The people's Pete

Pete Seeger, "Pete"
(Living Music)

By SAM HURWITT

it's ironic that Pete Seeger is perhaps best known today for his renditions of children's folk songs, because a few decades ago he was the last person Joe and Jane Public would want influencing the minds of their brood. The gentle folk singer was widely denounced as a Communist during the right-wing hysteria that swept the land in the '50s (not to be confused with the right-wing hysteria sweeping the land in the '90s). As part of the popular folk group the Weavers, Seeger was blacklisted for over 15 years for his political beliefs. In 1950, when his song "If I Had a Hammer" was published in "Sing Out!," the leftist folk music magazine founded by Seeger and Woody Guthrie, one reader wrote in, "Cancel my subscription, all you left out of that song was the sickle."

As a red diaper baby, I've always had a soft spot in my head for ol' Pete. (Though I suppose all babies have a soft spot in their heads.) My grandmother helped plan the 1949 Peekskill, New York concert (in which Seeger opened for the great singer and civil rights leader Paul Robeson) that ended with vigilantes and police beating and stoning the participants and injuring over 200 people. Though Seeger was banned from TV for 16 years because of his political activism, by the time I was glued to the tube he was guesting on "Sesame Street" every now and again, crooning the golden rule to a pygmy audience that had not yet learned to hate.

So it was a special treat to see the 77-year-old activist folkie's grinning mug splashed in heroic Soviet Realist style across the cover of his new CD, "Pete," produced by Grammy-hoarding new-age dude Paul Winter. "Pete," Seeger's first studio album in 17 years, is blessed with new recordings of many of his most beloved songs, augmented by the performer's own copious and inspirational liner notes detailing the genesis of each number and what it means to him.

It seems silly to be a purist about the work of an artist whose oeuvre has always been doggedly inclusive and laissez-faire, but part of Seeger's appeal has always been the elegant simplicity of his style -- just a warm voice and the plunking of a banjo. So, having a 30-member choral mob following him around is intrusive as all get-out. The good-natured twitterings of the Connecticut chorus Gaudeamus sully half of the tracks on the album, most egregiously "Well May the World Go" and "Russian Song/Ode to Joy" (singing the didactic new lyrics Don West tacked onto the Beethoven riff Seeger's been plunking for 50 years or so). Their whispering chorus is indispensable on "Garbage," Bill Steele's dark ode to all forms of pollution (with a Marxist verse tossed in by Seeger), but, by and large, they seem too darn churchy to be singin' 'bout the workin' man.

But once you get past this elephantine stumbling block, "Pete" yields some beautiful tracks. The most heart-rending is Seeger's rendition of "How Can I Keep From Singing," a jubilant 19th-century hymn with a stirring third verse penned by Doris Plenn during the Red Scare of the '50s ("When tyrants tremble sick with fear/And hear their death knell ringing -- When friends rejoice both far and near/How can I keep from singing?"). "In the Evening," Leroy Carr's classic blues number, is graced with intimate campfire instrumentation and euphonious back-up vocals by the Union Baptist Church Singers. On "Sailing Down My Golden River," a lovely original tune that has nothing whatsoever to do with water sports, Seeger accompanies himself on 12-string guitar, and it couldn't be more cozy, or more tender.

Though Seeger is old enough to remember days spent with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, he never seems to age. His strumming and picking is as deft as ever, and he still has that gentle, amiable voice that makes any cause he eulogizes seem so reasonable and right. It's hard to imagine that anyone ever thought ill of the man.

"The artist in ancient times inspired, entertained, educated his fellow citizens," Seeger writes in the liner notes. "Modern artists have an additional responsibility -- to encourage others to be artists. Why? Because technology is going to destroy the human soul unless we realize that each of us must in some way be a creator as well as a spectator or consumer.... Make your own music, write your own books, if you would keep your soul." That, my friends, is commie talk if I ever heard it.

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Sam Hurwitt reviewed the latest releases from Lou Reed and Iggy Pop for Salon. His work has also appeared in the San Francisco Examiner and the East Bay Express. He lives in Berkeley, California.