What Pete Seeger described as his “biggest disappointment”
It’s a bit ironic that Pete Seeger, one of the great ambassadors of American folk music and an appreciator of a good “tall tale”, would eventually be remembered as part of a new sort of American myth.
As has been properly documented many times, Seeger was not aggressively opposed to his friend Bob Dylan “going electric” in 1965, and he certainly didn’t wield an axe at the Newport Folk Festival, trying to cut down the sound system during Dylan’s electrified set like a crazed Paul Bunyan. That version of Seeger, as most recently depicted in 2024’s A Complete Unknown, makes for a better foil in the Bob Dylan folk tale, but it also does the real man a disservice, painting him as an ageing square, close-minded and stuck in his ways.
The real Seeger wasn’t a big fan of noisy distortion drowning out the lyrics of a performance, but overall, he repeatedly stated that he wasn’t against Dylan’s electric forays, and in fact, remained a fan of much of Dylan’s post-folkie recordings. In terms of disappointments in Seeger’s life, Newport ‘65 wouldn’t have made the shortlist.
By the time 1965 rolled around, Seeger was 46, and not exactly the face of mainstream American music. Sure, loads of younger folk revival musicians held him in high regard, but he wasn’t what you’d call chart-friendly. Truth be told, he’d spent most of the previous decade just trying to stay above water after getting blacklisted for his ties to communist groups back in the ’40s and ’50s.
Seeger’s refusal to give over the names of past friends and associates during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts in the mid-1950s eventually landed him a prison sentence for contempt of Congress; a ruling that was overturned by an appeals court in 1962. That victory didn’t repair his career or reputation, however, as many venues still refused to host his concerts, and television stations were often hesitant to book him.
The folk revival explosion in the 1960s, and Seeger’s gradual transformation into the friendly elder statesman of the left-wing protest movement, did help solidify his role as a vital figure in 20th-century American music. Seeger probably would have traded his own status and later accolades, however, for the chance to have achieved more of the goals he’d fought for on the larger social and political stage.
“I suppose my biggest disappointment,” Seeger told the Washington Post in 1980, “Is that the American labour movement decided to play along with the Cold War and the Establishment rather than keeping what I’d considered a class-conscious world view—the struggle for peace, against racism, sexism, all those things.”
Watching the idealistic dreams of the ‘60s turn into the brutal realities of the ‘70s was many degrees more painful than hearing young Bobby Dylan play ‘Maggie’s Farm’ through an amplifier.
At the age of 61, though, Seeger was still thoroughly engaged in his activist mode in that 1980 interview, looking toward the future with a hope that new voices would take up the mantle as he and his pal Woody Guthrie had back in the day.
“Part of living with the machine age is learning to assert yourself,” Seeger said, “To add something to canned food, to change things to the way you want them. Woody Guthrie was always changing things; he’d change songs to fit whatever he needed.”
Those certainly don’t sound like the words of a man who’d shit a brick about an artist taking his music in a new direction.
