According to Wikipedia (and when was it ever wrong?) Seeger’s first apology for having got it a teensy bit wrong politically came in his 1993 autobiography – but even then he sought to excuse himself with the sort of goofy, puerile argument that would see a ten-year old kicked off the Junior School Debating Team:
…today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader." I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She's part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American.If you're not feeling too bilious at the thought of an old man using his granddaughter as a human shield to deflect criticism, I'm sure you'll have noticed the plethora of flaws in this argument. For a start, Christians alive today weren’t around during the Inquisition, and, besides, very few of them were given the choice of whether to support it or not at the time. And when Seeger came up with this pitiful guff, there was no white person alive in America who'd had anything to do with slavery or stealing land from Injuns. As for the admittedly dodgy incarceration of Japanese-Americans in WWII, I wonder how many froze or starved to death while temporarily confined.
Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League in 1936 at the age of 17, before the sheer mind-boggling horror of Stalin’s Russia had become apparent, so we’ll give the idealistic kid from a privileged background a pass on that one. But ol’ banjo-totin’ Pete was 23 when he joined the grown-up Communist Party and would have had to be some kind of stupid not to have an inkling of what was going on back in Mother Russia, and, until he performed at a Solidarity benefit concert in 1982, he didn't even hint at any misgivings - despite, we’re told, having “disliked” Soviet-style Communism for decades: evidently not enough to speak out against the Soviet suppression of freedom movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or against the erection of the Berlin Wall, or against the Gulags, and not enough to prevent him from travelling to North Vietnam to give succour to yet another peace and freedom-loving Communist regime.
Seeger was evidently a fool or a hypocrite or both – and he deserved to be blacklisted. In his later years, when the music business had passed him by, the sheer monstrousness of communism had been exposed for all but the most wilfully blind to see, and it had become obvious that American workers were somewhat less interested in sitting around camp-fires singing "Kumbaya" than in raising their families in one of those “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” Seeger sneered at in his biggest hit (yes, I know this disgustingly smug slice of leftist snobbery was written by someone else), our hero of the people took up the cause of environmentalism in a big way – evidently unaware that communism’s crimes against nature were as heinous as those they committed against humanity.
Seeger’s voice was too mellow and his performing style too pious to interest me when I was growing up, but I appreciated the fact that he had played a major role in keeping alive the musical traditions of the “old, weird America” long enough to pass them on to the likes of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn. It was just a shame that he expected his successors to go on warbling away for all eternity about Joe Hill and the Wobblies and this land being our land to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars: his claim that he threatened to take an axe to the electric cable powering Bob Dylan and the Butterfield Blues Band’s raucous performance of “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival because he wanted everyone to hear the words is about as convincing as his miserable little wet fart of an apology for having worshipped Stalin. Here’s that Dylan performance - the vocals sound clear enough to me:
Still, Seeger wrote (or adapted) some great songs – here are some of my favourite versions of them by other artists:
I’ll end with Lilli von Shtupp doing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, because it’s unintentionally hilawious:
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