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Pete Seeger dies
genkaku
Northampton, Mass. U.S.A. Veteran
Posted on my blog this morning:
I suppose it is a tribute to his efforts that the death of folk-singer Pete Seeger yesterday feels viscerally personal, as if a family dog of many years and many adventures and many licks on the cheek had taken its quiet leave. A soft and insistent sorrow greets the news and yet finding a purchase point in that sorrow -- specific whys and wherefores -- is utterly elusive. The sadness is not devastating, but it is all over me like rain.
Seeger was a fighter. That he used music as a means of putting up his dukes was as crafty as it was subtly effective: No one can defend against music that makes you want to tap your toe. And mixed into my sadness is a kind of protective resentment that after so many bumps and bruises at the hands of a greedy and war-prone establishment, no doubt that establishment as well will praise him in his passing.
I grew up with the Almanac Singers, with "Talking Union" and "Which Side are You On?" Later it would be a collection of banned songs from the Spanish Civil War including "Viva la Quince Brigada." Seeger's detractors would label him a socialist and a communist and various other sorts of 'unpatriotic' pond scum ... and now the same establishment will embrace him as a puppy dog giant among folk singers instead of someone who knew where the blood was spilled and what things cost. He was a pretty good-natured man, but he fought and didn't give up fighting.
I guess I resent the idea that I must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mourners whose fingernails are manicured and whose policies create the patriotic hogwash that kills and maims and deprives others ... mourners who mourn as a means of raising their own stock. But that is the nature of music, I suppose: It touches all comers and there is no single way of loving it any more than there is one single way of mourning the death of Pete Seeger....
... A Johnny Appleseed of the good fight, planting his musical seeds here, there, and everywhere. Sometimes they sprouted. Sometimes not.
I am sad in his passing and glad in his being.
I suppose it is a tribute to his efforts that the death of folk-singer Pete Seeger yesterday feels viscerally personal, as if a family dog of many years and many adventures and many licks on the cheek had taken its quiet leave. A soft and insistent sorrow greets the news and yet finding a purchase point in that sorrow -- specific whys and wherefores -- is utterly elusive. The sadness is not devastating, but it is all over me like rain.
Seeger was a fighter. That he used music as a means of putting up his dukes was as crafty as it was subtly effective: No one can defend against music that makes you want to tap your toe. And mixed into my sadness is a kind of protective resentment that after so many bumps and bruises at the hands of a greedy and war-prone establishment, no doubt that establishment as well will praise him in his passing.
I grew up with the Almanac Singers, with "Talking Union" and "Which Side are You On?" Later it would be a collection of banned songs from the Spanish Civil War including "Viva la Quince Brigada." Seeger's detractors would label him a socialist and a communist and various other sorts of 'unpatriotic' pond scum ... and now the same establishment will embrace him as a puppy dog giant among folk singers instead of someone who knew where the blood was spilled and what things cost. He was a pretty good-natured man, but he fought and didn't give up fighting.
I guess I resent the idea that I must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with mourners whose fingernails are manicured and whose policies create the patriotic hogwash that kills and maims and deprives others ... mourners who mourn as a means of raising their own stock. But that is the nature of music, I suppose: It touches all comers and there is no single way of loving it any more than there is one single way of mourning the death of Pete Seeger....
... A Johnny Appleseed of the good fight, planting his musical seeds here, there, and everywhere. Sometimes they sprouted. Sometimes not.
I am sad in his passing and glad in his being.
3
Comments
scary than talking"