For Pete's Sake

Pete Seeger's unique and all pervasive influence on folk and popular music has been so well documented that repeating it would really just be paraphrasing Wikipedia. My perception of the late and, fortunately for us, long-lived icon is a direct link to the time honored tradition of American protest music.

The rambling talking blues style originated with African American musicians in the early Twentieth Century, the songs essentially social commentaries documenting everything from poverty and corruption to unique weather events like dry spells or floods. The tradition carried  into the late 1920s and early 30s in the raucous sounds of the jug bands and popular artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Minnie, just to name a very few, but protest music grew and flourished during the Great Depression, spurred on - unfortunately - by shared misery. The Dust Bowl exile of the suddenly nomadic Okies was musically documented by a young Woody Guthrie through tunes like "If You Ain't Got The Do-Re-Mi", but the style and the content spread through popular music of the time. Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur have successfully resurrected some of these tunes for contemporary audiences. There is a definite link between protest music and reggae, which Jamaican artists have used to highlight social conditions and agitate for change, as well as rap, with its piercing commentaries on social disparity viewed from the street.

Seeger's place is firmly established as he protested everything from racism to poverty to war to cleaning up the Hudson, but he did it in a self effacing collegiate persona that opened the door for Peter,Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio among other folkie groups in the early 1960s. Seeger looked earnest and well groomed, the opposite end of the spectrum from Bob Dylan or the luminaries in the flourishing New York folk community of the time like Dave Van Ronk, Essentially, it was  protest music from the kid next door.

It seems doubtful that Seeger's legacy will be fulfilled in the same way that he stepped into Woody Guthrie's shoes. The element of protest is still there, but the message is not "We Shall Overcome" or "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?". The squeaky clean activists who politely demonstrated about moral causes have been replaced by flash mobs, cyberthreats, suicide bombers and terrorist acts that are clandestine and random. Yet you can bet that in some corner of America, in the thin and ragged network of coffee shops, community halls, and festivals that still host folk musicians, Seeger's epitaph is being played out tonight by another earnest folkie out to change the world - for Pete's sake.