Public Employee Press

Review
Pete Seeger's music was part of people's struggles

Step by step the longest march,
Can be won, can be won,
And by union, what we will, can be accomplished still.
Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.

These words from a mineworkers union constitution that Pete Seeger put to an old Irish tune - adapting and popularizing as he did with many others, including "We Shall Overcome" - reflect his lifelong theme of change through collective action.

A concert with Pete was a lesson on the history of the songs and the struggles they were part of, and he always inspired audiences to sing along at union and civil rights rallies and even at august Carnegie Hall.

Seeger died in January, but his story lives in the compelling Public Broadcasting Service DVD, "Pete Seeger/The Power of Song." The video portrays him riding the rails with Woody Guthrie to perform for strikers in the 1930s, with Paul Robeson in the 1940s, in the civil rights and peace movements of the '60s and '70s, and recently in the environmental movement to save the Hudson River.

Always thinking globally and organizing locally, he sang for people challenging racism, attacks on working families and unions, war and environmental destruction. He rose to fame in the late 1940s with the Weavers, only to be blacklisted in the 1950s' Red Scare. But he kept organizing through his songs and helped spark the folk music revival and the singer-songwriters who contributed to the mass movements of the 1960s. Seeger led "This Land Is Your Land" at President Barack Obama's inauguration and at 91 marched for the 99 percent with the young activists of Occupy Wall Street.

Seeger wrote two books with Bob Reiser, "Everybody Sings Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures" and "Carry It On" (labor songs). Like Robeson, he drew on the folk traditions of diverse cultures and passed them on to new generations of activists and performers like the Grammy-award-winning African American group Sweet Honey in the Rock and Bruce Springsteen.

The Ed Fund library in Room 211 at DC 37 has these books and the DVDs and numerous CDs of songs sung by Pete and his followers, many written by him such as the anti-war songs "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" You can check the library's catalog at www.dc37library.org

— Ken Nash
Education Fund Library