Seeger Pete

Pete Seeger is a Musicien born with New York in 1919, pioneer of the music Folk with Woody Guthrie. It took part during the Fifties in a weekly Hootenanny.

Biography

Pete Seeger was born in 1919, in a family of musicologists of left. By his two parents, it belongs to very old American families, downward of the puritans of Mayflower. At twenty years, it stops its studies of journalism to devote itself to its passion for the music and the folksong of which it will be one of the main actors.

In 1940, via Alan Lomax, with which it works with the Library of the Congress, it meets the large wandering entertainer, poet and singer Woody Guthrie, true icon of the song protester. Together, they found the " Almanac Singers" , group with variable geometry which sings initially militant songs for the trade unions of the CIO, the pacifist songs, then, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the songs for the entry in war of the United States.

In 1950, with Lee Beam, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, it founds the " group; The Weavers" , which will play a determining role in the blossoming of the current of the " Folksong" protester. Their collaboration with Gordon Jenkins brings a number 1 to them to the United States during 13 weeks to the autumn 1950 thanks to the title Goodnight Irene .

Pete Seeger leaves then the group and carries out many rounds in all the country, only with its banjo, and records hundreds of titles, the most imposing whole of folksongs and songs protesters ever recorded in the United States.

During the blossoming of the " generation; Folk" in the Sixties, it has the appearance of large a groin and reference for all the young artists who emergent at that time, like Joan Baez or Bob Dylan.

Worried at the time of the " drive out with the sorcières" for its engagement in the American Communist party, of which he is member since 1940, he refuses to testify, informant whom his freedom of expression and of opinion is guaranteed by the first amendment of the American constitution. This defense is worth to him ten cumulative judgments at one year of prison each one for insult with the congress. But the sorrow is cancelled in call, and will never be carried out.

Militant of the civic rights, which is worth the friendship of Martin Luther King Jr to him., then against the war of Vietnam, it since always is also invested in the combat environmentalists.

He is the author with Lee Hayes of If I Had has Hammer (Reprise again by Claude François: " If I had a marteau" , in a version which out of gum all the side protester and subversive, and popularized by Peter, Paul and Mary, then Trini Lopez) and of " Turn! Turn! Turn! " , on words drawn from Ecclésiaste, (popularized by the group The Byrds).

But he sings also texts plus protestors, like Little boxings ( Petites boxes , of malvina Reynolds, interpreted in French by Graeme Allwright), where he tackles creative teaching étatsunien according to him of Conformisme. He is even wilder in the song What did you learn in school? , written by Tom Paxton, and also sung in French by Graeme Allwright:

I learned our government must Be strong.
It' S always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.

During engagements for the civic rights of the Blacks, it gives a political version of an old religious anthem, " We Shall Overcome" , which will be taken again in particular by Joan Baez.

In 1966, it popularizes the song of Jose Marti Guantanamera with the festival folk of Newport.

Prototype of the protest singer and the folksinger, his intellectual posterity and artistiue is still long-lived: in the album homage " testifies; where are the flowers gone" in 1998 and 2006, the album of Bruce Springsteen " we shall overcome, the Seeger Sessions" , where the cantor of the blue-collar rock'n'roll finds his taste for the orchestras folk and fits deliberately in his line.

Discography

Personal discs

2006 : " Favorite American ballads" (4 vol.)

Participations

2007 : " My Name Is Buddy" (Nonesuch Records) of Ry Cooder with Paddy Moloney, Van Dyke Parks, Mike Seeger, Flaco Jimenez, Bobby King & Terry Evans, Jim Keltner, Jacky Small terrace, Jon Hassell…

Anecdotes

the positions sometimes considered to be - wrongly or rightly - not very American of Pete Seeger were worth some enmities to him, of which that of the Nobel Prize Murray Freezing-Mann, that it expresses in a passage of its book the Quark and the jaguar .
One sees it appearing in the film Alice' S Restoring , playing its own part, returning visit with his/her friend Woody Guthrie hospitalized.

External bond

Official site containing the original version of the album of Bruce Springsteen (The Seeger Sessions)

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