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toshi seeger
Pete Seeger Labeled 'Subversive' After Speaking Out Against Plan to Deport Japanese
Newly released 1,700-page FBI file shows the US government 'went to lengths' to track beloved folk icon
Dec 18, 2015
The late beloved singer and activist Pete Seeger inspired countless worldwide with his songs about peace and equality, and--according to his newly released FBI file--he also inspired the ire of the U.S. government, which spied on the folk icon for decades and labeled him a "subversive" for his Communist sympathies.
The 1,700-page tome, handed over by the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act, was revealed in an Associated Press report on Saturday.
Among the revelations was that the U.S. military launched an investigation into the young singer in 1942 after Seeger sent a letter to the California American Legion condemning the group's resolution "advocating the deportation of all Japanese, citizens or not, and barring all Japanese descendants from citizenship."
"We're fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism," Seeger wrote in the letter, which was penned as the U.S. government was actively forcing Japanese-American citizens to live in government internment camps.
After scouring his letters and school records and interviewing family members, ex-landlords, and friend Woody Guthrie, the U.S. military eventually concluded that Seeger's association with known communists and his Japanese-American fiancee, the late Toshi Seeger "pointed to a risk of divided loyalty," the AP reports.
In one excerpt, the investigator who interviewed Guthrie reportedly noted the singer's guitar, famously emblazoned with "This Machine Kills Fascists." Of the inscription, the investigator wrote: "It is this agent's opinion that this bears out the belief that the Almanac Players"--of which Guthrie and Singer belonged--" were active singing Communist songs and spreading propaganda."
The AP notes that the FBI went to "lengths...to keep tabs on the singer's travels, performances, and rally appearances at least into the 1970s." Seeger, who died in January 2014, was an active singer and activist until his death at age 94.
According to the reporting, the National Archives plans to release additional Seeger files in the future.
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So Long, Pete & Toshi Seeger, It's Been Amazingly Great to Know You...
Jan 28, 2014
Toshi and Pete Seeger defy description except through the sheer joy and honor it was to know them, however briefly.
Their list of accomplishments will fill many printed pages, which all pale next to the simple core beauty of the lives they led.
They showed us it's possible to live lives that somehow balance political commitment with joy, humor, family, courage and grace. All of which seemed to come as second nature to them, even as it was wrapped in an astonishing shared talent that will never cease to inspire and entertain.
Pete passed on Monday, at 94, joining Toshi, who left us last year, at 91. They'd been married nearly 70 years.
Somehow the two of them managed to merge an unending optimism with a grounded, realistic sense of life in all its natural travails and glories.
Others who knew them better than I will have more specific to say, and it will be powerful and immense.
But, if it's ok with you, I'd like to thank them for two tangible things, and then for the intangible but ultimately most warming.
First: In 1978, we of the Clamshell Alliance were fighting the nuclear reactors being built at Seabrook, NH. An amazing grassroots movement had sprung up. With deep local roots, it helped birth the campaign for a nuke-free/green-powered Earth that still evolves.
We had staged successful civil disobedience actions in 1976-7 that grew from Ron Rieck solo climbing a weather tower (in January!) to 18 arrests to 180. Then in April, 1977, some 2,000 folks came from all over the U.S. to an occupation whose 1,414 arrests filled the Granite State's National Guard armories for two media-saturated weeks.
In the summer of 1978 a complex, controversial chain of events led us to shift from a civil disobedience action to a legal rally. It was daring, difficult and divisive. We had no idea what would happen.
But the weekend dawned with bright sunshine ... and with Pete! Joined by Jackson Browne and John Hall, their presence helped transform a challenging gathering into something truly transcendent. It was, like Pete himself, an unassuming miracle.
Thirty years later our sister Connie Hogarth brought me to Pete and Toshi's hillside cabin overlooking the Hudson, not far enough from Indian Point. With utter nonchalance Pete had built one of the world's first electric vehicles by gutting the engine from an old pick-up and filling it with car batteries. It got him to town and back. It did the job.
Like the Clearwater. A boat to sail the Hudson. To do it well while making a point about the Earth and what she needs.
They chopped wood and made preserves and it was all so comfortably grounded. Toshi had a deeply affecting grace, an irresistible combination of firm direction and gentle wisdom. And those sparkling eyes. What a glorious partnership!
But I had an agenda. I wanted a song for Solartopia, a vision of a green-powered Earth. And who was a pischer like me to ask?
Pete's response was instant, warm, enthusiastic. He whipped out that legendary banjo of his and within five minutes he had a song. A good one.
He asked me to write some verses, then gently informed me that as a songwriter, I should keep my day job (which would've been great if I had one!).
So he handed me a set of envelopes carefully addressed to various lyricists. We kicked the thing around for a year or so.
Then his wonderful colleague David Bernz came up with verses Pete liked. Joined by Dar Williams and a chorus of "Rivertown Kids," they recorded it in a single take, and it found its way on to an album that won a Grammy.
Something only Pete Seeger could have done. Because for all the catalogue of his political battles, his unshakable integrity and his giving nature, this was a guy with an astonishing talent.
Someone who could help conjure a political anthem like "If I Had a Hammer" and then help join it with a gorgeous love song like "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine."
A man who conspired to give the picket lines of the world "We Shall Overcome" and then took "Turn, Turn, Turn" from the Bible to a rock anthem.
A performer who could sing and sing well deep into his nineties, his innate sense of justice and dignity completely in tact.
So we could go on and on like that, but Pete and Toshi wouldn't have had the patience for it. Their longevity was a great gift. It gave us all time to appreciate them, to assess what meant the most to so many of us about them, to understand the beauty of their mentoring.
These were people who knew who they were and stayed true to it. They were incredibly talented. They raised their kids, lived on the land, learned as they went along, embraced new things, but stayed true to an abiding faith in compassion and grace.
So now ... with tears of gratitude and joy ... so long, dear friends.
How good it's been for all of us to know you.
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Pete Seeger: The Man Who Brought Politics to Music
One of Pete Seeger's greatest achievements was incorporating political activism into music, and realizing that liberation struggles need a soundtrack
Jan 28, 2014
Pete Seeger was a good man. There aren't many musicians you can say that about without seeming simplistic. Music is often progressed by flawed, volatile, glamorous egotists, and thank God for them. But Seeger carved out his place in history with a quieter, rarer set of qualities: nobility, generosity, humility and, when things got rough, breathtaking courage. Perhaps uniquely, he became one of the most important singers in America without ever being a star, because he believed in the song rather than the singer.
Seeger was born into privilege but not convention. His father Charles, an Ivy League professor and composer, was a pacifist and founding member of the leftwing Composers' Collective, and he came to embrace the radical potential of folk music. Pete was an intense, idealistic Harvard dropout when, in 1940, the folklorist Alan Lomax introduced him to Woody Guthrie. Said Lomax: "You can date the renaissance of American folk song from that night."
This impassioned trio brought folk music to the cities and the airwaves. Lomax was the song collector and facilitator, Guthrie the charismatic Dust Bowl poet, and Seeger the man who got America singing. He didn't have a remarkable voice but it was clear and strong and it never got in the way of the material, which was the point. A great believer in the power of communal singing, he saw himself as just a catalyst: a means to an end. He crafted songs - both his own compositions (If I Had a Hammer, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?) and existing ones that he adapted - so that anyone could sing them. Describing We Shall Overcome, which he adapted and popularized, he said: "It's the genius of simplicity. Any damn fool can get complicated."
Even if he had wanted to be a star, America's politics were against him. His first group, the Almanac Singers, collapsed during the second world war when their previous role as entertainers at Communist meetings was exposed. Returning to America after serving in the Pacific, Seeger saw two cherished projects fail: his organization People's Songs, an organization to "get America singing", and the presidential campaign of the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace. He was hounded, sometimes violently, by the right. His new band, the Weavers, briefly became sensations, but the Red Scare ripped them apart in 1952. And there was worse to come.
Pete Seeger talks about the history of "We Shall Overcome" (2006)Pete Seeger, in a conversation with Tim Robbins for Pacifica Radio, talks about the history of the song "We Shall Overcome" ...
Summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, Seeger refused to wriggle out of trouble by taking the Fifth and made himself an "unfriendly" witness. While awaiting trial for contempt of Congress, and likely imprisonment, he threw himself into the civil rights movement. It was Seeger who introduced Martin Luther King to We Shall Overcome and advised civil rights activist to form their own group, the Freedom Singers. "Songs have accompanied every liberation movement in history," he wrote. "These songs will reaffirm your faith in the future of mankind."
Seeger was also the forefather of the folk revival. In 1962, the same week his legal troubles were finally over, Peter, Paul and Mary took Where Have All the Flowers Gone? into the Top 40. But the revival ran away from him, thanks to Bob Dylan. The oft-told anecdote about him trying to take an axe to the power cables during Dylan's electric set at Newport in 1965 isn't true (it was a figure of speech) but he was certainly let down that Dylan would rather be a mercurial rock star than the darling of the folk-loving left. In that respect, he ended up on the wrong side of history but, having worked tirelessly and risked jail in the service of an ideal, he was justified in feeling disappointed. He soon got over it.
As a songwriter, Seeger was never mainstream again, not least because his protest songs were snubbed by broadcasters. With 60s anti-war songs such as Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Bring Them Home, he was largely preaching to the choir. But he retained his power to popularise other people's songs. At a New York hootenanny in 1946, he was the first to make Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land feel like a new American classic and 23 years later he led half a million anti-war protesters in a chorus of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance, which, he said, "united the crowd as no speech or song had been able to all afternoon". In 1974, he was the first to record Estadio Chile, the last song Victor Jara wrote before his murder by General Pinochet's thugs.
Throughout his 94 years, Seeger's principles never wavered, his optimism never faltered. His biographers couldn't find anyone with a bad word to say about him. He lived with his wife Toshi for 70 years, until her death last summer. He apologized without reservation for his naivete about Stalin, although he still considered himself a communist. He remained a committed activist and supporter of numerous causes. He lent a hand to countless musicians in many countries. Even in old age, he kept singing, notably at President Obama's inauguration and Occupy Wall Street. His voice may have grown shaky but it carried with it the history of the American left since the New Deal. He would have considered it neglectfully selfish to retire.
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