Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seegerwas an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth3 May 1919
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing good that doesn't have bad consequences and nothing bad that doesn't have good consequences.
Some folklorists just collected dead bones from one graveyard, only to bury them in another, their library.
If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.
Well, it's one of the things that will. Words are good, and words help us become the leading species on earth to the point where we are now ready to wipe ourselves off the earth. But I think that all the arts are needed, and sports too, and cooking, food, and all these different ways of communication. Smiles, looking into eyes directly, all these different means of communication are needed to save this world. But certainly a great melody
We all go to different churches or no churches, we have different favorite foods, different ways of making love, different ways of doing all sorts of things, but there we're all singing together. Gives you hope.
To everything there is a season.
Looking back, I think I tried to be too eclectic. Sometimes I'd sing thirty songs, and fifteen of them were not in English.
If there is a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.
The world will be solved by millions of small things.
But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.
Anybody who wants to learn everything is pretty stupid. You learn what you can.
I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known.
Work in nightclubs was interesting. There were interesting people and places, but by and large, the commercial music experience.
In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.