Obama praises Stalinist and folk singer Pete Seeger
“Over the years, Pete used his voice — and his hammer — to strike blows for worker’s rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation,” said Obama in a statement released Tuesday. “And he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger.”
How America’s most successful Communist claimed folk music for the Left.
That Pete Seeger, who died yesterday at age 94, is being hailed as a sort of American hero — re-discoverer and popularizer of traditional folk music, champion of anti-war, civil-rights, and environmental causes — is a testament to just how profoundly to the left popular culture shifted over the course of his lifetime. For there can be no doubt that Seeger, a one-time member of the Communist Party, campaigner for Henry Wallace, unwilling witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, saw himself as a man of the Left, though he might have preferred being described in terms such as “champion for social change.” It is pointless, though, to seek, at this point, to impeach his credibility or minimize the extent of his influence on the basis of such affiliations. Those who might disagree with Seeger on all sorts of issues, owe him, more than anything, grudging admiration. The popular culture that honored him in life — with a lifetime-achievement Grammy Award and the National Medal for the Arts — did so in no small part because Pete Seeger himself did as much as anyone to move it to the left. I’ve referred to him as “America’s Most Successful Communist” — and, if he was that, it was because of his profound impact on popular music, especially through his songwriting.
To understand Seeger’s impact, it makes sense to look back to March 1962 — when a clean-cut group called the Kingston Trio released what would become a No. 1 hit, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” written by Pete Seeger. Adapted from a Ukrainian folk song quoted by Soviet writer Mikhail Sholokhov in his novelAnd Quiet Flows the Don, it was a lament about the tragedy of war and its victims — tuneful, subtle, and evocative. And it was brilliant anti–Cold War propaganda: “When will they ever learn?” that war is not worth its costs. Its success was a watershed: It marked the beginning of the introduction of political themes and overt social causes into American pop music — a process that would be continued by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and countless others to the point that now we take it for granted.
.............
Read more: www.nationalreview.com
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Pete Seeger dead at 94
by Rick Moran
Seeger referred to himself as a "communist with a small 'c'."
...
When you're a young, pre-teen boy, you don't give much thought to the politics of a song. You only know that a particular song is fun to sing and the words move you. My memories of Seeger will always be of more traditional folk songs like "This Land is Your Land," "Greenland Whale Fisheries," "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," and, a family favorite, "We are Marching to Pretoria." It didn't matter to me that a Communist was singing these songs. What mattered is that they were good songs and that you were singing them with your family.
Thousands of songs, millions of words, they will live on teaching us the power of music to change the world. As Seeger said, ""The key to the future of the world is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known."
A fine epithet for a musical giant.
Thomas Lifson responds:
Sorry, but he was an unrepentant communist. He was part of a movement that saw art as a servant of politics, so that is hopw his art must be judged. I would no more honor or mourn Seeger than I would an unrepentant "small 'n' Nazi."
Read more: www.americanthinker.com
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
PETE SEEGER:
THE COMMUNIST CONSUMERS LOVED
by Lauren Weiner
During the 1950s and 1960s, when Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds coaxed classrooms full of kids to join them in the singing of folk songs, no one paid much attention, not even those who, in the middle of the Cold War, saw America’s “singing left” as a threat to the republic. “They never thought there would be a problem with Pete Seeger singing to six-year-olds,” Seeger’s biographer, David King Dunaway, wrote. But considering the baby boom those six-year-olds turned out to be, Dunaway’s later observation made sense: What was in the offing was “an American folk music revival that I think we have to give the FBI credit for helping to establish.”
The law of unintended consequences gave a quirky twist to the relation between the Old and New Left and, in the process, lent peculiar accents to America’s musical and political culture that we can’t seem to get rid of even today. The folk revival, “a fad sandwiched between the beatniks and the hippies,” may have been brief, but it was also the baby boomers’ coming of age, and its echoes have been lasting. Bruce Springsteen made a splash in 2006 with his Seeger Sessions. Ry Cooder paid homage to Woody Guthrie in the 2007 release My Name Is Buddy. Sheryl Crow told Billboard magazine that her song, “Shine Over Babylon,” is “very environmentally conscious, in the tradition of Bob Dylan.”
It’s curious how much the postwar children of prosperity enjoyed hearkening back to hard times. Dylan’s early compositions were full of Dust Bowl references. Odetta was on television rendering the sounds of the chain gang while bathed in a glamorous cabaret spotlight. The Gordon Lightfoot song “Early Morning Rain” (1964) complained that “you can’t jump a jet plane” as easily as you hopped a freight train back in the good old, bad old days. “Green, Green,” Barry McGuire’s 1963 top ten hit, had the perky coeds of the New Christy Minstrels belting out the plea of the Great Depression: “Buddy, can you spare me a dime?”
The Appalachian murder ballads, convict songs, and Dust Bowl laments of the 1960s did prompt some debate about authenticity, but the rescuers of old-time music cheerfully exposed themselves to the charge of dilettantism. “Some of my favorite songs I’ve learned from camp counselors,” admitted Pete Seeger. Dave Van Ronk—whose disarming memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, was published posthumously in 2005—recounts that many years after he had helped popularize “House of the Rising Sun,” he actually went to New Orleans, only to learn that the original establishment was not a bordello, as he had supposed, but a women’s prison. Another staple of Van Ronk’s repertoire, “Candy Man,” had been taught to him by a master of ragtime guitar finger-picking, the Reverend Gary Davis. The straight-laced Davis was loath to join him on “Candy Man” before an audience—eventually Van Ronk caught on that the song he’d been performing was about a pimp.
Superficiality did not hinder the music. It sold like hotcakes (at least until the Beatles arrived and made rock ’n’ roll king), and the secondhand quality escaped those of us working up third-hand versions, strumming along with our phonograph records. From my own spot in the Great American Middle—a subdivision of ranch houses newly erected on flat farmland west of Chicago—I couldn’t see the pretense in “Tom Dooley,” as the preppy-looking Kingston Trio impersonated a poor Confederate soldier who hung down his head and cried. Struggling to play and sing—my elders on their Silvertone guitars from Sears, and I on my baritone ukulele to accommodate the small hands of an eight-year-old—we were disinclined to delve into questions of provenance.
....................
Read more: www.firstthings.com
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Pete Seeger, Commie-Lover Till The End
Oh I realize this speaks well for our 1st amendment rights. But it also brings to mind a snicker by former Brazilian President Janio Quadros circa 1961: “Those Americans are much like women. They have a masochistic streak. The more you slap them around, the more you get out of them.”
That singer, by the way, is the recently-deceased leftish troubadour Pete Seeger. In their tribute the Washington Post hailed him as “America’s best-loved commie.” Author and expert on commie fellow-travelers Ron Radosh writes that (at his prodding in 2007) Seeger finally repented for his infamous Stalin-philia, even composing a song to that effect titled “Big Joe Blues.” The song’s Big Joe was “Uncle” Joe Stalin and the song made it clear that Joe Stalin –rather than Joe McCarthy—had been the real threat to freedom in the 50’s. Alas, Seeger never actually released the song for airplay and only sang it privately to friends. So Seeger’s reputation remained pristine among most commie fellow-travelers.
Unsurprisingly, the Castro regime’s captive (literally!) media contributed heavily to the Seeger tributes and eulogies this week. After all, in 1999 Pete Seeger hadeagerly visited Cuba to proudly accept the Castro regime’s highest cultural honor, the Medal of the Order Felix Varela, in honor of Seeger’s “humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism.”
In brief: famous peacenik Pete Seeger proudly visited the Stalinist dictator who brought the world closest to nuclear war of any in history to eagerly accept an award “against racism” from the Stalinist/Apartheid regime that jailed and tortured the most black political prisoners in modern history!
An article in Castro’s eunuch media by the regime’s eunuch cultural ambassador ( singer Silvio Rodriguez who often met with Pete Seeger) relates how three years ago during a meeting in New York Seeger lamented to Rodriguez that: “conditions in Latin America had not improved because of the U.S. (Imperialism, presumably.) But that this would change in the next 15 years.”
So here he was at age 91: still blaming the U.S. and (presumably) capitalism for the woes of the Third World as brought about by its own thieves, frauds and scoundrels.
Shortly after his meeting with Rodriguez, Pete Seeger joined ranks with several U.S. celebrities (Danny Glover, Martin Sheen, Oliver Stone, Glover, Susan Sarandon, among many others) to boost one of the Castro regime’s most vital campaigns by signing a letter to “Free The Cuban Five.”
...............................
Read more: www.frontpagemag.com
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario