Pete Seeger and a Peaceful World

Ruth describes a Pete Seeger concert she attended five years ago and reminisces about her banjo-playing days. Please click on the "Read More" link below to continue.

PETE SEEGER AND A PEACEFUL WORLD

March 19 2008

Web site publication date: April 1 2008

As Don and I set out at five o’clock on the morning of January 24, 2003, the temperature was five degrees below zero and the window-washer spray froze to the windshield. The weather reports were iffy, and we were heading for Syracuse, New York, where it snows every day.

But we were going to see Pete Seeger!

When my niece, Thane, who lives in Syracuse, had learned that Pete Seeger would be performing at the “A Peaceful World Is Possible” concert sponsored by the People’s Music Network and the Syracuse Community Choir—and, moreover, that Pete would be leading the singing of the children’s section of the choir of which my grandnephew is a member—she immediately phoned me and invited us. I accepted with joy.

I had bought my first banjo in a music shop in Oxford, England, in 1965. We were living in Brandon, England, and Don was working as a dormitory counselor at the U.S. Air Force high school in nearby Lakenheath, but that summer we lived for six weeks in an Oxford bed-and-breakfast while Don took poetry courses at the university’s summer school. In the music shop, amongst the instruction books for sale was Pete Seeger’s How to Play the 5-String Banjo, and I grabbed it.

Like so many girls, I had taken piano lessons throughout my childhood. I was not musical, not talented, but I was dogged. And I did love the music. My mother in her forthright way (there’s a certain amount of my mother in the character of Puddles) told my piano teacher to quit giving me pieces like “To a Picnic,” a ditty that he himself had composed, and to concentrate on the Three B’s: Bach, Beethoven, Brahams. In junior high, I wanted to play popular music, so I switched teachers. “Down Yonder” was my specialty; this was what I performed whenever the teachers organizing assembly programs got desperate and rounded up everybody who could play an instrument. Finally, though, by high school I had had enough of piano lessons.

At Bennington, however, I took a Music Theory course. As related in Snowy, “Bennington being Bennington, the real thing was included besides theory, so she was taking piano lessons. She had wanted guitar lessons, to aid her Bohemian aspirations, but everyone else had the same idea and the openings were filled in a flash.” Then my friend Gloria, to whom Snowy is dedicated, bought a Kingston Trio LP and I was captivated by the banjo in those songs. But nobody was giving banjo lessons.

Later, in the early 1960s, Don and I watched Hootenanny on TV. We felt guilty about doing so because blacklisted performers weren’t allowed on it (Pete Seeger’s name was probably on the top of the list), but I loved the show, particularly the banjos.
And then in England, in that Oxford shop, I finally bought a banjo, a five-string banjo. It wasn’t a long-necked one like Pete Seeger’s, but still I thought it beautful.

But next I had to learn to play it.

First of all, I had to file my nails as Pete’s book (please see left sidebar for more information about the book) directed, the left hand short, the right hand “neither too long or too short.” With the book, I settled down every evening in our apartment in a converted colonnade in a stately home, where a copper beech glowed out front and we reached our door via a walled kitchen garden. Mercifully, Don could escape my efforts; his job as a dormitory counselor meant that he worked nights. I didn’t use fingerpicks and was as quiet as one could be with a banjo, and to my surprise the neighbors didn’t complain.

I learned to thumb the fifth string, which, as Pete wrote in his book, is “the thing which gives this style of banjo playing its distinctive flavor . . . Like a triangle in an orchestra, it keeps on dinging away through the whole song, never changing in pitch.” Pete’s book taught me “hammering on,” “pulling off,” “double thumbing,” and “frailing.”

In Pete’s book there was a Peanuts comic strip in which Linus tells Charlie Brown, “I feel sorry for little babies. When a little baby is born into this cold world, he’s confused! He’s frightened! He needs something to cheer him up. The way I see it, as soon as a baby is born, he should be issued a banjo!”

Well, at last I had a banjo, and I was playing it.

When we returned to the States the next year, I splurged. With some of the money from the sale to Redbook of my first novel, The Lilting House, I bought a Pete Seeger Special, the long-necked five-string banjo he designed. It was truly beautiful.

And I took some lessons from an old banjo player whose skill made me realize that once again, as with the piano, I would always be an amateur. But it has often been pointed out that the word “amateur” comes from “amare,” to love.

When we’d gone to England we had sold some of our belongings and parceled out to family the rest, so we had to begin accumulating things again when we returned. For a birthday surprise, Don came home from work one day with a record player. This was a replacement. But he also brought something totally new to us, the Pete Seeger LPs that he had ordered at a music store. I still remember how the needle touched the first record and we heard Pete’s tenor sing out, “If you miss me at the back of the bus—”

I gave the banjo-playing interest to one of my heroines, Emily in One Minus One. In it she says that Pete Seeger is her hero. It was suggested that I should mention this to Pete Seeger, so I wrote him a letter, quoting it. To my astonishment, I received a postcard from him. It was a reproduction of an old engraving of the Hudson River, with this description printed on it: “One hundred years ago, when this quiet scene was sketched and then engraved on a fine-grained block of wood, the Hudson River ran sweet and clean. Its deep, clear water yielded sturgeon, shad, and bass.” Pete had written, “Well, by God, I’m speechless. It’s hell, being a hero, I think. But I’ll hold up somehow. Pete.” After his name he drew a little long-necked five-string banjo. I still have that postcard, framed, the ink fading.

I discovered that we could get his old TV show, The Rainbow Quest, which we had never seen before. It came in very fuzzily on a public TV channel, but I watched it twice every week, when it was first run and when it was rerun. He had a remarkable assortment of guests on it, including a young jumpy Johnny Cash being watched like a hawk by June Carter. And every week he opened and closed the show with the theme, “Oh, Had I a Golden Thread . . .”

In the early 1970s Don and I drove one evening to Kennebunkport, Maine. (We didn’t know then that it was the summer home of [irony!] the Bushes. I don’t think we even knew who the Bushes were.) At last we were going to see Pete in person! He was in the process of sailing his sloop, Clearwater, down the Atlantic coast as part of his campaign to clean up water in general and his Hudson River in particular, and he was stopping here and there along the way to give concerts. We sat on the grass, waiting eagerly. Pete appeared, looking just like Pete. But it was announced that alas, he had come down with laryngitis. That didn’t stop him from playing while other people from the sailboat sang, and it was wonderful.

When we moved to Sandwich in 1976, we were so busy making the house livable and just plain surviving that my banjo-playing lapsed. Eventually the beautiful banjo became only a decoration, an objet d’art. I finally realized that it should be being played, so I took it to the Fret Shop in Ashland, NH, where it was appreciatively recognized for what it was, and I sold it.

But I’ve kept on singing Pete’s songs unaccompanied, and he has remained my hero, and now we were on our way to Syracuse to see him again.

We found Syracuse freshly white after its daily quota of snow. At Thane’s house, while she made a chicken dinner she told us about how last night she and Hamish (my grandnephew, age six then) had been at the rehearsal of the children’s part in the concert with Pete. Thane said, “He was Pete, and he was also very professional, making sure the kids got it.” I thought of Thane at her son’s age and younger, singing “Put Your Finger in the Air” and other songs along with Pete on his children’s songs record.

Hamish had an early supper and was picked up by other participants to get to the concert ahead of time. After our supper, at which a neighbor couple joined us (Thane’s husband, James, an environmental biologist, was away in Washington), off we went in Thane’s car, bringing Thane’s contribution, a big bottle of water, a crock, and a stand, for the choir’s parched throats. The night lights of the city looked exciting to Don and me, country mice. Near the Landmark Theater the streets were crowded with cars and people. Thane miraculously nabbed a parking space, and we lugged the water supply through the cold night, on snow-trampled sidewalks.

We were warmed instantly by the interior of the Landmark Theater. It has been redone, returned to its original splendor. Gold; gold encrusted; opulent! Ornaments, embellishments everywhere. I thought it seemed like a jewel and then realized that being in it was like being in a jewelry box. We took the water down to the basement and set up the crock on its stand, then went back up and located our seats, on the left, down front, a wonderful spot that Thane had got for us. She sat on one side of Don and I sat on the other.

And there was Pete, sitting on the left-hand side of the stage so we had a great view. He wore jeans, a shirt with sleeves rolled up, and he held his banjo. He was almost eighty-four then, but he looked ageless.

The Onondaga Nation peacekeeper gave a welcoming speech. (Thane, by the way, at the time was a lawyer in a law firm; she is now a lawyer for the Onondagas.) The concert began.

Hamish was standing in the front row of the children’s group, with the rest of the Syracuse Community Choir filling the stage behind. As Pete and the kids started singing, Thane and I promptly burst into tears. Poor Don, surrounded by two weeping women! The song was Pete’s “Take It from Dr. King”:

Don’t say it can’t be done.
The battle’s just begun.
Take it from Dr. King,
You too can learn to sing.
So drop the gun!

Pete apologized for his lack of voice in his old age. He thinks of himself now as a song leader, not a singer. But although he wasn’t trying for the high notes anymore, he did great, still sounding like Pete, and the banjo was crisp and clear.

Indeed, if we observed correctly, Pete was the only one playing an instrument that wasn’t plugged in!

After the kids’ part in the program was over, they filed off the stage, and soon Hamish was sitting with us. Pete sang and led a series of his songs, exhorting the shy and self-conscious to join in. Then he sat down again on the left-hand side and watched the other performers. I watched the audience as well. Although we were in a city, I kept sensing a small-town feel, a feeling of the community in the choir’s name, and this entire community here was singing about the theme of the night, the possibility of a peaceful world. I thought of my grandfather, Frank Carleton Doan, a Unitarian minister; he was a conscientious objector during the First World War, but when he offered to resign from his Summit, NJ, church, he was asked to stay. Now America was on the brink of a war with Iraq. It was such a relief to be in the midst of people who felt the same way as we did about it.

After the intermission, Pete sang again. In addition to his classics, he led us in “Over the Rainbow,” which I’d never heard him sing on his records. There were more performers. Hamish fell asleep on Thane’s lap. Then came a rousing penultimate song by Kim and Reggie Harris, who were terrific and rocked the theater with “This Little Light of Mine,” all of us in the audience singing our lungs out. When we calmed down, the Harrises quietly began the last song, Pete’s “Rainbow Race.” All our voices lifted, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one crying as we sang:

One blue sky above us,
One ocean lapping all our shore.
One earth so green and brown.
Who could ask for more?

And because I love you,
I’ll give it one more try,
To show my rainbow race
It’s too soon to die . . .

Hamish slept on my lap during the ride home at midnight, so I was the warmest person in the car.

Two months later, and five years ago from the date I’m writing this, the United States invaded Iraq.

Photographs: Pete Seeger's photo, as you can see, is used with permission from the flickr.com's photo-sharing pages. Don MacDougall took the photos of Ruth with her banjo.

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