let's pretend you're satan. you look down at joseph stalin and think you can do better. the napalm enemas and school bus sized deer tics just don't seem to be enough. but then an opportunity comes along. a banjo player has just died.

a few billion years of that ought to be perfect.

r.i.p. pete. a full life and fully lived!

If I am a "commie hater" what does that make you?

R.I.P., Pete. We could use more men of principle like him. Hell of a banjo player, too, the man who invented the longneck banjo. I communicated with him about this a number of years back. If you're at all interested, here's the blog post covering this:

The California Files: How Pete Seeger Invented the Longneck Banjo

thank you for that post.

Such a man of principle that he defended both Hitler and Stalin. Few people can make that claim. I'm not making this up. If you care for the truth you'll find it yourself; if not, nothing I can say will change your mind. If he was so principled why did he turn on a dime and go from opposing America's entry into the war when Hitler and Stalin were friends and start agitating for America's entry the second Russia was attacked. Who cares if he opposed McCarthy? Millions of people opposed McCarthy, which is why he died a homeless alcoholic. Pete made millions as a representative of the people. Yes, he died a multimillionaire.

You are supposed to speak good of the dead and it is poor manners to say something bad about a person who just died, but for a man who wanted his politics, personality and music to be judged together, I have nothing good to say about a man who defended Hitler until his Soviet overlords told him not to, and then defended Stalin for decades until it was impossible to continue the defense with a straight face.

One of the great fallacies of our century is the claim that you have to either follow Seeger and his ilk or McCarthy and his ilk. Truly there is no difference between Pete Seeger and Joe McCarthy; either one of them trusted with power over you would have conducted a purge to endure that anyone with a different opinion wouldn't survive.

Only read the last few posts.

He supported those who killed millions. I cannot forgive that.

As for McCarthy, to my knowledge he supported no mass murderers, and never flip flopped on his allegiances. He went after Communists in government and film, and history (esp. as found in the files of the former USSR and in Cuba) has largely proven him right.

Per wiki, "140 leaders and members of the Communist Party had been charged under the law, of whom 93 were convicted."

Hardly akin to publicly supporting Stalin or Hitler and attempting to undermine support for our efforts to protect our allies.

Not saying he was perfect, just Truly there is no difference between Pete Seeger and Joe McCarthy

This

When all is said and done, the guy was a decent songwriter/musician who happened to be a hardcore, unrepentant, communist. I don't care for "folk" music and can't abide the man's politics.

Yesterday I spent about 6 hours driving all over the state and I listened to NPR most of the time. Needless to say it was as if the Pope had died.

I try to listen to AM radio as much as possible while driving. ESPN is my main channel but I also have a couple "conservative" stations I go back and forth to if ESPN isn't on something I'm interested in.

I HATE listening to Rush....such an annoying tone. Plus I hate all that "spewing" stuff....kool aid.....no matter what side it's coming from. Ridiculous.

I used to like NPR before I knew about the different sides...you know red and blue. I liked how low key the presentation was. Nice easy going voice...just talking to you like you were a friend while hanging out in a casual setting. But not sure if they are still like that. Must be on FM, I guess.

I don't use XM Radio or the other one you subscribe to. I don't really spend that much time in my truck and would rather listen to my MP3 players while working with MY selection of music.

I guess before this thread I was ignorant of all the negativity surrounding Pete's politics and/or lifestyle. I just thought of him as a very significant influence in our country's music history.

I understand the concept of respecting the death of a public figure. I also feel there is an opportunity for sharing of information. We can have both if respectfully submitted.

If one remains open-minded....there is much to learn and can be enjoyable and interesting along the way.

Love NPR. Love folk music. Love God. Love America. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming.

Talk about the last word...

"Just a few weeks ago, Pete Seeger featured over at our Song of the Week department for his quite discreditable role in the intellectual-property heist of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Seeger lived long enough to go down and join the Occupy Wall Street protesters a year or two back. I believe he sang "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" to them, although "Where Have All The Showers Gone?" might have been more appropriate with that crowd. He died on Monday at the age of 94. Here's what I wrote about him upon the occasion of his 90th birthday:

This week marks not only the first hundred days of King Barack's reign and the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street, but also the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger. The celebrations of Mr Seeger's tenth decade are extensive. If he seems a remote figure from the pop culture back catalogue, not so fast: He played at the Obama inauguration. Which, when you think about it, is quite something.

One must congratulate the old banjo-picker on making it to four score and ten, which is a lot older than many "dissenting artists" made it to under the regimes he's admired over the years. Two years ago in The New York Sun, you'll recall, Ron Radosh had a notable scoop: Hold the front page! Stop the presses! Grizzled Leftie Icon Repudiates…

Who? Castro? Chávez? Al-Qaeda?

Whoa, let's not rush to judgment. No, the big story was: Grizzled Leftie Icon Repudiates . . . Stalin.

A couple of months earlier, there'd been some documentary or other "celebrating" the "spirit" of Pete Seeger, the folkie colossus, with contributions from the usual suspects – Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, one or more Dixie Chicks, two-thirds of Peter, Paul and Mary, etc. Mr Radosh had also been interviewed but his remarks about Seeger's lifelong support of Stalinism had not made the final cut. No surprise there. In such circumstances, the rule is to hail someone for his "activism" and "commitment" and "passion" without getting hung up on the specifics of what exactly he's actively and passionately committing to.

Giving him a Kennedy Center Honor a decade or so back, President Clinton hailed ol' Pete as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them," which is one way of putting it. You can't help noticing, though, that it's all the documentaries and honors ceremonies and lifetime-achievement tributes to Mr. Seeger that seem to find certain things "inconvenient." The Washington Post's Style section, with its usual sly élan, hailed him as America's "best-loved Commie" — which I think translates as "Okay, so the genial old coot spent a lifetime shilling for totalitarian murderers, but only uptight Republican squares would be boorish enough to dwell on it."

Anyway, in the Sun, Mr. Radosh, a former banjo pupil of the great man, did dwell on it, and a few weeks later got a letter in response. "I think you're right," wrote Pete. "I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR." And he enclosed a new song he'd composed:

I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe
He ruled with an iron hand
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place
I got the Big Joe Blues
(Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast)
I got the Big Joe Blues
(Do this job, no questions asked)
I got the Big Joe Blues . . .

It's heartening to see that age (he's now 88) hasn't withered Seeger's unerring instinct for bum rhymes ("fast/asked"). Still, Ron Radosh was thrilled that, just 54 years after the old brute's death, a mere three-quarters of a century after the purges and show trials and whatnot, the old protest singer had finally got around to protesting Stalin, albeit somewhat evasively: He put the human race "right in the same nasty place"? Sorry, not good enough. Stalin created whole new degrees of nastiness. But, given that Seeger got the two great conflicts of the 20th century wrong (in 1940, he was anti-war and singing "Wendell Wilkie and Franklin D/Both agree on killing me"), it's a start. I can't wait for his anti-Osama album circa 2078.

Mr. Seeger has a song called "Treblinka," because he thinks it's important that we "never forget." But wouldn't it be better if we were hip to it before it snowballed into one of those things we had to remember not to forget? Would it kill the icons of the Left just for once to be on the right side at the time? America has no "best-loved Nazi" or "best-loved Fascist" or even "best-loved Republican," but its best-loved Stalinist stooge is hailed in his dotage as a secular saint who's spent his life "singing for peace."

He sang for "peace" when he opposed the fascistic arms-lobby stooge Roosevelt and imperialist Britain, and he sang for "peace" when he attacked the Cold War paranoiac Truman, and he kept on singing for "peace" no matter how many millions died and millions more had to live in bondage, and, while that may seem agreeably peaceful when you're singing "If I Had a Hammer" in Ann Arbor, it's not if you're on the sharp end of the deal thousands of miles away.

Explaining how Stalin had "put an end to the dreams" of a Communist utopia, Seeger told Ron Radosh that he'd underestimated "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence." But that isn't true, is it? Very few of us are violent. Those who order the killings are few in number, and those who carry them out aren't significantly numerous. But those willing to string along and those too fainthearted to object and those who just want to keep their heads down and wait for things to blow over are numbered in the millions. And so are those many miles away in the plump prosperous Western democracies who don't see why this or that dictator is their problem. One can perhaps understand the great shrug of indifference to distant monsters. It's harder, though, to forgive the contemporary urge to celebrate it as a form of "idealism."

James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger:

"'If I Had A Hammer'? Well, what's stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they're about a buck-ninety, tops."

Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself. Yet in a sense Lileks is missing the point: Yes, they're dopey nursery-school jingles, but that's why they're so insidious. The numbing simplicity allows them to be passed off as uncontentious unexceptionable all-purpose anthems of goodwill. Which is why you hear "This Land Is Your Land" in American grade schools, but not "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

The invention of the faux-childlike faux–folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture. Seeger's hymn to the "senselessness" of all war, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" combined passivity with condescension — "When will they ever learn?" — and established the default mode of contemporary artistic "dissent." Mr. Seeger's ongoing veneration is indestructible. But at least we now know the answer to the question "When will he ever learn?"

At least half a century too late."

Mark Steyn

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this is from the Wiki on him, and the 2 endotes are there as well:

His critics have also tried to downplay the sincerity of Seeger's “anti-war” sentiments, and even to suggest that he was a supporter of Nazi Germany, by asserting that Seeger was only anti-war in the early 1940s because at the time the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and that he immediately became pro-war after the USSR was invaded. They support this assertion by pointing out, incorrectly, that the Weavers' album Dear Mr. President (supporting the war effort) was released “shortly” after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. However, Dear Mr. President was actually released a year later, in June 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’

it implies that he was misled by CPUSA as a young man - which would not be surprising

I don't know if the claims by MRM are true or not, but Seeger was one gutsy guy.

It was real gutsy to cash those royalty checks - especially the ones from the song he stole from the African.

Prine did a good job lampooning the type...

"Selling bibles at the airports
Buying quayludes on the phone
Hey, you talk about
A paper route
She's a shut in without a home
God save her, please
She's nailed her knees
To some drugstore parking lot
Hey, Mr. Brown
Turn the volume down
I believe this evening's shot"

^

haters are going to hate
that is why they are the dark side

pete was a good person
he stood against the haters

If you were brought up in a working class family in 1920/30's America you too would have most likely become a Communist. The Russian Revolution would have looked like the wave of the future where the working man got a fair deal. The truth about Stalin and the Russia that he was creating was an unknown to most Americans. The US government during the war played him as our GOOD, Brave and Noble Ally.

For many American servicemen and government officials who were Communists or sympathizers the actual coming face to face with the beast during and immediatley after the war changed their opinions very quickly. Stalin was seen very clearly for the first time as the monster that he actually was.

Yet the belief that each of us be given the chance to maximize our potential in life remained. That hope was what Pete Segar embodied in his songs, not with standing his clouded belief in the efficacy of a political ideology as being the facilitator of that hope.

nota - I'm not a hater of Seeger. I have a dvd of his. I actually like folk music, banjos, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. But he was still a misguided person who should have stuck to something he knew - like folk music, the banjo and singing. He was very wrong to support the Communists.