Similar artists to Pete Seeger — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm Tom Paxton (born Thomas Richard Paxton on October 31, 1937) is an American singer-songwriter of folk music whose songs have had enduring appeal… Don't want to see ads? Subscribe now Ramblin' Jack Elliott (born Elliott Charles Adnopoz, 1 August 1931) is a Grammy Award winning American folk performer. Originally from New York, Elliott… There are at least two artists that go by this name. The other is a current hip-hop producer. Odetta (December 31, 1930 - December 2, 2008)… 1000+ images about Music on Pinterest | Joan baez, Johnny cash and Bob dylan Bluegrass band: banjo, fiddle, mandolin, dobro, upright bass, guitar, and a harmonica. Now you just need a few talented folks!

See More Amazon.com: Pete Seeger - Song & A Stone: Pete Seeger, n/a: Movies & TV Pete Seeger - Song & A Stone Pete Seeger (Actor), n/a (Director) Rated: NR Arrives before Christmas. Choose delivery option in checkout. Sling Television: 14 days FREE Watch Live TV Programming Any Time and Anywhere. Simple monthly pricing, no long-term contracts or hidden fees. Watch now See all buying options $19.95 Free Shipping for Prime Members | Fast, FREE Shipping with Amazon Prime Only 3 left in stock (more on the way). Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available. Frequently Bought Together One of these items ships sooner than the other. Show details Buy the selected items together This item:Pete Seeger - Song & A Stone by Pete Seeger DVD $19.95 Only 3 left in stock (more on the way). Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. FREE Shipping on orders over $49. Details Pete Seeger: The Power of Song by Joan Baez DVD $19.49 In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. FREE Shipping on orders over $49.

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) Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 DVD Release Date: October 7, 2014 Run Time: 85 minutes By Anthony McGill on October 23, 2014 Format: DVD Verified Purchase Wonderful to have this old 1972 Bob Elfstrom documentary on Pete Seeger available on DVD. This film was made when Pete was still battling the cruelties of the blacklist and at times the film is a little creaky but the message of peace and good will that the filmmakers are sending is so overwhelming that you are willing to forgive the dodgy sound that pops up every now and again, at least on my copy. My admiration for Pete goes back a long, long way and it was extremely sad to lose him recently but if any of us had led half as a rewarding life as Pete did with his unyielding commitment to peace, human rights and environmentalism, we would be very satisfied and the world would be a heck of a lot better off.

This forty year old documentary which I had not seen before highlights such events as his anti-Vietnam war stance, his battle to clean up the Hudson with the Clearwater sloop, a rare appearance on television on the Johnny Cash Show, his remembrances of Woody Guthrie and family gatherings especially with wife Toshi and with his father, the renowned musicologist Charles Seeger. And of course many, many great folk songs performed in Pete's unforgettable style. N.B. My copy bought through Amazon is a European DVD but it has region zone "0" listed on the back. Although I have a region free player and am able to play all zones, I was under the impression that "0" (as this DVD is) indicated "zone free" and could be played on any type of DVD player. The Joan Baez Web Pages - Official Bio Joan Baez Bowery Songs, the newest album from Joan Baez and her first live album in ten years, is a soaring chronicle of her 2003-2004 tour. The album was recorded in its entirety on the Saturday night after Election Day, November 2004, at New York's Bowery Ballroom.

From Joan's opening acapella benediction, "Finlandia," to her prophetic and telling versions of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and Steve Earle's "Jerusalem" that close the album, there can be no mistaking the medium and the message she sought to capture. One of the album's centerpieces is Earle's "Christmas in Washington" ("So come back Woody Guthrie/Come back to us now..."), one of three ‘Bowery songs’ that originated on Joan's most recent studio album Dark Chords On a Big Guitar (released in September 2003). The others are Greg Brown's "Rexroth's Daughter" (whose lyric gave the album its title) and Natalie Merchant's "Motherland," all of which have become staples in Joan's repertoire. The spirit of Woody Guthrie hovers throughout Bowery Songs. Joan has been singing "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" since the 1960s, but this is her first live release of the song. Bob Dylan also figures in the program.

"Farewell, Angelina" was the title tune of her 1965 LP that contained two Guthrie songs and four Dylan songs, one of which was "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Joan also assays Dylan's "Seven Curses" of 1963, which was his free adaptation of the old Child ballad "The Maid Freed From the Gallows" aka "Anathea." Another tune associated with Dylan and his mentor Dave Van Ronk is "Dink's Song," collected by Alan Lomax, which Joan sang with Bob on 1976's Rolling Thunder Revue.

As on all of her previous live albums, Bowery Songs fulfills Joan's objective of spanning as much of her career as possible - from "Silver Dagger" (the opening song of her first solo LP of 1960), "Jackaroe" (first heard on 1963's In Concert, Part 2, later to become a staple of the Grateful Dead's songbook), and "Joe Hill" (sung by Joan at Woodstock), to the venerable Irish "Carrickfergus" (first heard on her 1989 album, Speaking of Dreams) and the songs from 2003's Dark Chords On a Big Guitar. Bowery Songs includes four songs that Joan has never recorded before: "Finlandia," "Seven Curses," "Dink's Song," and "Jerusalem." Bowery Songs reminds us that at crucial moments during her long and storied career - which is to say, at crucial moments in America's history over the past four decades and then some - Joan has recorded and released live performance albums that have served as critical barometers of our times.

1963's In Concert, Part 1 and In Concert, Part 2 LPs (Vanguard) were recorded during Joan's first full-scale major cross-country tours, just three years into the start of her career in the heat of the Civil Rights movement and the nascent Free Speech and anti-war struggles, and in the blush of he early involvement with the music and soul of Bob Dylan. A dozen years later, From Every Stage (A&M) was a verite recording that documented Joan's summer tour of 1975 with a 4-piece band. The double-LP set a standard by including songs ‘from every stage’ of Joan's career, from her earliest hymns, Civil Rights solidarity anthems, and Bob Dylan songs, to such contemporary crowd-pleasers as "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Diamonds and Rust." During the 1980s, when Joan was free of any major label associations in the U.S., she released several live chronicles of her European tours. The first of these, European Tour (CBS), was an album that, once again, presented songs from the entire span of her career, with several foreign language titles.

(Unreleased in America, the LP remains out-of-print.) Live Europe '83: Children of the Eighties (Ariola) continued the trend. Joan refined the concept for her next live album, 1989's Diamonds and Rust in the Bullring (Gold Castle), recorded in Bilbao, Spain; the album's first six numbers were sung in English, followed by six in Spanish. Back in the U.S., her most recent live album was 1995's Ring Them Bells (Guardian), an all-star affair recorded at the Bottom Line in New York, featuring collaborations with Mary Black, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Mimi Farina, Tish Hinojosa, Janis Ian, Indigo Girls, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and Dar Williams. Thus, the release of Bowery Songs is framed in rich tradition, capturing the work of an artist whose finest moments often happen onstage. It's been told that some artists live in history - and the lives of other artists are history. From the very beginning of her musical career, Joan Baez has never sought to draw lines between real world, real time events and her own artistic vision.

Dark Chords on a Big Guitar (September 2003), Joan's first album of studio recordings in six years is a fresh collection from contemporary songwriters whose work resonates with Joan Baez. The songs are drawn from the pens of Ryan Adams ("In My Time Of Need"), Greg Brown ("Sleeper" and "Rexroth's Daughter," whose lyric gives the album its title), Caitlin Cary ("Rosemary Moore"), Steve Earle ("Christmas In Washington"), Joe Henry ("King's Highway"), Natalie Merchant ("Motherland"), Josh Ritter ("Wings"), and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings ("Elvis Presley Blues" and "Caleb Meyer"). Joan's appreciation of distinctive songwriting - a hallmark of her recordings and performances ever since she first stepped on a stage - has been heightened over the past decade as a result of collaborative mentoring with an impressive roster of younger artists and songwriters. After attending an early Indigo Girls concert in 1990 (the year after their major label album debut) and then playing concerts together, Joan reinforced her belief in the current generation of songwriters' ability to speak to her.

When Joan's album Play Me Backwards came out in 1992, it featured songs by Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Hiatt, John Stewart, and others. Each new album since then has incorporated its share of exciting material, often juxtaposed with songs that reflect Joan's rich folk music heritage. Every song chosen by Joan for Dark Chords on a Big Guitar speaks to the times in which we live - could Joan Baez have recorded an album that did anything less? From her earliest LPs, when she introduced a wider audience to songs written by Bob Dylan (whose career has intertwined with Joan's since 1961), Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Richard Farina, Johnny Cash, Donovan, Malvina Reynolds, Tim Hardin, and others, Joan was charting new waters. She was among the singers who rejected the hit parade and established a precedent whereby the music of a new generation became the conscience for an emerging era of social activism. At a time in our country's history when it was neither safe nor fashionable, Joan put herself on the line countless times, and her life's work was mirrored in her music.

She sang about freedom and Civil Rights everywhere, from the backs of flatbed trucks to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest miltary spending, and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley. A year later she co-founded the Institute For The Study of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Joan Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages, and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a Christmas vigil. The following year she turned her attention to the draft resistance movement. As the war in Vietnam escalated in the late '60s and early '70s, she traveled to Hanoi with the U.S.-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast. The soundtrack to those times was provided by a stunning soprano whose natural vibrato lent a taut, nervous tension to everything she sang.

Yet even as an 18-year-old, introduced onstage at the first annual Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and during her apprenticeship on the Boston-Cambridge coffeehouse folk music circuit leading up to the recording of her first solo album for Vanguard Records in the summer of 1960, Joan's repertoire reflected a different sensibility from her peers. In the traditional songs she mastered, there was an acknowledgment of the human condition - underdogs in the first, inequity among the races, the desperation of poverty, the futility of war, romantic betrayal, unrequited love, spiritual redemption, and grace. Hidden within the traditional ballads and blues, lullabies, Carter Family songs, cowboy tunes, and ethnic folk staples were messages that won Joan strong followings here and abroad.

Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that would find their ways into the rock vernacular were "House Of The Rising Sun" (The Animals), "John Riley" (The Byrds), "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" (Led Zeppelin), "What Have They Done To The Rain" (the Searchers), "Jackaroe" (Grateful Dead), and "Long Black Veil" (The Band), to name but a few. "Geordie," "House Carpenter," and "Matty Groves" became staples for a multitude of British artists whose origins are traced to three seminal groups: Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span. In the wake of the Beatles, the definition of what constituted folk music - a solo performer with an acoustic guitar - broadened significantly and liberated many artists. Rather than following the pack into amplified folk-rock, Joan recorded three remarkable LPs with classical instrumentation. Later, when the time was right, as the '60s turned into the '70s, she began recording in Nashville.

It provided the backdrop for her last four albums on Vanguard Records (including her biggest career single, a cover of The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down") and her first two releases on A&M. Within the context of those albums and the approaching end of hostilities in Southeast Asia, Joan decided to cast light on the suffering of those living in Chile under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. To those people she dedicated her first album sung entirely in Spanish, a record that inspired Linda Ronstadt, later in the '80s, to begin recording the Spanish songs of her heritage. One of the songs Joan sang on that album, "No Nos Moveran" (We Shall Not Be Moved), had been banned from public singing in Spain for more than forty years under Generalissimo Franco's rule, and was excised from copies of the album sold there. Joan became the first major artist to sing the song publicly when she performed it on a controversial television appearance in Madrid in 1977, three years after the dictator's death.

Joan's productive years at A&M Records in the 1970s included the landmark release of her self-penned "Diamonds & Rust" single, the title track of an album that included songs by Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band - and Bob Dylan. His Rolling Thunder Revues of late 1975 and 1976 (and resulting movie Renaldo and Clara, released in 1978) would co-star Joan Baez. Later that year she traveled to Northern Ireland and marched with the Irish Peace People, calling for an end to the violence plaguing the country. Even as she began brief associations with new record labels in the late '70s (CBS Portrait) and after a long hiatus, the late '80s (Gold Castle), Joan Baez did not diminish her political activities. She appeared at rallies on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement, and performed at benefit concerts to defeat California's Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative), legislation that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools.

She received the American Civil Liberties Union's Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues, and founded Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which she headed for the next 13 years. After winning the San Francisco Bay Area Music Award (BAMMY) as top female vocalist in 1978 and 1979, a number of film and video and live recordings documented Joan's travels and concerts. In 1983, she performed on the Grammy Awards telecast for the first time (singing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind"). In the summer of 1985, after opening the U.S. segment of the worldwide Live Aid telecast, she later appeared at the revived Newport Folk Festival, the first gathering since 1969. In 1986, Joan joined Peter Gabriel, Sting and others on Amnesty International's Conspiracy of Hope tour. Later that year, she was chosen to perform The People's Summit concert in Iceland at the time of the historic meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

After performing at a 1989 concert in Czechoslovakia attended by many of that country's dissidents, President Vaclav Havel (who was in attendance) cited Joan as a great influence in the so-called Velvet Revolution. Two years later, Joan teamed with the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter (as Four Voices) for the first of several benefit performances. In 1993, Joan became the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo since the outbreak of the civil war as she traveled to war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina at the invitation of Refugees International. The next year she sang in honor of Pete Seeger at the Kennedy Center Honors Gala in Washington, D.C. Also in 1994, Joan and Janis Ian sang for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's Fight the Right fundraising event in San Francisco. After receiving her third BAMMY (as Outstanding Female Vocalist for 1995), Joan's nurturing support of other singer-songwriters came full circle with her next album, Ring Them Bells.

Recorded live at the Bottom Line in New York City, the CD featured guest artists Mary Black, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Mimi Farina, Tish Hinojosa, Janis Ian, Indigo Girls, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and Dar Williams. The album that followed, 1997's Gone From Danger, again revealed Joan as a lightning rod for young songwriting talent, with compositions from Williams, Sinead Lohan, Kerrville Music Festival newcomer Betty Elders, Austin's The Borrowers, and Richard Shindell (who went on tour extensively with Joan over the years). In August 2001, Vanguard Records began the most extensive chronological reissue program ever focused on one artist in the company's history, as expanded edition CDs were released of her debut solo album of 1960, Joan Baez, and Joan Baez Vol. 2 (1961). The series (nearly complete as of this writing) encompasses every one of the 13 original LPs she recorded while under contract to the label between 1960 and 1972.

Spurred by Vanguard's lead, Universal Music Enterprises gathered Joan's six complete A&M albums released from 1972 to 1976 into a mini-boxed set of four CDs, also with bonus material and liner notes by Arthur Levy. In August 2003, just prior to the release of Dark Chords On a Big Guitar, Joan was invited by Emmylou Harris (who credits Joan as a primary influence) and Steve Earle to join them in London at the Concert For a Landmine Free World. While she was there, Joan performed concerts in-the-round with Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and Billy Bragg. The album's release in September 2003 was celebrated with a 22-city U.S. tour through the south, the northeast and midwest. On October 3rd Grammy Award-winning classical guitarist Sharon Isbin presented her debut performance of The Joan Baez Suite, Opus 144. Written for Isbin by John Duarte and commissioned by the Augustine Foundation, the piece featured songs from Joan's earliest days in folk music.

Highlights of the 2003 tour included a live broadcast of Joan's October 17th concert at Town Hall in New York City (over WFUV-FM), syndicated to over 100 triple-A radio stations; likewise, Joan's two-night stand at the Old Town School of Folk in Chicago was followed by a videotaping for the acclaimed PBS Soundstage series (which has a DVD distribution deal with KOCH). Joan was joined by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, along with Nickel Creek, for the Soundstage show, which aired in the spring 2004. Meanwhile, she spent January-February on a 16-city sold-out U.K. tour with Josh Ritter opening. the conclusion of the tour coincided with the fifth annual BBC2 Folk Awards, where Joan presented Steve Earle with the Lifetime Achievement Award - the same honor she received when the awards were inaugurated in 2000. Joan and Steve Earle played a series of dates together in the U.S. that spring.

After a 16-city tour of European festival and theater dates in July-August, Joan joined Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello for the West Coast leg of Michael Moore's "Slacker Uprising Tour" in advance of the national election. When their ad hoc appearance at Cal State San Marcos outside San Diego was banned by the school's administration, the students rented the Del Mar Fairgrounds and attracted ten times as many to the event, upwards of some 10,000 people. After a well-deserved rest in early 2005, Joan returned to the theater in June and July as she has for several years now, in San Francisco's Teatro ZinZanni cabaret-antics-music-comedy-dinner show. "All of us are survivors," Joan Baez wrote, "but how many of us transcend survival?" More than four decades after the release of her first recordings, she has never meant more to fans across the globe, has never shown more vitality and passion in her concerts and records, and has never been more comfortable inside her own skin.

--Arthur Levy, July 2005 Woody Guthrie | Similar Artists | AllMusic Woody Guthrie Biography by William Ruhlmann A colossal figure of America's folk heritage, whose simple, lyrically powerful songs inspired generations, both musically and socially. Similar artists to Woody Guthrie — Free listening, videos, concerts, stats and photos at Last.fm There is more than one artist by the name 'Jimmie Rodgers'. 1) Jimmie Rodgers (James Charles Rodgers, September 8, 1897 – May 26, 1933) was an… The Weavers were an American folk music quartet based in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. The Weavers were formed in November 1948… Woody Guthrie | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by William Ruhlmann Woody Guthrie was the most important American folk music artist of the first half of the 20th century, in part because he turned out to be such a major influence on the popular music of the second half of the 20th century, a period when he himself was largely inactive.

His greatest significance lies in his songwriting, beginning with the standard "This Land Is Your Land" and including such much-covered works as "Deportee," "Do Re Mi," "Grand Coulee Dam," "Hard, Ain't It Hard," "Hard Travelin'," "I Ain't Got No Home," "1913 Massacre," "Oklahoma Hills," "Pastures of Plenty," "Philadelphia Lawyer," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "Ramblin' Round," "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "Talking Dust Bowl," and "Vigilante Man." These and other songs have been performed and recorded by a wide range of artists, including a who's who of folksingers, among them Joan Baez , Harry Belafonte , the Brothers Four , Judy Collins , Ramblin' Jack Elliott , Richie Havens , Cisco Houston , the Kingston Trio , the Limeliters , Lindisfarne , Don McLean , the Chad Mitchell Trio , Holly Near , the New Christy Minstrels , Odetta , Tom Paxton , Peter, Paul & Mary , Utah Phillips , Tom Rush , Tom Russell , Pete Seeger , Sweet Honey in the Rock , Dave van Ronk ,

 the Weavers , and Kate Wolf ; country performers such as Eddy Arnold , Chet Atkins , Gene Autry , Glen Campbell , Johnny Cash , Flatt & Scruggs , Tennessee Ernie Ford , Lee Greenwood , Merle Haggard , Waylon Jennings , Alison Krauss , the Maddox Brothers & Rose , Anne Murray , Dolly Parton , Johnny Paycheck , Jim Reeves , Tex Ritter , Red Smiley , Ernest Tubb , and Bob Wills ; and rock and pop musicians like the Alarm , Paul Anka , the Band , Billy Bragg , the Byrds , Concrete Blonde , Ry Cooder , Ani DiFranco , Dion , Lonnie Donegan , Donovan , Bob Dylan , Nanci Griffith , Arlo Guthrie , Hot Tuna , Indigo Girls , Little Feat , Lone Justice , Trini Lopez , Country Joe McDonald , John Mellencamp , Natalie Merchant , Van Morrison , the New Riders of the Purple Sage , Linda Ronstadt , Doug Sahm , the Seekers , Michelle Shocked , Bruce Springsteen , the Waterboys , Wilco , and Jesse Colin Young .

(For the most part, Guthrie created his songs by writing new lyrics to existing folk melodies.) Most of those performances and recordings came after Guthrie 's enforced retirement due to illness in the early '50s. During his heyday, in the 1940s, he was a major-label recording artist, a published author, and a nationally broadcast radio personality. But the impression this creates, that he was a multi-media star, is belied by his personality and his politics. Restlessly creative and prolific, he wrote, drew, sang, and played constantly, but his restlessness also expressed itself in a disinclination to stick consistently to any one endeavor, particularly if it involved a conventional, cooperative approach. Nor did he care to stay in any one place for long. This idiosyncratic individualism was complemented by his rigorously left-wing political views. During his life, much attention was given in the U.S. to whether people of a liberal bent were or had ever been members of the Communist party. No reliable evidence has emerged that Guthrie was, but there is little doubt where his sympathies lay; for many years, he wrote a column published in Communist newspapers.

Such views also help explain his uncomfortable relationship with the trappings of media and financial success that he encountered fleetingly in the '40s. Ironically, as Guthrie 's health declined to the point of permanent hospitalization in the '50s, his career took off through his songs and his example, which served as inspiration for the folk revival in general and, in the early '60s, Bob Dylan in particular. By the mid-'60s, Guthrie 's songs were appearing on dozens of records, his own recordings were being reissued and, in some cases, released for the first time, and his prolific writings were being edited into books. This career resurgence was in no way slowed by his death in 1967; on the contrary, it continued for decades afterward, as new books were published and the Guthrie estate invited such artists as Billy Bragg and Wilco in to write music for Guthrie 's large collection of unpublished lyrics, creating new songs to record.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, OK, on July 14, 1912, 12 days after his namesake, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention. As this early political connection suggests, Guthrie 's father, Charley Edward Guthrie, was himself a politician who, at the time, held the elective post of District Court Clerk as well as being a real estate agent. Guthrie 's mother, Nora Belle (Tanner) Guthrie, had earlier given birth to his sister Clara and brother Lee Roy; another brother, George, would follow in 1918, and finally another sister, Mary Josephine Guthrie, in 1922. Guthrie 's mother taught him folk songs as a child. In May 1919, when Guthrie was six years old, his sister Clara accidentally burned to death. It was the first of a remarkable number of fire-related injuries suffered by Guthrie and those around him during his life. It marked a decline in fortunes for the family, and it may have been related to the undiagnosed but increasingly apparent illness of his mother.

Unbeknown to her, Nora Guthrie was beginning to suffer from the mental and physical effects of the rare, hereditary, and incurable condition known as Huntington's disease, the onset of which tends to come in middle age, with a steady decline thereafter, resulting in a loss of mental control and muscle control, eventually leading to death. By the mid-'20s, Guthrie had begun to display an interest in music, learning to play the harmonica. On June 25, 1927, another fire incident occurred in which Guthrie 's father was severely burned by a kerosene lamp. Two days later, Guthrie 's mother was committed to the Central State Hospital for the Insane in Norman, OK. (She died there in 1930.) His father was taken to Pampa, TX, to stay with his aunt and recover. Guthrie , not yet 15 years old, stayed with his older brother or family friends, but went largely unsupervised. Before his 16th birthday, in June 1928, he took his first extended trip, hitchhiking around the Gulf Coast states and working at odd jobs before returning to Okemah.

Although he attended high school during this period, he never got beyond the tenth grade. In the spring of 1929, he moved to Pampa at his father's invitation. There he worked in a drugstore and then became a sign painter. He also took guitar lessons from his uncle Jeff Guthrie and soon began playing professionally, teaming with Matt Jennings, who played harmonica and fiddle, and guitarist Cluster Baker in a group they called the Corncob Trio. On October 28, 1933, Guthrie married Jennings' sister, Mary Esta Jennings. Guthrie had begun to write his own songs as early as 1932. On April 14, 1935, he found inspiration in a natural disaster, when a major dust storm hit Pampa, as drought conditions and subsistence farming across the Great Plains combined to strip off tons of topsoil and send it flying into the wind, contributing to the financial catastrophe suffered by farmers during the Great Depression. Guthrie wrote "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh" (aka "Dusty Old Dust"), which was full of bitingly comic observations about the troubles suffered by people in the storm.

The same month, he self-published the first of a series of songbooks he would turn out during his career, Alonzo M. Zilch's Own Collection of Original Songs and Ballads. The Guthries' first child, Gwendolyn Gail Guthrie, was born in November 1935, but that did not signal that Guthrie was settling down with his family. On the contrary, in 1936, he returned to hitchhiking or jumping freight trains to travel around the country as a hobo. In the late winter or early spring of 1937, he finally took off for good, moving to California. His wife, meanwhile, was pregnant again, and she gave birth to a second daughter, Sue Guthrie, in July. Meeting his cousin Leon Jerry "Oklahoma Jack" Guthrie in Los Angeles, Guthrie began performing with him, and the two were hired to do a radio program on the local station KFVD, launching the daily 15-minute program The Oklahoma and Woody Show on July 19, 1937.

In September, Jack Guthrie dropped out, and Guthrie replaced him with singer Maxine Crissman, whom he dubbed "Lefty Lou," with the program rechristened The Woody and Lefty Lou Show. The two were popular with other expatriates from what had become known as the Dust Bowl, and Guthrie began to write more songs directed at them, such as "Do Re Mi," in which he warned potential migrants that California might not be welcoming to them if they didn't arrive with money; the nostalgic "Oklahoma Hills"; and "Philadelphia Lawyer." He also made enough money from the radio show and the sale of songbooks to send for his wife and children, who joined him in Los Angeles in November 1937. The Woody and Lefty Lou Show continued until June 18, 1938, when Guthrie went back to traveling around the country. He returned to KFVD by himself in November.

Perhaps influenced by his observations of struggling migrant workers, he began to express himself in more overtly political terms, writing songs like "Pretty Boy Floyd" (which treated the famed bank robber born Charles Arthur Floyd as if he were a modern version of Robin Hood) and "Vigilante Man," a condemnation of the police and private security forces that harried homeless workers. He also began writing a column, "Woody Sez," for the Communist newspaper People's World in May 1939. His third child, a son named Will Guthrie, was born in October. In November, he left his radio show and moved back to Texas, but he did not stay there long. In the early months of 1940, he took off again, this time to New York City to visit his friend, the actor Will Geer, who was appearing on Broadway in the play Tobacco Road. On his way across the country, Guthrie frequently heard on the radio Kate Smith 's rendition of Irving Berlin 's patriotic song "God Bless America," which Berlin had written during World War I, but first published in 1939, as World War II loomed.

Guthrie found the song jingoistic, and when he arrived in New York he was inspired to write his own answer song, which he initially called "God Blessed America for Me." Although the song, later revised as "This Land Is Your Land," itself came to be regarded as a patriotic anthem, Guthrie 's actual intended message was an attack on private property, a cornerstone of the capitalist system. His initial draft of the song is dated February 23, 1940, but he did not perform it until much later. By the time Guthrie arrived in New York, the plight of the Okies, as the Midwestern farmers who had lost their farms and headed west to become migrant workers were known by now, had become a national cause, in part because of the success of John Steinbeck's best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath, which had been published in April 1939 and quickly adapted into a motion picture that opened in New York on January 24, 1940.

Guthrie had met Steinbeck in California, and in March 1940 he was invited to perform at a benefit for migrant workers sponsored by Steinbeck and emceed by Geer at the Forrest Theater, where Tobacco Road was running. His appearance was a sensation; with his demeanor and accent, he seemed the living embodiment of the Okies, and his songs and wry humor called to mind a combination of the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and the homespun monologuist Will Rogers . At the event, Guthrie met a number of prominent folksingers, among them Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson , as well as the 20-year-old aspiring folksinger Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax , the assistant in charge of the Archive of Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax in particular proved beneficial to Guthrie 's career. He quickly invited Guthrie to Washington, D.C., to interview him for the archive. The interviews took place on March 21, 22, and 27, 1940, at a studio at the Department of the Interior, where they were recorded.

At this, his first-ever recording session, Guthrie discussed his life and performed many songs, including "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," "Do Re Mi," "Pretty Boy Floyd," "I Ain't Got No Home," "Worried Man Blues," "Goin' Down That Road Feeling Bad," and a number of others explicitly about the conditions in the Dust Bowl. The recordings stayed in the archives for nearly a quarter of a century, until they were released commercially as a three-LP box set, Library of Congress Recordings , by Elektra Records in 1964. Lomax had other media connections that gave Guthrie greater exposure. On April 2, 1940, he presented Guthrie on his nationally broadcast CBS radio program, Columbia School of the Air, and later in the month Guthrie made the first of several appearances on another CBS show, The Pursuit of Happiness. Lomax also talked Guthrie up to RCA Victor Records, which signed him to a contract that resulted in the release of two albums, each consisting of three 78 RPM discs, in July 1940, Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol. 1 and Dust Bowl Ballads, Vol.

2 . The selections included many of the same songs Guthrie had just performed for the Library of Congress, plus the newly written "Tom Joad," a musical adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which had to be broken into two parts due to its length. After completing the recordings in early May, Guthrie took a trip back to the Southwest with Seeger tagging along, but he had returned to New York by August, when he began to appear on another Lomax radio show on CBS, Back Where I Come From, signing to become a regular. He also began performing in nightclubs, often in the company of his friend Cisco Houston . But he discontinued his newspaper column, which had been appearing in another Communist paper, the Daily Worker, apparently because his views were not sufficiently orthodox to suit the party. After signing to appear on another radio show, Pipe Smoking Time, he sent for his family, which moved to New York in late 1940. This level of success and, more important, conformity, did not suit him for long, however, and in early January 1941 he abruptly walked out on his radio commitments and left New York, moving back to Los Angeles with his family.

Guthrie briefly returned to his show on KFVD, but his next important activity began with a letter from the Bonneville Power Administration, part of the Department of the Interior, in Portland, OR, which requested his services to narrate and sing songs for a documentary film to be made about the building of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River running along the border of Oregon and Washington state. He drove to Portland with his family and was hired for one month as an "information consultant" to write songs. He wrote or adapted 26 of them over the next several weeks, including "Roll on Columbia" (later declared the official folk song of the state of Washington), "Grand Coulee Dam," and "Pastures of Plenty." Many of the songs were recorded, but the film project was shelved temporarily (it eventually appeared in 1949), and when the month was up on June 11, 1941, Guthrie returned to New York, leaving his family in Portland. Seeger had formed a politically oriented folk group, the Almanac Singers , with Lee Hays and Millard Lampell , and Guthrie joined them.

In early July, they recorded two albums, Deep Sea Chanteys and Sodbuster Ballads, for General Records, before embarking on a national tour of union gatherings. The tour went across the country, concluding in August in Los Angeles. There, Guthrie was reunited briefly with his family, which had returned from Portland, but Mary Guthrie soon moved with the children to El Paso, TX, effectively separating from her husband, who returned to New York after performing in the Northwest with Seeger . In New York, Guthrie lived at the communal Almanac House, where the expanding lineup of the Almanac Singers maintained its headquarters. As usual, he wrote prolifically, his compositions including "Sinking of the Reuben James," about a U.S. destroyer torpedoed by a German U-boat, and he began to get assignments for articles in magazines, starting with "Ear Players," published in Common Ground in the spring of 1942. During this period, the Almanac Singers , who had been rabidly anti-war until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, became rabidly pro-war, a stance that coincided perfectly with the mood of the U.S.

in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. As a result, they began to get offers from network radio shows, reaching their commercial peak on February 14, 1942, when they appeared on a program called This Is War broadcast on all four national radio networks. Their political affiliations, however, made them unsuitable to the conventional entertainment business, just as Guthrie was individually. They turned down an offer to appear at the prestigious Rainbow Room, and their increasing recognition led to newspaper accounts of their ties to left-wing organizations including the Communist Party, which in turn led to the cancellations of other nightclub bookings and a proposed contract with Decca Records. Guthrie , meanwhile, met Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia, a dancer with the Martha Graham dance troupe, with whom he began a romantic relationship, even though both of them were married to other people. Around the same time, he was signed by publishers E.P. Dutton to write his autobiography. While working on this book, he gradually lessened his involvement with the Almanac Singers .

By the fall, he was appearing in a short-lived group he called the Headline Singers along with Leadbelly , Sonny Terry , and Brownie McGhee . Guthrie 's fourth child, Cathy Ann Guthrie, was born to Marjorie Mazia on February 6, 1943. In March, Guthrie 's book Bound for Glory was published to favorable reviews. The same month, Mary Guthrie signed her divorce papers, which had the effect of making Guthrie eligible for the draft. When he received his draft notice, he joined the merchant marine as an alternative to going into the army, signing on with Cisco Houston to a ship that was part of a convoy taking supplies for an invasion of Italy. The four-month trip began in June 1943; on September 13, the ship was torpedoed but managed to make it into port in Tunisia. Guthrie returned to New York in October, but could stay only 30 days before going on another merchant marine journey if he wanted to continue to avoid army service. So, there was a trip along the Eastern seaboard a month later, and then in January 1944 a second journey across the Atlantic that lasted until March.

When he returned, Guthrie showed up at the offices of the small Asch Record Company and introduced himself to its owner, Moses Asch , who agreed to record him on an informal basis. Starting on April 16, 1944, Guthrie , sometimes accompanied by one or more musical associates including Houston , Sonny Terry , Leadbelly , and former Almanac Singers member Bess Hawes, began making what eventually added up to hundreds of recordings for Asch including, for the first time, "This Land Is Your Land." The initial Asch sessions lasted at least into late April, totaling upward of 150 songs, both Guthrie originals and traditional compositions. Asch had no means of releasing such a torrent of material at the time. In May 1944, Guthrie shipped out again on a merchant marine ship taking troops for the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the soldiers were put ashore on Omaha Beach in early July, the ship hit a mine, but made it back to England, where Guthrie appeared on the BBC before heading back to the U.S. in August.

In September, Asch released the first of his Guthrie recordings on the various-artists album Folksay: American Ballads and Dances, followed by another various-artists album called Blues, and then, at the turn of the year, the solo album Woody Guthrie , consisting of three 78 rpm discs and including such songs as "Grand Coulee Dam" and "Jesus Christ." Guthrie also went back on the radio during this period, hosting a show on the local New York station WNEW called Ballad Gazette that used "This Land Is Your Land" as its theme song and working on the NBC program America for Christmas, broadcast December 25, 1944. Guthrie continued to record extensively for Asch in the early months of 1945. In March, he was again called to the draft and found that the merchant marine's union had tightened its requirements with regard to the political affiliations of its volunteers, such that he was no longer eligible. Thus, he was inducted into the army on May 7, 1945. That was also the day that Germany surrendered, but the war against Japan was still going on.

After undergoing basic training, Guthrie was posted to a series of army bases around the country. At one of them, he happened to hear on a jukebox Jack Guthrie 's Capitol Records recording of "Oklahoma Hills," which peaked at number one on Billboard magazine's "Most Played Juke Box Folk Records" chart (the precursor to the country singles chart) for the first of six weeks on July 28, 1945. He discovered that Jack Guthrie had credited himself as songwriter. Legal discussions ensued, and eventually "Oklahoma Hills" was co-credited to the two Guthrie cousins, who shared the songwriting royalties. On November 13, 1945, Guthrie married Marjorie Mazie, who had obtained a divorce from her first husband. He was discharged from the army the following month. In 1946, Guthrie played concerts under the auspices of People's Songs, an organization founded by Seeger and other folksingers as a clearinghouse to promote political folk songs.

He also continued to record for Asch , who released a new album, Struggle: Documentary #1, and commissioned him to write a series of songs about Sacco and Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchists who had been convicted of a robbery in which two guards were killed and had been executed in 1927, their case long a cause célèbre of the American left. (The album was not released until 1960.) Inspired by his daughter Cathy, Guthrie also had begun writing children's songs, and he recorded these for Asch as well, starting in February 1946. After being released later in the year on Asch 's Disc Records label on the album Songs to Grow On: Nursery Days, these became among Guthrie 's most popular recordings, and he made more of them. Work Songs to Grow On followed in 1947. (Tragically, Cathy Ann Guthrie died in another of the bizarre series of accidental fires associated with him on February 10, 1947. He was not present when the incident occurred.) Although Guthrie himself had faded from national attention, his persona as a rambling folksinger was already beginning to become legendary.

This was suggested on January 10, 1947, when the musical Finian's Rainbow opened on Broadway for a run of 725 performances. Sonny Terry had a part in the show, which featured a certain character named Woody, a free-spirited, guitar-playing ex-merchant seaman who helped lead a labor revolt. On July 10, 1947, Guthrie 's fifth child, Arlo Davy Guthrie, was born. He would go on to become a singer/songwriter like his father and do much to further Guthrie 's legacy. His younger brother Joady Ben Guthrie, who also became a performer, was born on December 25, 1948. Nora Lee Guthrie, Guthrie 's seventh child, was born in January 1950. Guthrie , meanwhile, had be re-recording much of the material from the Dust Bowl Ballads albums and the Columbia River songs for Asch , resulting in a Disc album called Ballads from the Dust Bowl released on a new Asch label, Folkways Records, in October 1948.

He was also at work on a new book about a trip he and his father had taken in search of a goldmine in the early '30s. The book would not be published until 1976, when it appeared under the title Seeds of Man. Moses Asch went bankrupt in 1947, an event that would have major implications for Guthrie 's discography, since Asch 's ex-partner, record store owner Herbert Harris of Stinson Records, held onto some of Guthrie 's master recordings, as did a pressing plant that auctioned them to Pickwick Records. As Guthrie 's popularity increased in the 1960s, Stinson and Pickwick's Everest label, as well as Folkways, would issue competing Guthrie titles drawn from the recordings he had made in the '40s for Asch . Since discovering that his mother had suffered from Huntington's disease shortly after her death, Guthrie had feared that he would inherit the illness, as he confided to friends on several occasions in the 1930s and '40s.

By the late '40s, he had begun to exhibit symptoms of the disease, although, since his behavior had always been idiosyncratic, they were not recognized as such by him or others, and tended to be ascribed to excessive drinking. His last major composition (for which he wrote only the lyrics with the music later added by Martin Hoffman ) came in 1948 with "Deportees" (aka "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"), an account of an incident in which a plane carrying immigrant workers crashed. Meanwhile, his earlier songs were beginning to become generally popular. The Maddox Brothers & Rose had a successful recording of "Philadelphia Lawyer," and in 1950 the Weavers , a group formed by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of the Almanac Singers with Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert , recorded "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh," which peaked at number four in the pop charts in early 1951. By late 1951, Guthrie 's erratic behavior had led to his separation from his wife.

On January 7, 1952, he did a recording session for Decca Records as part of proposed contract with the label, but his performing skills had deteriorated noticeably; the contract was withdrawn, and the recordings have never been released. This was Guthrie 's last serious attempt to record, although there was a final session for Asch two years later that also proved fruitless. Guthrie was hospitalized on May 16, 1952, and was in and out of hospitals over the summer until a neurologist finally recognized his symptoms as Huntington's disease in September. Nevertheless, he was released and immediately moved to California, where he took up with a 20-year-old art student, Anneke van Kirk Marshall, who left her new husband for him and traveled with him back to New York and then to Florida. While staying on a friend's property there on June 10, 1953, Guthrie was severely burned in attempting to douse a campfire, crippling his right arm. Nevertheless, the couple took off again, stopping in Mexico in July so that Guthrie could be divorced. They married in December and moved to New York in January 1954.

On February 22, 1954, Anneke Guthrie gave birth to Guthrie 's eighth and last child, Lorina Lynn Guthrie, who would be put up for adoption after the couple separated and divorced. On September 16, 1954, no longer able to function, Guthrie checked himself into Brooklyn State Hospital, where he had received his diagnosis two years earlier. This was a voluntary commitment that allowed him to leave the hospital on weekends, which he spent with his ex-wife Marjorie Guthrie. On May 23, 1956, Guthrie checked himself out, intending to hit the road again, but within days he was arrested for vagrancy in New Jersey and involuntarily committed to Greystone Park Hospital, where he remained for five years, until Marjorie Guthrie was able to get him moved back to Brooklyn State, an easier commute from her home in Coney Island. As Guthrie 's physical condition deteriorated, however, his career blossomed.

The Weavers, who had been forced to disband due to the Communist witch hunts of the early '50s, reunited in 1955 and began performing "This Land Is Your Land," which gained enormously in popularity. On March 17, 1956, a benefit concert for Guthrie 's children was held at the Pythian Hall in New York City. Guthrie himself attended, although he was of course unable to perform. The concert was one of the events that marked the start of the folk revival. By the late '50s, with Folkways releasing albums of previously unheard Guthrie recordings, his songs became necessary to the repertoires of all the emerging folk performers.

For example, the Kingston Trio , the most popular folk group of the '50s, put "Hard, Ain't It Hard" on their gold-selling number one album The Kingston Trio , released in the fall of 1958, with "Hard Travelin'" appearing on Make Way in early 1961 and "This Land Is Your Land" and "Pastures of Plenty" on Goin' Places that spring; their version of "Deportee" was on their LP Sing a Song with the Kingston Trio in late 1963. The New Christy Minstrels' recording of "This Land Is Your Land" reached the pop singles chart in December 1962. Dust Bowl Ballads was reissued as an LP in 1964 along with the initial release of Library of Congress Recordings , which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording. Several Guthrie songbooks were published during the early '60s, and in 1965 Born to Win, a collection of his writings edited by Robert Shelton, folk music critic for The New York Times, was published.

Guthrie was moved to Creedmore State Hospital in Queens, NY, in July 1966 and put under the care of a doctor specifically studying Huntington's disease. He died there on October 3, 1967, at the age of 55. His death did not impede his career renaissance. New albums continued to be released. On January 20, 1968, the first of two all-star tribute concerts was held in New York, with proceeds going to benefit research into Huntington's disease, its participants including Judy Collins , Bob Dylan , Arlo Guthrie , Richie Havens , Odetta , Pete Seeger , and Tom Paxton . The second concert was held September 12, 1970, at the Hollywood Bowl and featured Collins , Arlo Guthrie , Havens , Odetta , Paxton , Seeger , Joan Baez , Ramblin' Jack Elliott , Country Joe McDonald , and Earl Robinson . Albums chronicling the concerts were released in 1972 and reached the charts.

Woody Sez, a book collecting his newspaper columns, was published in 1975, followed in 1976 by Seeds of Man and a film adaptation of Bound for Glory starring David Carradine with an accompanying soundtrack album. Guthrie was admitted to the Nashville Songwriters' Hall of Fame in 1977 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. He was the subject of an off-Broadway musical bearing his name in 1979. After the death of Moses Asch , the archives of Folkways Records were donated to the Smithsonian Institution, and to help finance the preservation of the material, an all-star album of songs by Guthrie and Leadbelly , Folkways: A Vision Shared , was released, featuring performances of Guthrie 's songs by Bob Dylan , John Mellencamp , Willie Nelson , Bruce Springsteen , and U2 . It reached number 70 in the charts. "This Land Is Your Land" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1989.

In 1990, another book of Guthrie 's work, this one edited by rock critic Dave Marsh , was published: Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait -- The Unpublished Writings of an American Folk Hero. Another musical based on Guthrie 's life and music, Woody Guthrie's American Song, opened regionally in 1991 and produced a cast album. In 1998, Billy Bragg and Wilco combined to investigate the Guthrie files of unpublished lyrics, resulting in the release of Mermaid Avenue , their recordings of the resulting songs. A second volume followed in 2000. Both albums charted in the Top 100. Meanwhile, Smithsonian Folkways reissued Guthrie 's recordings on carefully considered and annotated CDs, and RCA Victor, or its parent company BMG, periodically reissued Dust Bowl Ballads .

The Asch recordings that had escaped to Stinson and Pickwick continued to appear, licensed to a variety of labels, a problem that was superseded as of the 1990s by the 50-year copyright limit on recordings in Europe, which eventually put all of Guthrie 's recordings into the public domain there, resulting in a flood of unlicensed European reissues. While some of these discs were better than others, the Smithsonian Folkways and RCA Victor releases remained superior renderings of the material. Decades after Guthrie 's death, his ragamuffin image, the blue-jean-wearing Everyman with a guitar on his back, had become an American archetype, and his songs, in some cases benignly reinterpreted, had become a permanent part of the American consciousness, whether it was a parent and child singing "Put Your Finger in the Air" without any idea who wrote it, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir thundering "This Land Is Your Land," ignorant of its original socialist intent. In this sense, he had proved himself a true folk artist, one whose creations had passed into the culture and seemed always to have been there.

In truth, Guthrie defined an era in his Dust Bowl ballads, his outlaw tales, his work and labor songs, anti-war songs, children's songs, political songs, and a host of love songs and songs that touched on philosophy, geography and the hard work of living day to day in an emerging industrial world. He wrote constantly, a bit like a maverick beat reporter, and new poems, writings, drawings and even previously unknown songs kept turning up into the 21st century. In 2012, the centennial year of his birth, several books, anthologies and box sets of his work appeared, and Guthrie was firmly enshrined as a one-of-a-kind American icon and treasure. The Essential Pete Seeger by Pete Seeger on Apple Music 36 Songs Album Review Pete Seeger is the sort of person who has become the stuff of legend for all the best reasons.

As a musicologist, he's been a passionate archivist of folk songs of all sorts from around the world for most of his life, and thousands of people (perhaps millions) would not have heard songs such as "Goodnight Irene," "This Land Is Your Land" and "Wimoweh" (aka "The Lion Sleeps Tonight") had he not championed them. As a songwriter, any man with "If I Had a Hammer," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "I Come and Stand at Every Door" and "Turn, Turn Turn" in his catalog (among many, many others) has created a truly impressive repertoire. As a musician, it's hard to count how many people picked up the guitar or banjo from his example, and he's always been a pithy and compelling player. And as an activist, Seeger has bravely put his ideals of peace, justice and equality ahead of his career in a manner few musicians of any stature have ever dared or even imagined.

However, since Seeger is as influential as any figure in the history of American folk music, and has been recording since the 1940s, the question is — can this man's life in music be accurately summed up on a single CD? That more than anything is the rub with The Essential Pete Seeger, a compilation which focuses primarily on Seeger's recordings for Columbia from the 1950s and '60s. Assembled by Nedra Olds-Neal, The Essential Pete Seeger does make some important gestures towards being career-inclusive — it includes the 1950 hit recording of "Goodnight Irene" with the Weavers, as well as Seeger's 1941 version of "Talking Union" and a few other tracks licensed from Smithsonian Folkways (who issued the majority of Seeger's catalog).

Many of the songs most closely associated with Seeger are included (if not always in their definitive recordings), and all these performances (especially the ones recorded before a live audience) are impassioned, powerful and direct from the heart, especially "Guantanamera" and "We Shall Overcome" (the understated force of the latter is still remarkably moving more than forty years after it was recorded). But this man has made far too much important music for a single disc to hold all that is "essential." The Essential Pete Seeger is a fine introduction to his work as a musician, and includes an excellent liner essay by Dave Marsh, as well as testimonials from Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Roger McGuinn, Bruce Cockburn and many others on the lasting importance of these songs and this artist. But isn't it high time Pete Seeger got the full box-set treatment that his body of work deserves and demands? Or at the very least a two-disc entry in Legacy's Essential series? Customer Reviews An Excellant Overview of an American Icon by TBrough At 36 tracks, "The Essential Pete Seeger" pretty much invalidates other, older compilations and sum up his time on Columbia Records.

While Seeger was still recording albums into his 80's, this takes the prime period of his recordings and spreaqds it out. Pete Seeger was an icon for all the best reasons. Picking up a banjo and guitar to makes statements about the nature of the times took courage then as it does now (quick, name on popular artist who uses his recorded output for challenging statements...could you?) and even got him blacklisted. Songs like "Talking Union" or the anti-Vietnam protest "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy," he not only found himself surrounded by controversy but actively courting it. He was the rare artist to put his beliefs before his career, even as it threatened his livelihood and even though he would ultimately be vindicated. You'll also find the songs that Pete wrote or adapted that became hits for others, such as "Turn Turn Turn" (The Byrds), "If I Had a Hammer" (Peter, Paul and Mary), and "Guantanamera" (Trini Lopez).

With both the adaptations of "Guantanamera" and "Wimoweh," a strong argument can be made the Seeger was one of the earliest purveyors of what everyone now calls "World Music," as he had the forethought to include them in he live concerts (and are both here as live versions). Even with those convictions, Pete Seeger also approached his music with a wit and sense of humor. "Little Boxes" is a stinging indictment of class conformity, yet it's actually a pretty funny song. Same with "Talking Union." But there's no escaping the anger that underscores "Which Side are You On?" What will remain his lasting legacy encompasses songs like these, but the gentle heart that could deliver a searing protest of war ("Where Have All The Flowers Gone") along side the civil rights anthem of peace in "We Shall Overcome." I was fortunate enough to see Seeger live at the 50th Anniversary of The Newport Festival. Even at his advanced age, his body may have been frail but his voice was a force of nature.

Like all his best work, he was the conduit for the music and the audience, leading call and response verses and choruses till the throngs of people that filled the field sang in unison. Even typing this now brings back chills. Few artists can lay claim to making culture bend in their direction, and Pete Seeger is such a man. While even two discs of music is incomplete (no "Good Night Irene"?) but this set is as easy an instant collection for a man whose greatness will remain an influence not just on artists still taking cues from him today, but those who will come along.

The Essential Pete Seeger pete Seeger keep on pickin Biography Born: May 3, 1919 in New York, NY Genre: Singer/Songwriter Years Active: '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s Perhaps no single person in the 20th century did more to preserve, broadcast, and redistribute folk music than Pete Seeger, whose passion for politics, the environment, and humanity earned him both ardent fans and vocal enemies ever since he first began performing in the late '30s. His battle against injustice led to his being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, celebrated during the turbulent '60s, and welcomed at union rallies throughout his life. His tireless efforts regarding global concerns... Top Albums and Songs by Pete Seeger 1.

Question: Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez are associated with what style of music?
Answer: Folk