The other day I asked Pete Seeger if he knew any “peacemaking techniques,” and he said, “Keep a cheerful countenance!” I said, “That certainly is a technique we all might need to practice!” It really does seem to help. Peter has seen some good times, and has been through some very tough times as well, and I am sure that “keeping a cheerful countenance” helped him survive some of the early days of the civil rights movement.
Have you ever had one of those really bad weeks where it seems like the world is just falling apart and everyone is going insane, and you say to yourself, “This is a huge disaster! If I only knew that something good would come out of all this I could handle it!”
We can’t all peek into the future, but we can peer into the past sometimes, and find wonderful encouraging moments in history where the darkest hour was followed by a brilliant dawn. I would like to focus this morning on a particularly stormy week in Pete’s life, August 27th to September 4th, 1949, otherwise known as The Peekskill Riots, to count the silver linings as it were, leading right up to today. If any of you have had a bad week, struggling against the oppression of the monolithic system, I hope that these success stories will help you overcome and keep you movin’ on.
Pete’s seven days in Hell helped launch two or three new songs that started a trend in music that made a difference in the course of history. Of course writing a song and sticking it in a drawer does nothing to help the masses, but if two start singing along, and then two more and two more, it might make a difference.
Of course it eventually took millions of people singing along to make the change become real, but it started with that tiny spark. Many years later Pete wrote “One man’s hands, can’t tear a prison down, two man’s hands can’t tear a prison down, but if two and two and fifty make a million, we’ll see that day come round, we’ll see that day come round!”
I mentioned to Pete recently that I had agreed to lead this tribute to Pete Seeger day at the UUCC, and he said, “There’s too much publicity and too much praise going on. There is a new (Holly wood) movie coming out called “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” and it has already been previewed a few times to reviewers, and it seems like there’s too much praise and hype about Pete Seeger these days.” In fact, Pete forgot to mention that a group is lobbying to have him receive the Nobel Prize next year. Talk about seeing a day come round.
I answered, “Yes, I agree. But I wanted to talk about the lesser-known side of the story. Remember when we went to do that concert in Peekskill on the fortieth anniversary of the Peekskill riots, and you told me all those stories about you and Paul Robeson, and the stories of the early civil rights movement?”
Of course he remembered, and talked my ear off for over an hour! Given the attention African-American Presidential candidate Barak Obama is getting, and the fact that Obama mentioned the march at Selma and the suffering that occurred there, the fire hoses in particular in his Iowa victory speech last week, I thought I’d share some of that conversation with you. I feel it is important that every American learn about what happened at Peekskill, and in Selma, and that similar tactics are still used today to quell free expression.
For those youngsters who don’t remember Paul Robeson, he was a brilliant African American intellectual, and a great and powerful singer who was not afraid to speak up about free speech. His very eloquence was the thing many white racists found so frightening. He was smart and black and was even becoming prosperous doing honest work. And now he was giving a concert with a white man! A white man named Pete Seeger! Robeson was famous for singing Old Man River in the musical and then the 1936 movie Showboat. Pete and I did an instrumental duet version for the World Wildlife Foundation once, but I never made the connection before. It goes,
Old Man River that old man river, he must know something but don’t say nothin’ that old man river he just keeps rolling along. He don’t plant taters, he don’t plant cotton, and thems that plants em, is soon forgotten, but ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along. You an’ me, we sweat and strain, body all achin’ and racked with pain Tote that barge, lift that bail, get a little drunk and ya land in jail I gets weary and sick of trying, I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dying But old man river, he just keeps rollin’ along.
(copyright © 1927 The Welk Group, Harms Music, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Kern)
I’m sure Pete heard Paul Robeson sing that song. That song not only describes the suffering of the black man under slavery which Martin Luther King helped assuage, but also inspires respect for rivers, a sentiment Pete shares, and has spent the last forty years of his life working to clean up the Hudson. I asked him if that song somehow motivated him to help clean up the Hudson. His answer took two words to complete: “Different river!”
In his later years, he wrote a song describing his vision of a “Rainbow Race” echoing an old Algonquin prophecy about America being the cradle of a new race, a mixing of red, black, white, and yellow. And then he wrote (in G)
“Oh had I a golden thread, and a needle, so fine,
I’d weave a magic strand of rainbow design, of rainbow design.”
Those days were still quite far off. All he wanted to do here was harmonize with a black man, and people were getting beaten with billy clubs.
They were called The Peekskill Riots plural for a reason, because in fact there were two of them. In 1999, there was a fiftieth anniversary press conference, and the county executive committee of Westchester brought together 200 people to share insights and recent research about the incident. Pete had told me amazing stories on our pilgrimage there in 1989, the fortieth anniversary, but he apologized for not knowing more. He said, “I went to that conference in 1999, and now I know so much more!”
A man stood up and said that he was a teenager in1949, and that a man was driving around in a truck picking up teenagers, saying “”Let’s get on the truck, get on the truck to go to Ossining to gather stones to throw at those nigger lovers and Commies!”
I have learned from reading Everybody Says Freedom, an amazing book by Pete Seeger and Rob Rieser, that in the 1950’s people who were for civil rights were considered “Communists.” People who were for integration of diners and restaurants, water fountains for both blacks and whites, were assumed to be communists, and were told to “go back to Russia!” which is ironic because there are few if any black people in Russia.
There was in fact a shred of truth to this crazy ploy, in that the Communists supported the workers unions, and the workers unions felt that bosses exploited black-white conflicts in order to control employees and keep them from organizing. So the unions supported integration, as they do now in fact. And some of them in those days were communists, but they were American communists, and I believe that not many of them were working for Moskow.
When I asked how the Peekskill riots began, Pete told me, “There was a man in the Truman administration who came up from Washington, D.C., and all he said was, “You know what to do!” Anyway, that’s all he needed to say, and the KKK and the Peekskill police and the anti-black contingent got busy. Pete said, “That guy and the KKK had recruiters in the police force and vets. The first concert was August 27th. They got together a mob to burn chairs, and planned to beat people, and the police were instructed to do nothing. A group of about twenty civil rights activists jumped on stage, led by a young writer and union organizer named Howard Fast, the author of The Last Frontier, a book about the Cheyenne, also Citizen Tom Paine, Spartacus, and The Immigrants, and later worked on the TV series “How the West Was Won.” He organized them into song, holding hands and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
According to the book Everybody Says Freedom, the original song was “Jesus is my leader, I shall not be moved” and it became a union song in the 1930s. Later, it was sung by many members of King’s group in the 1950s, including Bernard Lafayette. And indeed Howard Fast and the others showed no signs of moving, and the police saw there was going to be resistance and changed their tune, saying, “Everybody go home!” And they did. By the way, Howard Fast was arrested a few months later and spent three months in a county jail. His crime was “being a Communist.” That’ll do it!
Meanwhile, the police had blocked traffic coming into the site, and among those stalled cars was Pete Seeger with his sixty year old mother. They got close to an officer and Pete yelled out, “Officer, can you get me through? I’m supposed to sing tonight at the Peekskill landing concert?” The officer answered, finally, “There won’t be any concert! It’s been cancelled!”
Pete learned later of the shocking details, and the concert was rescheduled for September 4th, 1949. Everyone was sure that no one would try those tricks again.
On the day of September 4th, 1949, the concert took place and it was quite a scene, over 3,000 listeners enjoying the music, while over 2000 Union members (aka “Communists”) circled the field, with arms linked, to ensure a safe concert, with perhaps a thousand KKK and local rough necks outside the union workers trying to break the line. Pete felt safe enough to come with his two babies and two friends. “There was a lot of publicity and the concert went well, and everyone was happy it happened, and that the KKK had been apparently overcome.”
Pete had asked if his new group The Weavers could be with him to open the concert, and the producers said, “No way! Nobody’s heard of the Weavers, but some have heard of Pete Seeger, friend of Woody Guthrie! We want you to sing alone.”
Anti-Communist violence was everywhere, and the Unions were getting a lot of the flack. Peter and his friend and fellow Weaver Lee Hays, both unionists, had just written a new song about a hammer that seemed to tease the Red-baiters, since of course the Russian flag had a hammer and sickle on it, and labor union seals such as that of the Carpenter’s Union often had hammers on them. Pete sang that song for the first time in public, to open that second concert.
The song goes like this, and if you want, you can sing along.
(In A) If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land; I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out warning, I’d hammer out the love between my brothers and my sisters, aaaalll over this land. If I had a bell, I’d ring it in the morning…. If I had a song, I’d sing it in the morning, I’d sing it in the evening, all over this land…. Well I have a hammer, and I have a bell, and I have a song to sing all over this land, it’s the hammer of justice, it’s the bell of freedom, it’s the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.
The song was subtle enough, but if you were a Red-Baiter in 1949 and you already suspected that Pete Seeger was a Communist, and you hear him sing “If I had a hammer, I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out warning…” your ears would perk right up, which I suspect was Lee Hayes’s intention, although Pete says they never talked about it. Red-baiters were listening, saying, “Wait a minute! He’s singing, ‘If I HAD a hammer?” Does that mean he’s NOT a Communist? But if he’s not, why is he singing about a hammer in the first place?” It was sot of like the joke kids told in those days: “You wanna hear a dirty story?” “You mean like the one about the nun and the blind man?” “No! You have a dirty mind! I meant the one about a white horse who fell in the mud!”
In fact it was a great song, and in the end it turns out, in case you were wondering, that the hammer was the hammer of justice, such as the gavel used by the Supreme Court Justices in our Nation’s Capitol to bring the court to order, as American as Apple Pie! And what were you thinking it meant, Joe McCarthy? Okay, well it was clear that the singers of that song thought of America as a white horse that had fallen in some pretty deep mud, but the song wasn’t Communist.
The concert was a tremendous success. Pete told me his recollections of what happened next.
“As our cars were leaving the parking lot, police were there telling all drivers to turn to the right. As they did, they were channeled turn by turn into a narrow back street where there was no way to escape. This time the attackers were highly organized, and were gathered together in at least eight outposts within a mile along that route, and each group had a large pile of stones and several stone throwers, accompanied by angry placards, with racist remarks and threats. One of the phrases often used was “Wake up America, Peekskill did!” a phrase that has been often quoted.”
Their so-called “awakening” was to the rising threat of Communism in America and to nigger-lovers in general. The next morning, the signs were seen in the thousands across the state and the country. They were accompanied by signs saying “Go back to Russia, Commies, Niggerlovers, Kikes!” It turns out, it was a misguided awakening.
They broke the windshield and three windows of Pete Seeger’s car and the windows of each car ahead of and behind them and broke them completely. Not a window was missed, and in those days before safety glass, the passengers were covered with glass shards and splinters, and were bleeding, some badly. Old women and babies were not spared in these attacks and the stones sometimes went right through the windows and hit the passengers on the face and arms.
Pete said there may have been ten or fifteen piles all told. Pete saw a police officer, and said, “Please officer, aren’t you going to do something?” and the officer said, “Move on, move on!” Let me say I think it is ironic that we now have a large and powerful organization called “MOVEON” that champions the rights of the downtrodden, maybe it’s appropriate.
Immediately after the Peekskill Riots, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote a song about it all and recorded it with their new folk group, the Weavers, on their first record (a 78 RPM disc). The Weavers included some members of the Almanac Singers minus Woody Guthrie, who was the real great-granddaddy of the protest singer, by the way. The song was called “Hold The Line;” and though most of you probably never heard it, that defiant little tune which lauded the union workers for keeping the vandals out that night was the granddaddy of the modern day protest song, and it sparked a series of musical events that led directly to the folk movement, the popularity of Bob Dylan (and such narrative ballads as Pawn in the Game, a song about Medgar Evers) and the Woodstock Festival of 1969 almost exactly twenty years later.
HOLD THE LINE
Let me tell you the story of a line that was held, and many brave men and women whose courage we know well, How we held the line at Peekskill on that long September day. We will hold the line forever till the people have their way. The chorus went; “Hole the line, hold the line, as we held the line at Peekskill, we will hold it everywhere; Hold the line! Hold the line! We will hold the line forever till there’s freedom everywhere.” There was music there was singing, people listened everywhere The people they were smiling, so happy to be there While on the road behind us, the fascists waited there Their curses could not drown out the music in the air. The grounds were all surrounded by a band of gallant men, Shoulder to shoulder, no fascist could get in The music of the people was heard for miles around Well guarded by the workers, their courage made us proud. When the music was all over, we started going home We did not know the trouble and the pain that was to come We got into our buses and drove out through the gate And saw the gangster police, their faces filled with hate. Then without any warning the rocks began to come The cops and troopers laughed to see the damage that was done They ran us through a gauntlet to their everylasting shame And the cowards there attacked us, damnation to their name. All across the nation the people heard the tale And marveled at the concert, and knew we had not failed We shed our blood at Peekskill, and suffered many a pain But we beat back the fascists and we’ll beat them back again!
Hays/Seeger 1949
Pete Seeger and Lee Hays turned that horrible incident into not just one song, but three songs, and a revolution. A few days later they wrote Tomorrow Is a Highway.
The score to The Hammer Song ended up on the cover of the first issue of Sing Out Magazine which became the backbone of the folk movement (which I also wrote for and where I met Pete Seeger in 1978) and before the end of that fall of 1949, it appeared on their first album on tiny Charter Records. People were starting to hear of the Weavers.
Pete Seeger once said, “I want to “put a song on people’s lips, instead of just in their ear.” That song was a good example, a great sing-along song, with its elegant simplicity and powerful message. That disc only sold a few copies, but established their reputation forever as a “far left” group. They became famous for their next releases, the more conservative Irene Good Night by Leadbelly, and Tzena Tzena, Tzena, and they were suddenly at the top of the charts. In five months, the Weavers went from a group who weren’t well known enough to sing at the Peekskill riots, to the most popular recording sensation in pop music history until Elvis. But popularity has its costs—The Weavers’ managers said they couldn’t sing The Hammer Song ever again, it was too dangerous. They warned the Weavers they might all get blacklisted. The concern was real; the same week the single came out with Irene Goodnight on the A side and Tzena on the B side, Joe McCarthy gave his famous “Red Scare” radio broadcast from Wheeling, West Virginia, and suddenly Americans were terrified of Joe McCarthy and Communism. Joe and the Weavers were on the radio waves constantly, but The Hammer Song vanished from the Weavers’ programs. Instead it was a hit throughout Europe, and they sang along, in at least four or five languages. Howard Fast, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Ronnie Gilbert were all blacklisted during the 1950s anyway and the Weavers disbanded.
Joe McCarthy failed to be re-elected in Wisconsin and died at an early age, in 1956 but anti-Communism continued unabated. Pete Seeger was brought to court in 1955 and spent a day in prison and was blacklisted as a Communist, even while not singing If I Had A Hammer. In 1958, three young idealistic students who were friends of Pete Seeger’s, took that song and really sped up the tempo and a lot of people started singing along, in coffee houses around New York. Trini Lopez heard those kids sing it and he recorded it, and it was a big hit. The three students kept singing it all over this land and in 1962, they released a whole album on Atlantic Records called If I Had a Hammer, and a single as well which made If I Had A Hammer one of the most frequently played songs in radio history. The young folkies were Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers. There was even a choral folio published by Shawnee Press; chirs in blue robes and white collars were singing that song for which Pete Seeger was Biblically stoned only 13 years earlier. I was alive in 1962 and I remember how often that song was played, like, every five minutes, and in the sixties my sister and I, with the If I Had a Hammer songbook in hand, formed a folk quartet and sang that song all over this land, having no idea about the communist subtext, or the Peekskill Riots. I was only 13 years old in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. died, but I remember it well, and was part of the folk movement that started in Peekskill.
Peekskill was where Pete was most directly involved in the struggle for civil rights for blacks, but a few years later, he and Toshi, his wife, were on the march with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a three day march from Selma to Mongomery, Alabama. The march was accompanied by helicopters so that there would be no potshots, and it went fairly well. Pete sang some songs, but everyone was singing one that he helped to rewrite and arrange, a 1946 Union song, We Shall Overcome, with Guy Carawan, (his wife’s a Unitarian) Zilphia Horton, and Frank Hamilton.
Pete had to go to Miami to sing in a concert and had to leave the march before they reached Montgomery. He had to go to the airport and his feet were covered with mud, and there was no place to wash up. Everyone in the area knew that there was a lot of rain in Selma, and the march had gotten bogged down in mud, so having mud on you meant you were a marcher.
He was concerned of course that some of the seething racism that was bubbling up everywhere was going to be pointed at him once they saw his mud. He was keeping in the lines, and then nature called. He had to go to the bathroom, and he realized that he would be followed, and possibly attacked when he was alone in the bathroom. Toshi said he should wait until he saw several people go into the bathroom, and he waited a while, but finally his big break came, and he made it just in time and was not attacked.
Sitting on the plane, Pete conducted an interview with Look Magazine, however the man in the seat in front of him was really scowling. He was not keeping a cheerful countenance! Finally, when the interview was done, the man turned and said, “You gonna sing for those niggers?”
Keeping his cheerful countenance, Pete answered, “I hope I will sing for everybody!”
The man followed him around, and kept watching him. As Pete got to the end of the boarding ramp the man was standing there fuming. He said, “I gonna knock the shit out of you mister, sooner or later, but I can’t do it right here. If we were alone, and you weren’t with that reporter there…” That was one of those times when a cheerful countenance came in handy for Mr. Seeger.
One fine day in 1955, Pete was sitting in his cabin on the top of a mountain near Beacon, New York, and a man drove up in a big car, and walked fifty feet to Pete’s door. He said, “Are you Pete Seeger?” “Yes I am.” “I am so and so of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. This letter is a summons, you have been called to answer a few questions at Foley Square in New York City about your activities.”
So Pete went to the hearings, and he was asked this famous question, “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Pete, trying to remain polite and civil, said, “I have the right to remain silent.”
The judge said, “You MUST answer the question!”
“What about my first amendment rights? What about the fifth amendment? I have the right to remain silent!”
The judge told him once again to answer the questions. According to “Where have all the flowers gone” Pete offered to sing “Wasn’t That a Time” also by Lee Hayes, as his response, but the judge was not a music lover apparently, and did not accept the invitation.
The judge insisted that he had to answer the questions, and held Pete Seeger in contempt of court, and sentenced to one year in jail, on ten counts. Whatever the counts were wasn’t the point. Pete was in trouble.
Pete spent one day in jail and then bail money was posted, and he walked, but not quite free. He had to fill out legal paperwork each time he tried to leave the State of New York and it became very time consuming. He was constantly being harassed in the press.
Pete Seeger was still in trouble years later in 1961, and so he wrote a letter to the new president, who seemed to be more concerned with human rights. He explained his situation, that his sin was exercising his fifth and first amendment rights. Kennedy never answered his letter, but an interesting thing happened. Kennedy was visiting Ireland and was of course well received. He was introduced to a folk singer of some renown and JFK asked the singer, “Have you ever heard of a man named Pete Seeger?”
The surprised vocalist said, “Yes of course! I know his songs!” And before the man could continue, JFK said, “Good man! Pete Seeger! Good man!” and left. And he never answered that letter. Eventually, Pete, JFK’s “good man,” found himself no longer blacklisted, and charges dropped. As a side note, I later became friends with Bill Haddad, who was Kennedy’s assistant in those days, and we started talking about Pete Seeger. He said, “Is he still a Communist?” I said yes. He said, “Does he still sail the Clearwater, helping to clean up the Hudson?” I said yes, he still does. He said, “Good man, Pete Seeger, good man!”
King marched down the streets of Washington, DC and then gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, and Peter, Paul and Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer,” and Odetta sang Pete’s version of “We Shall Overcome” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with King present. King was killed in 1968, and again it was a dark hour, but one that passed a torch to a new generation of black leaders; Jesse Jackson, Bernard Lafayette, Ossie Davis, Ralph Abernathy, (Al Sharpton too!) and ultimately Barack Obama. Within a year, Pete wrote a song about the darkest hour being just before dawn. It was called Quite Early Morning.
Quite Early Morning goes like this…
Don’t you know its darkest before the dawn and this thought keeps me movin on. If we could heed these early warnings, thie time is now, quite earl morning! If we could heed these early warnings, the time is now quite early morning. Some say humankind won’t long endure But what makes them so doggone sure? I know that you who hear my singing ‘Could make those freedom bells go ringing I know that you who hear my singing Could make those freedom bells go ringing. And so we keep on whilste we live Until we have no, no more to give And when these fingers can strum no longer Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger And when these fingers can strum no longer Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger. So though its darkest before the dawn These thoughts keep us moving on Through all this world of joy and sorrow We still can have singing tomorrows Through all this world of joy and sorrow We still can have singing tomorrows.
That song, and Walking Down Death Row are his two favorite songs among his original works. Speaking of prison, I saw Pete in prison once, and it was once enough, but a great story. We had been talking on the phone about something else during the Tawana Brawley situation, over in Poughkeepsie, and he said, “What do you think we in the community should do about all this?.”
I said, “I think the thing is that we need to show solidarity in our community, with our black friends and neighbors. We need to stand up for ethnic diversity and human rights, and for both sides to be heard.”
The next day I turned on the TV and there was live coverage of Pete Seeger behind bars. I said out loud, “How did that happen?” The bright lights of the cameras were shining through the bars onto his cheerful countenance. It turned out there was a march led by Al Sharpton in the town of Albany, and Pete had turned out to show solidarity with the black community. There was a permit for the march, but it was restricted to a small area. Then Al led the people into the traffic of a small side street, which was outside the domain of the permit, and they rounded up the leaders and put them in jail, including Pete. It was a tactic used during the early civil rights marches to get media attention, one which a lot people had forgotten about. But it did get media attention. Pete told me those five days in a county jail were the only vacation he got that year, and he caught up on his rest. He said that although Al Sharpton comes across on TV as a blowhard, in real life, he was a good listener and friend, and Pete noticed that the young black men would gather around him in “the yard” at recreation time to ask him for advice and to tell him their stories. They trusted him.
This is the thing about civil disobedience. You break the law for any reason and you go to jail. And even if you don’t intend to break a law as part of your protest, sometimes the other team can make it seem like you did. As CT Vivian would say, “It goes with the territory!”
In fact, in 1963 at the height of the violence in the south towards blacks and towards white marchers, when so many of them were being killed and wounded while marching, no marchers were given permits, and the police used that as the basis for stopping the marches. The police captain asked Dick Gregory “Do you have a parade permit here?” knowing the marchers did not, and Dick Gregory answered, “No.” “No, what?” the Captain asked, reminding Gregory he was supposed to say “no, sir.” Gregory answered, “No, no, a thousand times no.” And was arrested. (Everybody Says Freedom p. 113)
One of the things that made civil rights organizer Medgar Evers’ death famous was that the Jackson, Mississippi police had to give his family a “Parade permit,” to carry his casket to the funeral, and it turned out that was the only march permit authorized, so over 2000 people marched behind that casket if you can imagine, people of every race and color. In fact, the ones who were unable to enter the small church turned left and started marching towards the capitol, and were met with considerable force and many ended up in prison. So there is a lot of history behind the permit laws.
And the bright lights of the news cameras shone in through the bars and they asked Pete what the heck he was doing in there. And he said, “I was marching to show solidarity with our black friends and neighbors, and that seems to me like a good thing!”
And he said it with that cheerful countenance that never ceases to amaze me and the right message finally got on TV, in spite of difficult circumstances. It was a message that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life trying to tell us.
In the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine it says, “During the dawning years of the urban folk revival, 1957 to 1962 Folkways Records released Seegers five record series America’s favorite ballads which encouraged a new generation to sing along to classic 19th century tunes. Now Folkways has reissued the album, including previously unreleased material.” Smithsonian Magazine January issue, 2008. Smithsonian,com/jukebox
I asked Pete what his favorite songs were, (of the ones he’d written) and which ones he would want us to sing here today. He said, “Well if I were to have my pick of which songs would be sung in say, 400 years, and hopefully none of them (dramatic pause) since of course they’d have written better ones by then….I’d choose Quite Early Morning, and Walking Down Death Row.”
Pete is a modest guy, so I’ll speak up for his songwriting. He wrote the Goofing Off Suite which was the theme song for the movie Raising Arizona. He wrote C for Conscription, he wrote 66 Highway Blues with Woody Guthrie, wrote Talking Union with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, We Shall Overcome with Guy Carawan, Zilphia Horton, and Frank Hamilton, based on a 1946 Union song; he contributed to The Foolish Frog written in part by his father Charles Seeger, He wrote the story of Abiyoyo, based on the South African lullaby; he co-wrote Kisses Sweeter Than Wine with the Weavers based on an Irish tune taught him by Huddie Ledbetter. In 1958 he wrote one of my favorite songs, late made famous by Judy Collins on Whales and Nightengales “Oh, Had I a Golden Thread;” He wrote My Rainbow Race, he wrote One Man’s Hands (with Staughton Lynd) he arranged Wimoweh with the Weavers based on a song by Solomon Linda (wimuweh) ; wrote the music to Sacco’s Letter to his Son as sang by Magpie; wrote the music for The Bells of Rhymney based on words by Idris Davies, which I heard on Folkways Records in 1959; He arranged the popular version of Guantanamera with Julian Orbon and Hector Angulo, Guantanamera, Guajira Guantanamera…
He did not write This Land is Your Land, which was written entirely by Woody Guthrie, but he certainly popularized it; one Native American added the verse This land is our land, but it once was my land, Before we sold you Manhattan Island, you pushed my nation to the reservation, This land was stole by you from me; He did write Bring Em Home (If you love your Uncle Sam bring em home bring em home, Support our boys in Vietnam, bring em home bring em home) he did write Big Muddy which he performed for seven million viewers on The Smothers Brothers Show, which some say got them cancelled; he did write Where Have All the Flowers Gone, which helped launch both Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio; he did write Letter to Eve, made famous by the folk duo Magpie; he adapted Turn Turn Turn from Ecclesiastes and created the lovely melody we all know, and made famous by the Byrds, which Pete says is similar to Bells of Rhymney, written a year earlier; He did write Old Devil Time for the movie Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon; He did write Walking Down Death Row, and then Quite Early Morning. There are many more Pete Seeger songs I could mention, but there are among my favorites and hope they are all remembered 400 years from now, no matter what Pete says.