Posted on 01/28/2014 5:58:18 AM PST by Mercat
NEW YORK – Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage, died Monday at the age of 94.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
*Off to that workers paradise in the sky.
Or some other place. *
He has an appointment with Hitler and a pineapple...
The first album by the Almanac Singers "Songs for John Doe" was released in May 1941, included
Ballad of October 16
Billy Boy
'C' For Conscription
Can you use a bayonet, Billy boy, Billy boy?
Can you use a bayonet, charming Billy?
No, I haven't got the skill to murder and to kill...
Jun 22, 1941. Nazis invade Soviet Union
1942. Album "Dear Mr. President"
Reuben James
Round and round Hitler's grave
Must have been dizzying to have been a premature anti-fascist and then a premature pro-fascist and then an anti-fascist
I know on this forum, the following comments will be less than fully appreciated, but hey ...
My mom (RIP) was full on into the great folk scare of the late 50s and early 60s. I grew up on this stuff.
The Weavers (even though they were earlier), The New Christie Minstrels, Kingston Trio, Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody and Pete.
I still have my copy of his The Folk Singers Guitar Guide from which I learned some songs. Still play today.
You’ll have to forgive me for not spitting on his grave.
Ol’ ‘If I had a hammer .. and a sickle’ Pete..
dead at 94? we all should be so lucky.
To quote the song “Teen Angst” by “Cracker”
“What the world needs now/Is another folk singer/Like I need a hole in my head.”
The Devil takes care of his own.
Jack Cashill has done a marvelous job in Hoodwinked and elsewhere over the years documenting fellow travelers of the 30s and 40s and how they eventually helped found the New Left Progressivism.
In a WND review in 2007 he cites in a movie review how Seegar finally repented from his support of Stalinsm and actually gives him some credit for coming clean about it.
But it focuses more on the folksinger as hero and victim, rather than shill for Soviet Stalinism.But, if the movie doesn’t quite get it right, Seeger himself seems determined to repent of old sins.
In a letter to his former banjo student and writer Ron Radosh, he confesses: “I think you’re right – I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in USSR.”
Pete Seeger testifying before House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955
Seeger has even written a song denouncing Josef Stalin, a song inspired by what he thought his mentor, Woody Guthrie, might have written about the fall of the Soviet Union had he been around.
It’s called “The Big Joe Blues” – a song Radosh says “makes the point that Joe Stalin was far more dangerous and a threat than Joe McCarthy
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2007/10/44217/#2cI526PC4Ah6PQw4.99
If Cashill can cut him a little slack, I think we should cite the instance to go along with our just criticism.
So he’s a Trotskyite. Even Khrushchev denounced Stalin.
All the communists reversed once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union — all of a sudden, they were with the Allies.
See my comment at #68 below where at the end of his life he finally reverses again and disavows Stalin with a later song.
Just as after Khrushchev denounced Stalin, all of a sudden, to them Stalin was a bad guy.
I forgive you. :-D I’ve found the posts pretty harsh. But I’ve also learned a lot. Sounds like he was a flawed human being who found a way to get rich being a musician. It’s a hard industry. Hard way generally to make a living. I’m not surprised that he was a hard assed capitalist pretending to be a Marxist. Lots of that going around.
Peet Seeger was a member of the Almanacs. This anti-World War II song was inspired by a speech given by Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D-Mont.)in January, 1941, in which he accused the Roosevelt administration of pursuing a foreign policy that would "plow under every fourth American boy."
The song was on "Songs for John Doe," an album of anti-war songs that was available for a few weeks before it was abruptly pulled off the market after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, prompting a change in the Communist Party line on intervention in the war.
That’s totally cool!
I tried to find “The Big Joe Blues” on Youtube. Can’t find it.
An album in 1941? Dude, you’re stretching!
It’s not just a little chit Pete Seeger. it’s a thousand of them funded by the Soviets from the 1930s until the 1980s, affecting the public opinion and foreign policies of this country, and that is little Seeger’s crime against humanity!
‘Now the folksinger came from America
To sing at the Albert Hall,
He sang his songs of protest
And fairer shares for all.
He sang how the poor were much too poor
And the rich too rich by far,
Then he drove back to his penthouse
In his brand new Rolls Royce car.’
-—Benny Hill, ‘What a World’, 1965.
Strangely that poem would apply equally to Obama and his SOTU tonight.
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