After 94 years, on January 27, 2014, the world lost Pete Seeger. The world is the lesser for that loss. The accolades for this giant of folk songs and herald of all causes just, are pouring in from around the world. He is celebrated for regularly showing up at mass protests, for singing songs so transcendent (“This Land is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”) they are sung in many foreign languages all over the earth and for his mentoring and motivating of millions of people and children.
Pete Seeger overcame most of his doubters and adversaries. On his famous five-string banjo, he inscribed the slogan, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
No less than the Wall Street Journal, after reprinting an ugly commentary on Seeger’s earlier radicalism, wrote, “Troubadour, rabble rouser, thorn in the side of the bloated and complacent, recipient of the National Media of Arts, American idealist and family man, Seeger maintained what Mr. Springsteen called his ‘nasty optimism’ until late in life.”
Read the full article here.
Sometimes trolls are just trolls.
“This land is your land, this land is my land…”
Commie propaganda? Say it ain’t so….
Sometimes “art” is just commie propaganda.
Sometimes it’s best to appreciate art beyond the politics of it.
That term as reserved for people other than the commies themselves. He was a full out commie, and he is finally in hell where he belongs.
It sounds like he was a well meaning “useful idiot” as Vladimir Lenin called the delusional people who bought into the communist BS that he spewed.
All commies are going to hell, and should be sped on their way.
And he was antiwar consistntly after WWII, and I believe most of his well-known songs were written later.
I’d rather remember his antiwar songs. He had some really good ones.
Pete Seeger is often seen as an antiwar troubadour, which is only partly correct. He certainly wrote songs about FDR the warmonger in the period from 1939 till June 22, 1941. This was the period of the Hitler Stalin Pact. After German forces invaded Russia, he started writing songs about the heroic war against Fascism.
He was not just a member of the Communist Party. He was a member of the Communist Party when Comrade Stalin was the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the leading Comrade in the world.
It appears you’re right. From Wikipedia: “In 1942 he became a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) itself. He eventually “drifted away” (his words) from the Party in the late 1940s and 1950s.”
I knew he was a communist but didn’t know that he was ever involved with the CPUSA.
Seeger was a member of the Communist Party USA