by Studs Terkel
A nationwide festival of tributes to the balladeer and songleader of us all, Pete Seeger, will be held on and around
his 86th birthday, on May 3 (for information see www.seegerfest.com). We asked Studs Terkel, who turns 93 on May
16 (hey, Happy Birthday, Studs!), to reminisce about his young friend. As Pete and The Weavers used to sing:
"Tzena, Tzena, join the celebration./There'll be people there from every nation./Dawn will find us dancing in the
sunlight,/Dancing in the village square.
Some years ago, DownBeat, the jazz journal, referred to Pete Seeger as "America's tuning fork." Along with Woody
Guthrie, Leadbelly and Alan Lomax, he was the balladeer who stirred up the American folk-song revival in the late
1940s and early 1950s. His influence among the young was so pervasive that it brought forth this thought: When you
see a kid with Adam's apple wildly bobbing and banjo held chest-high, you know that Pete Seeger, like Kilroy, was
there.
Pete and his wife, Toshi, live in a house he built in Beacon, New York, an upstate town along the Hudson River. His
later years have been devoted to the Clearwater, as a schooner and an idea--cleaning up the Hudson River, which
had through the years become polluted, "dangerous to all living things." He was 82 when he started the river project.
It is hard to think of Pete Seeger as an elderly gaffer, because the boy in him, the light, remains undimmed. It was
sixty-five years ago I first ran into him. He and three of his colleagues, calling themselves the Almanac Singers, were
on a cross-country jalopy tour singing and creating songs for the industrial unions aborning. The CIO had begun, and
how could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition, like the Hutchinsons, a family of
singing abolitionists during the Civil War. Some of the most heartbreaking music of that fratricidal conflict was theirs.
That night when I first encountered the four wandering minstrels was a cold Chicago beauty. At 2 in the morning, my
wife heard the doorbell ring. I was away rehearsing the first play in which I had ever appeared. It was Waiting for
Lefty, of course. There, at the door, were the four of them. The first was a bantam--freckled, red-haired and elfin. He
handed my wife a note saying: "These are good fellas. Put them up for the night." Putting them up was a rough
assignment, even for a Depression-era social worker, what with the only spare bunk being a Murphy bed that sprang
from the wall. Freckles announced himself as Woody Guthrie. The second was an Ozark mountain man named Lee
Hayes. The third was a writer, Millard Lampell. The fourth, somewhat diffident, more in the background, was a
slim-jim of 20 or so, fretting around with his banjo. He was Pete Seeger.
Happy Birthday Petedp
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