Here in the Hudson Valley, we are especially mourning the death of Pete Seeger. I had the honor of meeting him once or twice, and he just seemed ageless, old though he was. He also struck me as pleasantly modest and unassuming with anyone he met, given all that he had done in his life and all the deserved veneration heaped upon him. When I remember him, he will always be in Beacon's Riverfront park at a community event, where he was the last time I saw him, over a decade ago.
Sometimes you can sum up everything someone is or was in a single anecdote about them. I have one for Pete that always made an impression on me. Even though it happened to someone else.
Years before I moved here, I was up at SUNY Buffalo working on a master's in English. One of the courses I chose to take was on ... folklore fieldwork, taught by Bruce Jackson. It was a little different from the predominantly literature-based coursework I was otherwise doing, but that was the point.
Bruce himself had cut a considerable path to get to UB. His blurb, from his Nation review, long graced the back of the paperback of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which all of us English grad students of the era had either read or expected to. He had reviewed it because he had gotten to know Foucault during that brief period when he had taught at UB. A picture of Foucault was still on the wall of his classroom/office.
He had taken it because Foucault had been interested in another picture that Bruce had taken years before, of an elderly inmate at Texas's Ellis prison farm, who happened to look a bit like the French philosopher—balding and bespectacled. It was a memento of one of Bruce's many trips there to make documentaries about the inmates and record their work songs, back in the heady days of the folk revival.
Seeger was heavily involved in the same effort to document and record those many folk traditions. He and Bruce had worked together and gotten acquainted in the process. Bruce had worked at Ellis for several years collecting the work songs of black convicts. In Bruce's book Fieldwork, the only text for the class. He recounts how one day in 1966 Seeger called him up and asked if ...
... I knew of any decent films about the songs. I said I didn't. "Let's make one then," Pete said. "That tradition won't be around much longer and it's an important part of our heritage."
"Fine," I said. "But I don't know where we'll get the money."
"I'll pay for it," Pete said. "There isn't time to go looking for grants." (He was right; within a year the Texas prison work gangs were integrated and the songs were gone forever).
A few weeks later, Pete, his wife Toshi and his son Dan met me at Ellis Unit, not far from Huntsville. They arrived not just with film equipment but also with Pete's complement of longneck banjo and six- and twelve-string guitars. I asked what he intended to do with the guitars. "They're going to sing for us," he said, "so I'll sing for them."
"I don't think that's necessary, Pete," I said. "Not necessary at all." What I was thinking was: This is quite crazy. Ellis was the Texas prison for multiple recidivists, the men doing the most time because they'd been in for serious crimes more times than the rest of the state's prisoners; it was the prison for inmates who had been in the most fights or had killed other prisoners or had escaped from the other places. Pete's songs were fine for folk festivals and concerts in cities, where people knew him and liked him and his songs, but this was Ellis. "No Pete," I said, "I don't think you have to worry about reciprocating."
We began filming. On the second or third day Pete said "Did you set up that concert yet?"
"You still want to do that, huh?"
"He's serious," Toshi said.
Bruce talked to the warden, who said ...
... "He really wants to do this?" I nodded. "You told him about this place?" I nodded again. "OK. Tomorrow night in the gym."
The next night at seven o'clock approximately one thousand of Ellis's convicts were seated in the prison gym. I expected one of two things: hoots and jeers, which would be annoying, or stony silence, which would be worse. This wasn't, as I said, Newport or a college campus.
Within five minutes most of the convicts there were singing along and within ten minutes so were the guards and their supervisors and the assistant warden. After Pete's last encore the men cheered and yelled for ten minutes. It was for real; this was not a crowd that patronized anybody. It was one of the best concerts I ever heard and saw.
And, for Bruce, it had an encore of its own.
That's not why I'm telling you this. [A week later, after the Seegers] had gone back to New York[, a] convict I had seen [many times before approached me].
"I want to know why you've never recorded me singing any of them river songs," he said.
"I've been coming here for two years," I said. "You knew what I was doing. You never said you knew any of them."
"That," he said, "was before I knew you was a friend of Pete Seeger's."
As U2 once put it, "
Grace makes beauty out of ugly things." I was so struck by this story when I read it that I remarked on it to Bruce a day or two later. He recalled once again his reaction upon seeing that Pete had brought his instruments along, the incredulity he felt still evident in his face as he told that part of the story.
I don't know if this story has been told somewhere else, by anyone else. I mentioned it to Pete on one of our meetings and he just smiled in the way that people do when they recall good times from the distant past. He didn't need to add anymore to it.
But although it may not have made history I can think of no better example of what it means to be progressive, to be the change you want to see in the world, to change a small part of the world permanently for the better, to proceed with the best belief about humanity despite the fearful assumptions of others sympathetic to you. It is, not to exaggerate, what Jesus would have done.
We are all better off for having known Pete Seeger.