Pete Seeger Interview on Democracy Now in '04
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- čas přidán 7. 08. 2024
- The legendary folk singer and activist Pete Seeger died Monday at the age of 94. For nearly seven decades, Seeger was a musical and political icon who helped create the modern American folk music movement.
![Pete Seeger at home (1989) [Part 1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yncIV5sot4E/mqdefault.jpg)
I consider it a great privilege to have lived 49 years at the same time this extraordinary man/soul was on earth.He will NEVER be forgotten.............
This man taught me history they didn't dare mention in public schools. We need more people like him in today's society, especially with the resurgence of the United States labor movement
I am always inspired and given hope by this man's wisdom and music.
Ah, lovely, what a great interview. I love that man, a real hero, a simply GOOD man
We could use people like Pete Seeger today.
In a world rampant with hate. Today is when we need Pete Seeger most
Excellent interview.
"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them."
- Plato
It s sad, that a great voice like his just went away like a candles flame :( RIP pete seeger
I can vouch for Pete and the music sound system at Newport 65. I was there in the back and yelling to have the sound fixed, most of us were yelling for that reason... not booing.
thank you for posting this
When I was young I wanted to change the world. I tried to change my parents, then my village, then my country, and finely my world. If I had known then what I know now, as an old man, I would have changed myself, then my parents would probably have changed and then probably my village and then probably my country and then probably also my world. Pete is a modern day crusader and I'm sure he's keeping hope high in the sky. God bless him.
what a great life
except the whole blacklisted part lol....
Sad day!
Making it to 94 is pretty good! Pete is partly responsible for my existence, this interview is great!
I liked what he said about Bob Dylan's electric performance. While he himself didn't play electric guitar, he has performed with guitarists who performed awesome guitar work. But he didn't like the distorted sound that came out of the amps.
I'm not sure of his revisionism here. He was a bourgeois and Ivy League folk singer, and he and his family felt they were the judges of authenticity. Interesting, in his early days he faced criticism from Party leadership for singing folk and vintage union songs. This was not reaching and influencing the ordinary working class people. The Party recommended pop music or jazz. And it was Bob Dylan with his brand of music and his lyrics that reached a whole generation.
Pete has always tried to portray himself as an innocent picked-on liberal. The truth is that he was a long time member of the Communist Party under the rule of Soviet Russia, and stayed a member under Stalin a long time after Stalin's atrocities became known to other leftists. I know that communism was a popular belief in the 30's, and many well known people were sympathetic because it was seen as the only strong hope. But card-carrying membership was serious business, and it was the primary loyalty. He avoided dealing with that issue and the many human rights violations the Party was involved with. I would have respected him much more if he discussed this fact as part of the reason he often was black-listed. He would have helped bring closure to that period of time.
From Wikipedia:
In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997, reissued in 2009), Seeger wrote, "Should I apologize for all this? I think so." He went on to put his thinking in context:
How could Hitler have been stopped? Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in '36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger's book, From Yale to Jail ... [75] At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader". I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She's part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let's look ahead.[76][77]
@Checkmate1138 I have softened my attitude toward Seeger, after reading more about him. I think what struck me the most was his explanation that people now don't realize how idealistic they were then. But his smug, Ivy League, bourgeois demeanor always bothered me.