Pete Seeger Gazing up into the Trees

In 2005, the Clearwater Festival went on in spite of a cold, driving rain. My band, Old Crow Medicine Show, played our set, then cheered from the side stage while Pete Seeger sang with a chorus of schoolchildren. Later that day, I joined in with Pete’s grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, and his rock band. Backstage, Pete crunched on an apple and looked up at the dripping trees, seemingly unaware of the clash of drums and guitars. While Tao and I sang “Maggie’s Farm,” I kept looking back to see how Pete liked it, but he just went on munching that apple and gazing up into the trees.

That evening, the folklorist John Cohen stopped me on the path. He told me it was the forty-year anniversary of Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, and that the tune on that occasion had been “Maggie’s Farm.” John told me the story of how his first child had been born just a few days before the festival, and how Pete opened the concert by playing a tape recording of the newborn’s very first cry, a howling bellow that echoed across the festival grounds. Then John said something like, “Everybody remembers the story of Pete and the axe, but when I think about Newport 1965, I just remember Pete playing that tape of my daughter crying.”

To me, Pete Seeger’s legacy is perfectly expressed in that recorded howl. For Pete, a baby’s cry was as much of a call to social activism as any song. From Harvard to hobo, sit-ins to concert halls, Pete Seeger’s plan was simple: to lead a rallying cry at the front lines of justice, freedom, and peace, and to forge a new link in the chain, stronger than the last, for the next generation of folksingers. How best to begin this monumental task? Simply by teaching children to sing old folk songs.

Toward the end of that rainswept night in New York, my band and I finally got to greet Pete. He was standing outside his dressing-room trailer with that same skyward gaze. “Hiya, Pete,” I said. “We learned to play the banjo thanks to you.” He smiled proudly and looked us over and said something I’ve thought of many times since. “Let me tell you something, boys,” he said. “In Persia I once heard it told, ‘If you have your health, give yourself a one. If you have a family, put a zero behind it. If you have land, add another zero. If you have influence, add yet another zero. But take away your health and what have you got?’ Boys, keep your health!”

Today’s folk scene is as healthy as it’s been since the nineteen-sixties. We young pickers revive the hootenanny spirit every night onstage. It’s as clear to me as the waters of the mighty Hudson that the way to continue Pete Seeger’s legacy is as simple as teaching your children and your children’s children to sing an old song. Thinking back, I know now that what Pete saw up in the trees that rainy day on the river was a new crop bursting forth from all the seeds he’d sown, crying out to be heard.

Photograph by Harvey L. Silver/Corbis.