appleseeds

I suppose every folkie in Greater Rens-wijk has a Pete story, and many more than one, since he and his wife Toshi made their home on the river for six decades. You'd have found those stories all over the web last week, along with the complete, lengthy cv typical of your average 94-year-old singing, songwriting, banjo-playing multi-issue activist repeated in every obituary.

Americanistanians who don't know "folk music" (for lack of a better term) from a hole in the ground probably know a lot of Pete's songs by heart, both ones he wrote and ones he just made famous, whether they associate them with him or not. Among those familiar with both his music and him, every generation had its own Pete -- the kids who grew up with the Arlo record, the kids who grew up with Rainbow Quest, the Weavers generation before that, the People's Songs generation before that. (I'm squarely of the Arlo Record generation, but my adult self is firmly of the opinion that the coolest Pete records are really the Songs of the Spanish Civil War sides he cut in the 1940's.)

Pete Seeger's career was so wide ranging, his figure looms so large on the cultural landscape of American music in the 20th century, that it's easy to miss that you're looking at a family portrait. For a discussion of his father, musicologist Charles Seeger, and step-mother, composer Ruth Crawford, see chapter 8 of Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise. If the apples didn't fall far from that tree, the branches were spread wide, and if Pete's mission was at least partly to build bridges between rural musical traditions and the deradicated urban communities that needed them, it could be said that was a mission inherited. But it was also taken up by sundry of his siblings, chiefest among them Mike -- who was drawn south into Appalachia and started The New Lost City Ramblers, without whom that more rarified older sibling of Bluegrass known as Old Time would be very different, much less vibrant affair than it has become -- and Peggy, who went to the UK, formed a marriage and a musical partnership with Ewan MacColl that embraced both traditional song and political activism, and who continues to perform and advocate for both.

Then there's Anthony Seeger, nephew of Pete, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, who served as head of Smithsonian Folkways -- that label and institution -- for a little over a decade, from 1988 to 2002. It was from Dr. Seeger, in a panel discussion at the North American Folk Alliance, that we first understood the academic potential of an online application then in development that would enable people to buy single tracks for a nominal fee. If, per his example, a graduate student was doing thesis work on the song John Henry, they could go to the Smithsonian website and download each of the 24 versions of John Henry in the Smithsonian archive as a sound file, which could then be burned to a CD as supplemental material. It was pretty clear from Dr. Seeger's description that this revolutionary development in sound recording distribution would be an absolute game-changer for Ethnomusicology and Folklore graduate students everywhere. As it turned out, there was some additional ripple effect.

(Dr. Seeger also pointed out that, the advent of the mp3 notwithstanding, the most reliable archival medium for sound recordings was still the 78 rpm record. Perhaps we've come full circle on that one.)

Long story long, this was and remains a clan concerned with how we define past and present, utility and obsolescence, and how we document, maintain and extend cultural traditions organically and inclusively, rather than stuffing and mounting dead things for altars of worship. If in Pete's case that didn't quite reach as far as Dylan plugging in at Newport, well...[shrug] that's a blog post for another time.

A Pete story: At another Folk Alliance. It was the first night of the conference, in the lobby of the Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, and an Irish seisiun had taken over the comfy chairs, led by voluble Irish box player John Whelan and involving members of Manitoba's Scruj MacDuhk and some major UK-based neoCeltic outfit I can't remember the name of right now. A bunch of musos blazing away like that is wont to draw a crowd, and somewhere in medias res I looked around, and standing to the left of me was the phenomenal English songwriter/guitar player Steve Tilston; standing to my right was Pete Seeger. No stars there, just people who knew they could make themselves heard but knew also when to hush up and listen. I thought I must be in the right place.