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Folksy feel to rock and roll
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Absorbing the folk spirit and turning it into a crusade
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Cultural hero Peter Seeger
Peter Seeger’s interest in music began early. His father Charles Seeger, was a musicologist and his mother, a violin teacher. Both were on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music. He had learnt the banjo, ukulele and the guitar by his teens.
He developed an interest in America’s folk-music legacy at age 16 after attending a folk festival in North Carolina. He began working with noted folk archivist and field recorder Alan Lomax before travelling around the country and absorbing rural music.
He attended Harvard University and served the Army in World War II. In the 40s Seeger became a friend and singing associates of Woody Guthrie before forming the Weavers, an enormously popular folk quartet that popularised such folk chestnuts as On top of old smokey and Lead Belly’s Good Night Irene. Unquestionably, the foremost contemporary populariser of American music, his pop-folk success with the Weavers in the late 40s and through the 50s, when he was blacklisted by the Government, through the 60s, he became a cultural hero through his outspoken commitment to the anti-war and civil rights struggle.
He wrote a number of folk standards including, If I Had a Hammer (with Lee Hays) and Where have all the flowers gone? A gifted storyteller and music historian, he brought to his audiences not just the songs but the stories of the people who wrote and first sang them.
With the arrival of the Vietnam War protest, Seeger was rediscovered by a younger audience.
In 1965 the Byrds had a number 1 hit with Seeger’s, Turn!Turn!Turn!, a Biblical passage set to music.
He has crusaded for ecology with the Sloop Clearwater, giving concerts along the Hudson River. In 1994 he received the Presidential medal of the arts as well as the Kennedy Award.
He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame as an early influence in 1996.
A. GEORGE ANTONY
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