I have no love of communism but as my father was one himself, I make distinctions between those who turned towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. It was an evil but within it all there is a softness I have always felt towards Pete Seeger, whom I first heard perform at my summer camp in 1955 because he was at the time unable to perform anywhere else in North America. And from that moment, I loved his voice, his music and the banjo, which I still play, sort of. And I have also given my grandchildren a banjo of their own so that when they turn 100 and are asked where did you get that banjo, they can say it was given to them by their grandfather on the day they were born.

This post is dated May 3, 2019: Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger.

Pete provided much of the soundtrack for the political awakening of several generations of activists. The songs he wrote, including the antiwar tunes, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and those he has popularized, including “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome,” have been recorded by hundreds of artists in many languages and have become global anthems for people fighting for freedom. He introduced Americans to songs from other cultures, like “Wimoweh” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) from South Africa, “Tzena, Tzena” from Israel (which reached number two on the pop charts), and “Guantanamera” from Cuba, inspiring what is now called “world music.”

Thanks to Seeger’s influence, protest songs — via folk, rock, blues, and soul genres — became popular and even commercially successful. He recorded over eighty albums — of children’s songs, labor, civil rights, and antiwar songs, traditional American folk songs, international songs, and Christmas songs. Among performers around the globe, Seeger became a symbol of a principled artist deeply engaged in the world.

Even if I do not in any way share his politics, I love his music which has deep deep meaning to me. What more is there to say than that? Well, perhaps there is this: the vile idiots on whose website this post was found are themselves a menace and evil to the core. If you are looking for a fight, it is these people you should take on and not the memory of one of the greatest folk singers who has ever lived. It would be as idiotic as refusing to play God Bless America sung by Kate Smith because of something she had said or done back in the 1930s.

I own only two instruments, one is a banjo and the other a concertina. The reason I own them is because when I was very young, in the mid-1950s, I was sent to a summer camp for the children of comrades in the movement. And because of the blacklist, there were limited opportunities for people with a communist history, so two musicians came up to this southern Ontario campsite to entertain the children, one who played the concertina whose name I no longer remember; the other was Pete Seeger. Not many definitive moments in a child’s life that are remembered more than half a century later, but that concert was one. And so, very badly, I play the banjo, and it was from Pete Seeger’s instructional manual I learned.

I had one other Pete Seeger moment. I was staying with my aunt in Fishkill, NY, sometime during the 1960s, and she mentioned that Pete Seeger was in their local phone book, living in a place called Dutch’s Junction. So I phoned over to invite him to tea and goodness gracious, he answered the phone himself and it was Pete Seeger who has the most distinctive voice in all of folk music on the other end. He thanked me for the offer but didn’t come round but an indelible memory.

Growing up, every single one of my parents’ friends was in the movement. All were Stalinists, my parents included, which is hard to reconcile about people I loved as much as I did. And they taught me a lot, gave me my interest in politics but, as I see it, fortunately taught me enough to break with every political tradition they held dear.

Life is complex. Pete Seeger has died at 94 and I mourn his passing into the great beyond.