The Band of Heaven

[eborr]

Standing at the back the keeping our music grounded is Trevor Boulder, as McCormick in The Telegraph so beautifuly put it another of the Spiders from Mars has returned to the stars, you may not recognise the name but he played on Bowies most timeless songs, Ziggy Stardust, Jean-Genie, Life on Mars, Panic in Detroit

[eborr]

Lou Reed fled this mortal coil today, I just heard the news, it was the top story on the BBC radio. I was 10 years too young to hear the first manifestation of the the Velvet Underground, so I came to him late via Bowie.

I am feeling genuinely a little bereft, which surprises me, as he isn't someone I listen to every day. From he brief time in Tin Pan alley he learned the craft of song writing, and he became a formidible wordsmith, able to evoke pictures of New York's sceptic underbelly and those who inhabited it. What made Lou and the other Velvets special, was that during the summer of peace and love, they wrote songs about the wild side, and challenged the Californians who were getting high and counting petals.

Lou could when he wanted write a great love song, how many of us having tasted bliss with a partner wouldn't mutter under our breathes perfect day.

Lou Reed wrote some bad records, was not 'the nicest of men, and was responsiblecfor dooming at least one adolescent love affaire of mine. I feel very sad that there will not be a new Lou Reed Lp to look forward to

[Impenitent]

Arik Einstein died Tuesday 26 November.

He's probably unknown to most here, as all his music was in Hebrew. Thoughtful songs that reflected his life experience as an Israeli born in Tel Aviv, of the land around him, of conflict and peace and love. He was Israel's most respected singer/songwriter for more than 4 decades, and his gentle baritone is so evocative for me of a particular, important period of my late teens and early twenties.

Live on Arik

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Pete Seeger, the dean of American Folk Music, has passed on to the band of heaven at 94

If anyone 'had a hammer' it was him. RIP.

[Teremia]

Now that's my childhood soundtrack! There was one Pete Seeger record in particular that my mother would play every night as we (in theory) fell asleep--one side of it ended in this slooooow go-to-sleeeeeeeep-now-children called "One Grain of Sand." I hated that song (because it was so obviously being used as a weapon against us), but I LOVED the rest of that wonderful record.
Rest in peace, Pete Seeger!

[Passdagas the Brown]

RIP Mister Seeger. You have a new land to claim as your own!

[Sunsilver]

Moving my posts over from the other thread, so V-man can delete it:


One of my heroes has left us. Activist, musician, folklorist, and American icon, Pete Seeger has passed away.

Blacklisted for decades after being accused of supporting communism by the notorious Un-American Activities Committee, Seeger was finally allowed to return to the airwaves during the '60s. He was a big supporter of the civil rights movement during the '60,s and his song "We Shall Overcome" became its anthem. No doubt that was one of the main reasons he was invited to sing on stage for President Obama's inauguration gala. It was history coming full circle, at the feet of Abraham Lincoln's memorial. One of the last times Seeger sang in that venue was the day of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I wept tears of joy as he, Bruce Springsteen and others belted out "This Land is Your Land", the folk music classic made famous by Pete's pal, Woody Guthrie.

Today I'm weeping another kind of tears, as we mourn his loss at age 94.

Seeger remained active and involved with music and different social causes right up until the end. In 2011, he marched the streets to support the "Occupy" movement. His family reports that just 10 days before his death, he was out chopping wood at the cabin he built in Beacon, New York.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/2 ... 78019.html

[Sunsilver]

I found a much better summary of his life and contributions to this world here:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/man-both-simpl ... 10256.html

Pete Seeger was a complicated man with a simple message: Make the world better, and be kind while doing it. To accomplish these goals, he harnessed hundreds of years of musical tradition into a single banjo and a single, unyielding human voice.

It is tempting, from the short-memory vantage point of today, to see only the white-haired grandfather, mellowed with age, already accustomed to (if slightly uncomfortable with) being treated as an American icon. But that would be unwise. The belly fire inside Seeger — the one that drove the musical movement that propelled him, and that he propelled — was that of a young rebel unsatisfied with anything but energetically chasing his dreams of a more just America.

Oh yeah. Well said! Think I'll go watch "The Power of Song" one more time, in his memory!

[Dave_LF]

I started playing the acoustic guitar in my later teenage years and discovered folk music at the same time. My parents bought me one of Seeger's CDs during that phase and I've lost count of the number of times I've spun it around. It must have been immensely satisfying for him to play at Obama's election. The world has come a long way, and we have people like Pete to thank for that.

[Sunsilver]

Here's a link to that historic performance at Obama's inauguration. Some of the verses of the original song are a cry for social justice, and are rarely heard. They got to sing those, too!

http://unionsong.com/seeger.html

Please click on the other link, the one giving the history of the March on Washington. I had no idea the march was made in such a climate of fear: (Hey, I was only 10 years old at the time...)

As the first ceremony of such magnitude ever initiated and dominated by African Americans, the march also was the first to have its nature wholly misperceived in advance. Dominant expectations ran from paternal apprehension to dread. On Meet the Press, reporters grilled Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King about widespread foreboding that "it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting." Life magazine declared that the capital was suffering "its worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run." The Pentagon readied 19,000 troops in the suburbs and the jails shifted inmates to other prisons to make room for those arrested in mass arrests; the city banned all sales of alcoholic beverages; hospitals made room for riot casualties by postponing elective surgery.

[Sunsilver]

A fitting eulogy for Pete, in his own words:

To My Old Brown Earth

To my old brown earth,
And my old blue sky,
I’ll now give these last few molecules of “I”

And you who sing
And you who stand nearby,
I do charge you not to cry.

Guard well our human chain
Watch well you keep it strong
As long as sun will shine.

And this our home,
Keep pure and sweet and green,
For now I’m yours,
And you are also mine.

Pete Seeger, 1958
(c) 1964, Stormking Music

The YouTube video of the song is from Pete's flim, The Power of Song. The harmonies in the second half are beautiful and moving. Most of the scenes are from Pete's homestead near Beacon, New York, and show how closely he lived to the land. It also shows him still out on the front lines, campaigning for causes that were dear to his heart. He kept that 'fire in the belly' right up to the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YwKPOgz5o

[sniff!]

[Jude]

I'm not well-versed in pop music, so I was unfamiliar with Pete Seeger until just a couple of months ago - I was searching for versions of the song "Jennie Jenkins" and came up with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iCkCIBDRyE

I was absolutely charmed by how he and Jean Ritchie are having fun with the song. And that was my introduction to Pete Seeger

[Passdagas the Brown]

I would characterize him as more "folk" than "pop."

[Sunsilver]

I think Jude classifies music into two basic categories: classical and pop.

Jude, if that's your introduction to Seeger, you've got another 6 decades of catching up to do... Have fun!

Seeger was also inducted into the rock and roll Hall of Fame the same year he won a Grammy. His music crossed cultural, ethnic and political boundaries.

Religious boundaries, too. He was invited to play at Arlo Guthrie's Bar Mitzvah., probably the only hootenanny Bar Mitzvah the world has ever known!

[Jude]

I think Jude classifies music into two basic categories: classical and pop.

Wrong.

1. Classical
2. Early Baroque
3. Late Baroque
4. Renaissance
5. Medieval
6. Romantic
7. Everything else

[Primula Baggins]

Works for me.

[eborr]

Listening to Pete Seeger reminds us no matter what the perception is that there is a whole lot of the USA is not red-kneck.

[Sunsilver]

I often wonder how Old Abe would have reacted to the inauguration. I bet he would have been grinning from ear to ear, and tapping his toe in time to the music!

[Sunsilver]

The story of how "We Shall Overcome" came to be.

This is SO beautiful, I just had to share! And the song is still keeping on: parents of children with cancer are using it to inspire their kids to keep on fighting! it was also played hourly over the loudspeaker system to help keep those working at the ruins of the World Trade Centre after 9/11 from becoming depressed.

What a WONDERFUL illustration of the folk process!

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger, can you tell us about "We Shall Overcome"?


PETE SEEGER: I thought, in 1946, when I learned it from a white woman who taught in a union labor school, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, that the song had been made up in 1946 by tobacco workers, because they sang it there to strike through the winter of 1946 in Charleston, South Carolina, and they taught the song to Zilphia Horton, the teacher at the labor school, and she said, "Oh, it was my favorite song." And I printed it in our little magazine in New York, People’s Songs, as "We Will Overcome" in 1947.


It was a friend of mine, Guy Carawan, who made it famous. He picked up my way of singing it, "We Shall Overcome," although there was another teacher there, Septima Clark, a Black woman. She felt that "shall" — like me, she felt it opened up the mouth better than "will," so that’s the way she sang it. Anyway, Guy Carawan in 1960 taught it to the young people at the founding convention of SNCC, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC for short. And a month later, it wasn’t a song, it was the song, throughout the South.


Only two years ago, I get a letter from a professor in Pennsylvania, who uncovered an issue of the United Mine Workers Journal of February 1909, and a letter there on front page says, "Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome.'" So it’s probably a late 19th century union version of what was a well-known gospel song. I’ll overcome, I’ll overcome, I’ll overcome some day.


AMY GOODMAN: You sang it for Martin Luther King?


PETE SEEGER: In 1957, I went down to Highlander. Zilphia was dead, and Myles Horton, her husband, said, "We can’t have a celebration of 25 years with this school without music. Won’t you come down and help lead some songs?" So I went down, and Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy came up from Alabama to say a few words, and I sang a few songs, and that was one of them. Ann Braden drove King to a speaking engagement in Kentucky the next day; and she remembers him sitting in the back seat, saying, "'We Shall Overcome.' That song really sticks with you, doesn’t it?" But he wasn’t the song leader. It wasn’t until another three years that Guy Carawan made it famous.


AMY GOODMAN: Jim Musselman, do you want to add to that?


JIM MUSSELMAN: Yes, I just wanted to interject one thing. Pete has always said that the beauty of a song is how it can be used and reused and changed for different movements and everything, and the song "We Shall Overcome," which was used in the Civil Rights Movement was then used in Tiananmen Square and used in so many movements around the world; and when we put out the first volume of The Songs of Pete Seeger, I did the song "We Shall Overcome" with Bruce Springsteen. And Bruce said, "I wanted to do a totally different version of the song," and he personalized it and sang it on a personal level, like he was singing it to one individual.


And everybody was at first criticizing us, saying, "Why would you take that song and personalize it to an individual?" And then I started getting letters from parents whose children had leukemia and they said they were singing Bruce’s version of the song to their child, that we’ll overcome this disease. And then after the Columbine massacre, one of the students out there played the song "We Shall Overcome" that Bruce Springsteen had done out at the Columbine funerals. And then, after September 11th, we got a call from NBC News on September 12th, and they wanted to do a video montage of the rescue workers, and they wanted to use Bruce’s song, "We Shall Overcome," and the song was played every single hour on the hour by NBC News, and it gave people a sense of hope and a soothing, not only because of Bruce’s voice, but also the song that they had known, which had been used to overcome so much adversity throughout our history.


And that’s the wonderful thing about the songs that Pete has found, is that they keep being used and used and used for different movements. And that’s the beauty of not only the songs, but the timeless nature of how they’re always going to be used for different things. And it’s just beautiful to see the way "We Shall Overcome" has been used in so many battles and so many people’s movements around the world.

Read the full interview here: http://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/3/we ... _hour_with

I especially like what Pete says at the end of the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. And for someone who isn’t so hopeful who is listening to this right now, trying to find their way, what would you say?


PETE SEEGER: Realize that little things lead to bigger things. That’s what Seeds is all about [three albums of songs Pete recorded for Appleseed Records.] And this wonderful parable in the New Testament: the sower scatters seeds. Some seeds fall in the pathway and get stamped on, and they don’t grow. Some fall on the rocks, and they don’t grow. But some seeds fall on fallow ground, and they grow and multiply a thousand fold. Who knows where some good little thing that you’ve done may bring results years later that you never dreamed of.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I remember hearing that interview when it was first aired. I also heard some it again when they replayed it on Democracy Now after Pete Seeger's passing into the realm of the ancestors.