Folk Singer Pete Seeger Dies at Age 94: RIP
To Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, the singer/songwriter/activist who died Monday at the age of 94 was “the father of American folk music.”
But Seeger, who popularized This Land Is Your Land and We Shall Overcome and wrote If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn, never liked the term folk music.
Before Congress during the red scare: “I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody,” he told the committee. “I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature. . . . I love my country very deeply.” “It’s been defined as the ‘music of the peasants,’” Seeger told USA TODAY in a 2009 interview, “and then you get someone saying (of Seeger), ‘he’s no peasant!”’
Seeger, who dropped out of Harvard University in 1938 to ride a bicycle across the country, quoted his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist: “My dad, the old professor, used to say, ‘Never get into an argument about what’s folk music and what isn’t.’”
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