I’ve been listening to Pete Seeger all day, because it seems disrespectful not to. That’s been my stance toward him for decades: respect. When I have gone back to his records, it’s been more with admiration than with pleasure, at least at first. His music—which kept folk traditions alive, which delivered messages about the limits and pitfalls of contemporary society, which spanned the decades without quite taking into account the new developments all around it—seemed like something that should not be trifled with, and that aura made the music a little foreboding, even when Seeger was performing old railroad songs or reviving Irish reels or making charming records for children. His affability couldn’t conceal that he was talking about serious business.
This isn’t to say that Seeger wasn’t an entertainer, or that he didn’t care about his audience’s experience. Rather, his music carried a heavy load, and there have been times in my life (in my day, even) when this wasn’t what I wanted when I put on a song. Back in the late seventies, I saw Seeger in concert, in Miami. Arlo Guthrie was also performing—it was similar to the concerts collected on the 1981 album “Precious Friend”—and I sat in the audience and felt alternately restless and resentful. In my defense, I was ten years old, but it bothered me that he insisted on having the audience sing along with him, that some of the songs felt more like agitprop than art, that the aggressive anti-Reagan jokes (mostly from Guthrie, to be fair) seemed to please the largely self-selected crowd. I’m not sure where I would rather have been: at an Elton John concert, probably, or at home, listening to “Songs in the Key of Life” or watching Tony Clifton on “The Midnight Special.” My parents had taken me to the show, of course, and they were big on making sure that I realized that the concert was an important event, with two important musical thinkers. That was indisputably true, even then. I just wasn’t that interested in what they were thinking.
But the concert stuck, or at least a piece of it did. As I got older and bought my own records, I started to notice that some Pete Seeger was showing up alongside the Aretha Franklin and Hall & Oates, the Replacements and Prince and Guns N’ Roses and Run-D.M.C. and Sonny Rollins and Laura Nyro. Some of the Seeger songs were on LP, because that was the only way you could get them; some were part of the early-nineties Smithsonian Folkways CD rereleases; and some were cassette copies I made from the LPs or CDs of other people. I had “American Folk Songs for Children,” which included Seeger’s renditions of classroom sing-alongs like “Jimmie Crack Corn,” “This Old Man,” and “Frog Went A-Courting’ ”; “American Industrial Ballads,” which was both an explanation of and damning indictment of working conditions; and “The Bitter and the Sweet,” a live set that included the first recording of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” later made famous by the Byrds. One of my favorites was “Champlain Valley Songs,” a collection of folk songs from the Northeast, whose ancient mystery was both clarified and undermined by Seeger’s clear presentation. The songs had a calming effect, but then they started you thinking: who was this long-gone Captain Charles Stuart? Why didn’t Young Charlotte just keep herself warm during the ride with her mother? The bleakness and antiquity were offset by several lovely instrumentals, such as “Roslyn Castle.”
But “Champlain Valley Songs” was a museum piece, a way of preserving a lost culture, and albums like it allowed people to see Seeger as a museum piece, too. His view of the folk tradition was far more active, even aggressive. He thought that the world was full of terrible problems, and that songwriters had the opportunity and the responsibility to speak out against them: not just decades later but as they were happening.
In the late sixties, during a period when Seeger was signed to Columbia Records, he grew tired of the Vietnam War, then furious, and he responded by writing a song about a group of soldiers pushed forward to their death by an overly enthusiastic officer. The song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” was set during the Second World War, but it was clearly about Vietnam. Columbia Records, uninterested in releasing a controversial record, let it molder, but the Smothers Brothers contacted Seeger and booked him as a guest on their show. He performed four songs from different American wars—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the First World War, and then “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”—but the Vietnam content was evident to CBS’s censors, and they cut it out of the show. After the ensuing flap, the Smothers Brothers had Seeger back to sing the song again:
I’m always struck by the starkness of the presentation, which isolates the lyrics and, in turn, their central message: that an unquestioning devotion to authority will get you killed. Much of the controversy centered on the song’s refrain, “The big fool says to press on,” which was Seeger’s condemnation of the way that President Johnson (and the government in general) kept getting the United States deeper and deeper into the war. But, for me, the central moment of the song comes midway through, when the captain has mired his men in the Big Muddy.
The sergeant has his eyes open. He’s the one who, a verse earlier, challenged the captain about entering the Big Muddy in the first place. (“With all this equipment,” he says, “no man will be able to swim.”) But this narrow escape is no escape at all: as Seeger explains, this rescue was specific to one individual sergeant. The broader country didn’t make it out, but rather plunged back in.
The song remains relevant forty-five years later, with one war that ended recently and another that continues. But its message matters most, perhaps, if carried beyond the bounds of military engagement, where it can be seen as a metaphor for all the ways in which authority leaves people blinkered and cowed. Seeger’s life, which ended this week after ninety-four years, contained many plots and subplots: his apprenticeship to Alan Lomax, his folk stardom with the Weavers, his banjo innovations, his sometimes uneasy relationship with his rock-and-roll heirs. One of the stories that gets told most often is about his membership in the Communist Party, early in his life, which left him vulnerable to the blacklist in the early fifties. By then, Seeger had drifted away from the official party line, but he remained what obituaries like to call a “small-c communist,” meaning that he believed in the power of the people over the power of those with power over the people. In 2011, he marched with the Occupy movement, and a few days later commented on the similarities between contemporary protests and the social activism of the sixties. “Be wary of great leaders,” he said. “Hope that there are many, many small leaders.”
That’s a nice sentiment, of course, but it’s incomplete without songs like “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which demonstrate what happens when the opposite occurs: when there are leaders pointing the wrong way and people who can’t (or sometimes don’t even want to) think for themselves.
Photograph by Stephen Northup/The Washington Post/Getty.
