THE PETE SEEGER INTERVIEW: THE “SPIRITUAL FATHER” OF BEACON
by Owen Lipstein
Owen Lipstein: Beacon
seems to be a place where things are really starting to happen. What's your
perspective on that?
PS: Little Beacon, like most of the river towns, is a very
conservative little place. Franklin Roosevelt never carried Dutchess County. He
might have carried the country, but not Dutchess County. [Beacon was] a factory
town, originally Dutch and English, and then they became the Irish in the 1830s
and '40s. And then Italians and people from Eastern Europe. Then in World War
I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, and we got a whole lot of Greeks, Turks,
and Arabs. My neighbors are from Lebanon — they are pillars of the community
now — [but] when they first came they were camping out. They didn't have money
to build a house. Their kids lived in trees. Then following World War II, we
had a big influx of Latin Americans and African Americans. The Hudson River was
so dirty then that the ghetto of every town was along the river where the poor
people lived. Who wanted to live near the stinking river? The well-to-do people
lived in the hills a mile or two away, or more. The good and bad are so tangled
up now. The Clearwater sparked off a building boom. The Hudson Valley is now
doubling in population every 20 years. That can't go on forever.
OL: People are more involved as a group to clean up and
realize the importance of the river, and it's never been cleaner.
PS: One of the new developments, not just here but in many
parts of the world, is people are learning that they can start little projects
which will improve their city. Manhattan now has 800 community gardens. Can you
imagine that?
OL: That's the good news, that there are people who realize
that little things can make a difference.
PS: Also in New York, there is a hiking club called the
Shorewalkers. They don't go off and hike the beautiful Appalachians; they hike
around the shores of the five boroughs. I confess that when I was a kid I was
very against cities. I remember looking out of my parents' apartment — they
were music teachers at what is now Juilliard — and I saw a traffic jam. I said,
"Cities are stupid ... why don't people live in the country? That's a
sensible place to live." Well, at this late age in life, I am now
convinced the cities will save the world, because in the cities you learn how
to live on the same block with somebody who looks different, who goes to a
different church, who eats different food, dresses differently. In a small town
people say, "Oh, isn't it nice to be here. I am away from those
people."
OL: It's much easier to live with your biases in the
country.
PS: When you live on the same block with these people, speak
a different language and so on, you can even learn to say "Good
morning." That is one of the songs I am going to sing today — how do you
say "Hello" or "Good morning" in some other language? And
I'll get different people in the audience to say how.
OL: In the grand scheme of things, you see the good things
that are happening. How do you reconcile that with the should-be-impeached
George Bush and the shocking decline of this country?
PS: God only knows what the future is going to be. He gave
us brains, and if we use them, I think we have a 50-50 chance of the human race
being here in 100 years. There's a little story I told in a book that I hope to
get to press in a month or so. Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is
on the ground, because on that end there's a big basket of rocks in there. The
other end of the seesaw has got a basket one-quarter full of sand. Some of us
have teaspoons. We're trying to fill up that one with more sand. Most people
are laughing at us. They say, "Don't you see it's leaking out as fast as
you put it in. People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but
you're wasting your time."
We say, "No, we're looking at it closely and that
basket of sand is slowly filling up. We're getting more people with teaspoons
all the time." We think that one of these days, that basket of sand is
going to be more than half full, and that whole seesaw will go zoooop in the
other direction, and people will ask how it happened so suddenly. The whole
world will realize, unless we start working together, there will be no human
race here.
OL: How do you explain your own appeal over time across
generations, across ages, across genders, across political beliefs? How do you
explain the grace that you've had in putting your message out?
PS: I don't have a great voice, but I did learn some great
songs. If I get people joining in to sing them, they find it's kind of fun to
sing. Way back, almost 100 years ago, in 1910, John Philip Sousa, a great band
leader, said, "What will happen to the American voice now that the
phonograph has been invented?"
It's true. Men used to sing in bars; now they've got a TV
set there. Women used to sing lullabies to their kids; now it's 'Oh, put the
kid in front of the tube and he'll fall asleep." I'm not as optimistic as
people think. Matter of fact, if I'd been there thousands of years ago when
somebody invented the wheel, I would have said, "Don't!" On the other
hand, we have been given brains. You know what Einstein said? "Only two
things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about
the former."
OL: You have said, "Participatory music is so simple at
heart. My music allows people to participate." Would you comment on that?
PS: My guess is that participation is a basic human need
because for hundreds of thousands of years we lived in small tribal groups, and
if we didn't participate, we would die. When there was food, it was all shared.
Somebody shot a deer, there was no icebox, so you cut it up in little pieces
and everybody in the tribe got a piece. If there was hunger, everybody was
hungry. The chief was hungry. The wife and children were hungry. No thought of
one person well-fed and then next door someone not well-fed. This is a very
ancient tradition, and I think it's in our genes. For tens of thousands of
years, maybe millions of years, our ancestors have been walking on two feet,
and we started walking on two feet, we started throwing stones and swinging
clubs. This probably accounts for the popularity of golf and baseball and
tennis.
OL: How do you explain Beacon's renaissance?
PS: I can't explain it with any one thing, but little
things, like this little strawberry festival every June for now almost 30
years.
OL: Your little tablespoon theory?
PS: Teaspoons. I have friends in the Teaspoon Brigade. You
should come here on the last Saturday of every September. We have a big block
party on Main Street and you wouldn't believe it. It started 25 years ago.
There was a race riot at the high school and in trying to cool things off, they
started to have a Spirit of Beacon Day. It started with a few hundred, then
grew to a thousand and has steadily grown. Last year there were 7,000 or 8,000
people on the Main Street of Beacon. For $10 you can rent a little table and
you can give away [some of your material there], or you can sell something to
drink or something to eat, and there will be different kinds of music. The last
two years we've had some women from India with beautiful colored saris dancing
to Indian music with 200 people watching them.
OL: Who are your heroes?
PS: Well, I've got a whole batch, but one of the main ones
is Martin Luther King.
OL: Could you tell us why?
PS: When I was young, I thought of myself as an atheist, but
now I am very ecumenical. Martin Luther King taught me some real important
political lessons. He started with sitting down on a bus. That's a little side
issue. You aim at something you can win at. You aim for one of your opponent's
weak points and you capture it. And then you aim for another weak point and you
capture it, and finally you get to more important things like housing and
education and voting, and in the long run, you have to admit we're struggling
against something in our genes that says, "Don't trust people who look
different."
I only met him twice. When I first met him I sang the song
"We Shall Overcome," and a friend of mine drove him the next day up
to a speaking engagement in Kentucky, and she remembers him in the backseat saying,
"'We Shall Overcome' — that song really sticks with you, doesn't it?"
It was not well known then. It was a friend of mine that made it well known.
At the founding convention of a student nonviolent
coordinating committee, my friend Guy Keroan, another white man, was there, and
he taught the song to a few people months before, and they shouted out,
"Guy, teach us all 'We Shall Overcome,'" and it was the hip song of
the weekend. Then after the weekend, people all went to their homes, whether it
was in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, or West Virginia, and a month later, this wasn't
a song, it was THE song.
