Handwritten capital letters on Pete Seeger’s five-string banjo spell out the sentence “THIS MACHINE SURROUNDS HATE AND FORCES IT TO SURRENDER.” It was an apt credo for someone who believed in the power of music to inform, persuade, and unite. As Bruce Springsteen told Alec Wilkinson, for a 2006 Profile of the folk singer in the magazine, Seeger “had a real sense of the musician as historical entity—of being a link in the thread of people who sing in others’ voices and carry the tradition forward—and of the songwriter, in the daily history of the place he lived, that songs were tools, and, without sounding too pretentious, righteous implements when connected to historical consciousness.”
When the photo department heard the news, last week, of Seeger’s death, we began to cull the archives for a portrait to publish in the magazine. We chose a 1965 photograph by Bruce Davidson, and, in the process, assembled a collection of previously unpublished images, by Davidson, David Gahr, and Danny Lyon, that compose a rich record of Seeger’s life and legacy. The photographs show the breadth of Seeger’s contribution to American music and society, as a civil-rights activist, entertainer, husband, and father.
