Thanks to the script and Edward Norton—a real actor with a larger palette than Timothée el blanco—Pete Seeger is a central player in the new Dylan movie. Part of being a so-phisticated 9-year-old in 1965 (rather than a winsome seven-year-old sing-a-longer con hammer) was to lean away from Pete Seeger. Down the line, when I got all clear about the history of America’s Fellow Travelers, my aversion to him went beyond his/my square past. Every time some Oliver Stoney/Nationist upholds some update of Stalinist/Putinist nonsense, I want to curse all the fuckers who polluted the American radical imagination with agitprop about humanism of totalitarians. Seeger was tuned to their channel for way too long. Unlike so many of his comrades, though, he got free (if not loose)…
I recall the last time that I saw Pete, live, in performance. It was at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan in 1982, and it was not a concert. The event was a meeting in solidarity with the Polish trade union, Solidarity, which was doing its best to overthrow Communism and Soviet domination in favor of democracy. The most famous speaker at that Town Hall meeting was Susan Sontag, who denounced Communism as a species of fascism. Sontag made fun of The Nation. Good for her! But Pete Seeger spoke, too. He supported Polish Solidarity. This was, on his part, the evidence that he had come to his senses, and his ideals were authentic. I listened to him say his few words, and I was moved. If he had a hammer, he seemed to be saying, he would hammer away at whoever was oppressing the ordinary mass of humanity, even if the oppressors called themselves (however falsely) left-wing. This was excellent. It is my last memory of him. The memory is beautiful. It leads me to say: Long live the magnificent heritage of Pete Seeger! And if his heritage is not entirely magnificent, all the better, say I. His failings will remind us that everyone has failings, and let us tread carefully, and let us support the cause of equality and justice, even so. With a hammer![1[
I was with this witness (in spirit), but Seeger was a musician as well as a politico. For decades I assumed (like a dumbo) his heritage wasn’t meant for my ears. Wrong ’em boyo! When I heard the falsetto in the following song (a year or two ago, though it was released in 1966), I may have been as shocked as Seeger hearing Dylan go electric…
Note
1 Pete Seeger, 1919-2014: A Magnificent But Messy Legacy | The New Republic