18:09:23","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T22:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11545"},"modified":"2014-02-06T18:09:23","modified_gmt":"2014-02-06T22:09:23","slug":"real-revolutionaries-carry-a-banjo-jesse-drew-on-pete-seeger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/real-revolutionaries-carry-a-banjo-jesse-drew-on-pete-seeger\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Revolutionaries Carry a Banjo: Jesse Drew on Pete Seeger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"me_pete\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pete Seeger and Jesse Drew up the Hudson<\/i><\/p>\n

Via: Retort
\n[<\/span>Jesse Drew sends us his reflections on the late Pete Seeger, whom he met during the making of his\u00a0documentary on the politics of country music. A rough mix of <\/i>Open Country <\/span>was\u00a0screened and\u00a0presented by Jesse and Glenda at last January’s Retort, during which we learnt that the new Billboard category ‘Country and Western’ was\u00a0a McCarthy era\u00a0(December 1949)\u00a0coinage intended to break the lineage with political ‘folk’ e.g. Guthrie, the Almanacs and the Weavers.\u00a0Jesse himself worked as a sound engineer at Dolby Labs in San Francisco and recently as director of\u00a0Technocultural Studies at UC Davis, where he specializes in digital arts, media archaeology, documentary studies and the history of labor. He\u00a0contributed ‘The Commune as Badlands as Utopia as Autonomous Zone’ to <\/i>West of Eden<\/span> (PM Press 2012) where he described himself as ‘a\u00a0young teenage runaway, who roamed the United States and thrived thanks to a strong network of urban and rural communes and collectives,\u00a0spending many years as a labor activist in traditional smokestack industries before becoming involved in grassroots video production and the nascent digital arts movement.’<\/i> IB] \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jesse Drew
\n<\/span><\/b>29. i. 14<\/p>\n

I spend a lot of time thinking about Pete Seeger.\u00a0 I was even thinking of him the night news of his death flashed on my screen.\u00a0\u00a0In the course of working on an excruciatingly long-term film project on the politics of Country music, the influence of Pete Seeger arises quite often.\u00a0 Part of the thesis of the film, called Open Country<\/i>, is that Pete Seeger should be considered a founder of Country music.\u00a0 Not folk music, mind you, as that has been around for some time.\u00a0 Country music.\u00a0 Nashville, I believe, owes Pete a statue in the center of town. But I will return to this seemingly absurd point later.<\/p>\n

It is not possible to sum up the contributions of Pete Seeger in this commentary, nor in any article, anthology or book. His connection to the labor rebellions of the Great Depression and the post-War years, battles with HUAC and the anti-communist witch-hunts, participation in the Civil Rights movement in the South, agitation against the wars in Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East, building a community effort to clean industrial waterways, acting against global warming\u2014these are all rich areas where Pete Seeger would have to be included.\u00a0 To do justice to the legacy of Pete Seeger, indeed, one would have to write about every significant movement for social justice in the United States, if not the world, within the last 80 years.<\/p>\n

With his passing, as I try to take the long view of his life, I am tainted not by what I know from books, recordings and word-of-mouth legacy, but by the small personal experiences I had of him. Growing up in the 1960s, I had heard a few songs of his in school, sung \u201cWhere Have all the Flowers Gone\u201d in summer camp and saw him as a distant dot on a stage at anti-war rallies.\u00a0 Our family watched the Smothers Brothers television show religiously, and was vaguely aware of his censorship battle while \u201cwaist deep in the big muddy\u201d. But in my transition from pro-war patriotic teenager, to peacenik, to militant revolutionary, Seeger was too much \u201ckumbaya\u201d and not enough \u201cstreet fightin\u2019 man.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until the mid seventies, as I transitioned into a life in factory jobs and labor activism, that I realized how profound Seeger\u2019s contributions were.\u00a0 I discovered \u201cTalking Union,\u201d a record album of the Seeger-led Almanac Singers, with the labor songs that sitdown strikers and factory-occupying industrial workers sang across America in the 1930s and 1940s.\u00a0They called themselves the Almanacs after\u00a0Lee Hays remarked that “back home in Arkansas farmers had only two books in their houses: the Bible, to guide and prepare them for life in the next world, and the Almanac, to tell them about conditions in this one”.\u00a0I was surprised that I knew many of these songs from the Civil Rights movement, and discovered that they were indeed transported by Seeger and others from Flint and Pittsburg to Selma and Montgomery. Pete believed singing gave people the strength and resolve to maintain courage and dignity in the face of clubs, mace, jail and violence.\u00a0 \u201cLike a tree standing by the water\u201d was relevant wherever your fight.\u00a0 Throughout his life, he brought music to every arena of popular struggle.\u00a0 He believed in the power of music.\u00a0 He also believed deeply in the power of individuals to rise above their daily lives and join in a struggle for the greater good.\u00a0 Quite simply, he believed in two facets of society no longer mentioned in polite company.\u00a0 He believed in \u201cthe masses\u201d and he also believed in \u201cthe working class.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the late seventies, a friend of mine whose father had fought in Spain invited me to a reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.\u00a0 We entered the dark, wooden lodge-like old union hall in the East Bay of San Francisco, to encounter perhaps 50 older, somewhat grizzled men sitting on folding chairs around tables. Sitting casually amongst them was a tall, slim Pete Seeger, plucking a banjo, and chatting amiably with his table of military veterans, those who chose to fight prematurely against fascism.\u00a0 No generals, politicians or Chamber of Commerce people to thank these veterans for their service, just Pete Seeger, who stood later during the evening and roused them with the songs of their militant youth.<\/p>\n

Years later, while on a visit to the squatted community gardens of the \u201cLoisaida\u201d, the remnants of a once working-class and Nuyorican Alphabet City on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I spied the man ahead of me walking with an instrument case.\u00a0 As I approached from behind, I could see it was not a guitar, but a banjo.\u00a0 The man turned into a small pocket park, and shortly ahead was a group of perhaps 25 school children, sitting in the park in a semi-circle.\u00a0 It was Pete Seeger, of course, who serenaded the kids of the neighborhood with children\u2019s songs. I spoke with him after his casual performance, sitting in a wooden gazebo in the park, while he packed up his banjo. \u201cI try to get out here as often as I can, to play for the children, and to visit the neighborhood.\u201d\u00a0 He left unaccompanied, on foot, just an old man and a banjo.<\/p>\n

Years later I found myself beginning research on the politics and history of Country music, which I believe is rightfully the progressive voice of the rural and working poor, not the right wing, cowboy hat, pickup truck listeners of Nashville pop.\u00a0 Preparing to examine the long history of Country music, I was stopped short in the late 1940s-early 1950s. That was pretty much as far back as music called \u201ccountry\u201d went. \u00a0Before that, it was called \u201cfolk\u201d.\u00a0 All the music we would call \u201ccountry\u201d today was listed on the charts as \u201cfolk.\u201d\u00a0 Hank Williams, the standard by which every self-respecting country musician holds themselves \u00a0(What would Hank do?) considered himself a folk musician.\u00a0 Country music only showed up in the midst of the McCarthyite and HUAC assault on popular culture, whose impact is widely known on the film industry, somewhat known on the television and radio industry, but fairly unexamined in the music industry.\u00a0 As Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers and others who would dare sing about the struggles of poor and working people were dragged before HUAC and other un-American investigative committees, the industry read the lyrics on the wall.\u00a0 Their self-preservation stance was: We don\u2019t do \u201cfolk\u201d music, we do \u201ccountry\u201d music: God, guns and beer, not coal miners, sharecroppers and strikers.\u00a0 Almost overnight, the industry charts and lists separated \u201cfolk\u201d from \u201ccountry,\u201d with Nashville as the homeland of country. \u00a0Folk music with suspect lyrics were marginalized and pulled from the air, while the now safe Country music hit the charts. \u00a0So, Country music\u2014that\u2019s Pete\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n

As I spent more time on research into Country music, I kept being dragged back to Folk music, and to the role of Pete Seeger.\u00a0 For the film, I dreamed of interviewing him.\u00a0 But how? After months of asking around, all I could come up with was a PO Box in upstate NY.\u00a0 But he did not know who I was, or anything about my intentions.\u00a0 Why would he speak with the likes of me? One night I wrote him a letter and sent it off to the PO Box, not expecting any response.\u00a0 No response came and I quickly wrote off the possibility. Then, nine months later I had a voicemail.\u00a0 \u201cThis is Pete Seeger, finally got around to opening your letter. Looks like an interesting project.\u00a0 Why don\u2019t you give me a call and we\u2019ll set something up.\u201d\u00a0 Then he left his phone number.\u00a0 I immediately called back and booked a plane for NY.<\/p>\n

Picking up a friend and his daughter for technical support, we drove from Brooklyn up to his house in upstate NY in sub-zero weather, negotiating around dirt roads and frozen landscape.\u00a0 We approached a complex of cabins at the top of a hill, not knowing if we\u2019ve reached our destination or not, when we saw an elderly man with a knit cap splitting wood on the side of the house.\u00a0 Pete, of course.\u00a0 He invited us into his house, where his wife Toshi insisted that Pete \u201cbuild that fire higher, as it\u2019s freezing in here\u201d, so our crew pitched in splitting and carrying wood to get the house warmer.\u00a0 We got to roll camera and talk for hours, about country music, traditional music, revolutionary change.\u00a0 We heard the great stories about writing \u201cUnion Maids\u201d with Woody Guthrie in the back room of a union hall in Oklahoma, about sharing \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d with SNCC and other civil rights activists, about his involvement in organizing a community push to clean up the Hudson, about his optimism for the future.<\/p>\n

It struck me in the months afterwards that Pete Seeger embodied two of the most important characteristics I value in a revolutionary.\u00a0 He truly believed in the power of ordinary people to act for social change on a mass level. Many today give lip service to that idea, but Pete really believed it.\u00a0 And why not?\u00a0 In his lifetime he was witness to rank-and-file workers standing together and occupying their factory, of communities sitting in and standing up to brutally racist attacks, of students who put down their books and took over administration buildings, of young people who blocked trains of munitions heading for war, of thousands of young and old who occupied Wall Street. He\u2019s advocated for \u201cthe little drops that add up to buckets, that become a tidal wave of change.\u201d And he sang for them all. The other valuable attribute I found in him: his political ideas were lived in his daily life. His generosity and respect to individuals was genuine, not rhetorical.\u00a0 While interviewing him, I found there was a major film crew from Europe coming by the next day.\u00a0 Yet, it was clear my little production was as important to him as that production was.\u00a0 He remarked that just a few days before, \u201cthat fellow Bruce Springsteen\u201d was sitting in the same chair, asking him similar questions.\u00a0 I still had the impression that my sitting there was just as important to him. Pete lived the politics he believed in, he built his own house, grew a garden, chopped his own wood, was kind to people, and yet on top of it all still managed to change the world.\u00a0 And in the true tradition of punk rock, \u201che booked his own damn life\u201d although he may have been many months behind!<\/p>\n

In the weeks to come, there will be many eulogies to Pete Seeger.\u00a0 Many will downplay and sanitize who he was, stripping his politics away and leaving a kindly man who played banjo songs about America. Others will question and poison his motives, bringing in the spectre of the Communist Party, USA and when he broke from its Stalinist past.\u00a0 One thing is for sure. A profound link with the long trajectory of revolutionary change in the US has been lost.\u00a0 Someone who understood the links between labor, race, ecology, peace, culture and music.\u00a0 One who understood the importance of bringing masses of people into the struggle, to be respectful, inclusive and inviting. These are all qualities we are in desperate need of today.\u00a0 May his passing inspire the ranks of many new Pete Seegers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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