Seeger Banjo Views

General Goods

As well as laying out the facts of a life, The Power of Song amounts to a brief history of 20th century American moments and movements -- the Depression-era labor movement, the Second World War (Seeger went off banjo in hand), the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and finally the environmental movement. He joined and later drifted out of the Communist Party ( I was against race discrimination and the communists were against race discrimination; I was in favor of unions and the communists were in favor of unions ), which led him in due course to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he simply said that his politics were none of their business. And he quit the Weavers, with whom he had known success, because he did not want to sing in a cigarette ad.

Through it all, Seeger, whose banjo reads, This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender, strove to make music an instrument of change. He says of wife Toshi, accounted by more than one person in and out of her family to have made possible Seeger's non-careerist career, Her running joke has been, 'If only Peter would chase women instead of chasing causes I'd have an excuse to leave him.'

In 1943, Pete married Toshi-Aline Ōta, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. Pete and Toshi have three children: Daniel (an accomplished photographer and filmmaker), Mika, and Tinya—and grandchildren Tao, Cassie, Kitama, Moraya, Penny, and Isabelle. Tao is a folk musician in his own right, singing and playing guitar, banjo and harmonica with the Mammals. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was associate producer of the PBS documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Though Pete Seeger's parents were both professional musicians, they didn't press him to play an instrument. On his own, Pete gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it, while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina in 1936, while traveling with his father (then a director of Roosevelt's Farm Resettlement program),[9] It changed his life forever. He spent much of the next four years trying to master the instrument.