Pete Seeger - 100 years since his birth

Pete Seeger was born on MAY 3, 1919.  He would have been 100 this yer but he died six years ago, aged 94. 

For those too young to know who Pete Seeger was, he was the balladeer of the Labor struggle and then of the Anti-war movement.  
Both of those peoples' movements were of great interest and importance to me.  My father was an ardent union man.  We was a treasurer for his union for many years, a dangerous job in those days.  The treasurer before him had been disabled when a thug threw acid in his face.  My father wasn't a religious man but I always said the Labor Movement was his religion.  

Anyhow, folk singers like Pete Singer helped push my latent interest into actual research.  I read the biographies of great union heroes like Joe Hill, after hearing "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.  But Joe, your ten years dead said I; I never died said he.  I never died said he?"  Their efforts on behalf of there fellow men always moved me.  They were brave and stalwart and they changed the lives of the millions who came after them.  Like Joe Hill, many were beaten, murdered, and jailed, but they never gave up.  

Another old union song that used to move my heart was "Brother can you spare a dime."

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodly dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drum

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Why don't…

And as for the peace movement, it was boys my age who were drafted and sent to Vietnam regardless of their conscience or their emotional or mental readiness.  To be forced into the military against your will and shipped out to a country to kill or die when you didn't believe in any of it, was to me, the soul of injustice.  It reminded me of one of the things we fought for in the Revolution, to stop England from raiding our ships and ports and conscripting American men to their navy.  Conscription is the opposite of the right to Life and Liberty.  If you don't own your own life, what do you own?

Some of the injustices perpetrated against our own citizens are heartbreaking and fill you with despair.  I am thinking of the protest of the veterans of World War I when they were denied their benefits after the war, and they camped outside the White House and the cavalry was called out against them, and our own soldiers beat and shot and trampled our own veterans.  

Pete Seeger sang about these things and educated us about those parts of our history often eft out of the history books.  He followed in the hallowed foot steps of Woodie Guthried and other balladeers of justice and courage.  He may be dead but he will never be forgotten.

A personal note:  the first album I ever bought with my own money, to play on the stereo turntable my father and mother had bought me for Christmas that year was a Pete Seeger album, the one with "Little houses, made of tricky tacky, and they all look just the same"  I got it, even as young as I was that it was a metaphor for conventional thinking and conventional behavior.  

His most famous anthem was probably, "We Shall Overcome"  which he learned from a woman who taught at the Labor School for the tobacco workers of Charleston, South Carolina.  I wish I still had my Pete Seeger album, but we can't hold on to everything or we would need a warehouse to live in.