Found this one from January... this was one piece of news feed which hit home:
America lost a legend today.
I’m not referring to someone who played a sport or was in
a lot of movies. This man was the head
of a music revolution… no, darling, it’s not Elvis. I don’t think we’ll ever lose him.
Most of the young people I work with on a regular basis
won’t even know who Pete Seeger was, let alone mourn his passing. That is, until I get done telling them about
him. I learned a lot just today by going
back and looking over the many things this simple man did throughout his life
as he moved forward through time, spreading truth.
That’s really what he was about. Music was something he grew up around and it
became his medium, in much the same way as Picasso chose paint as his first
medium. Music was a method by which he
spread truth. Seeger researched folk
music, which has long been the most honest portrayal of the American life that
I’ve seen, and he brought it forth into the limelight. Don’t get me wrong, the man actually didn’t
like to be in the limelight just for the sake of being famous. He travelled the country by hitchhiking and
riding the rails just to see what the real underbelly of American life looked
like. And he wrote it down in
songs. Some had been passed down for
generations and he was just the first soul they touched who chose to put them
on paper. But let’s face it, very few
people have knowledge of Pete Seeger through paper.
How many of the youth I talk to will have heard “If I Had
a Hammer” in at least some form? Who
among them has heard “Turn, Turn, Turn”?
How many of them will recognize the names Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter,
Paul and Mary, Don McLean or Bruce Springsteen, all people who were influenced
and shaped by Seeger’s voice and his craft over the decades? Decades.
The man was 94 years old when he left this earth, and he’d been playing
the five-stringed banjo since he was about five years old. And if they don’t know the names, their
parents will, even if that music wasn’t their cup of tea.
He was accused by Congress of being a communist. He fueled the voices of change in several
generations: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” during the Vietnam era, civil
rights protest song “We Shall Overcome”, you name it. Whether you agreed with him or not, he was
impossible to ignore. He sang on stage,
in recording studios, in coffee houses, on lawns and on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial. In times of unrest,
the more that people protested the message of his music, the more that other
people would buy tickets to come hear what all the fuss was about. Either way, the truth continued to
spread. He sang about the pain that
people went through and their hopes for a tomorrow that was fairer and brighter
for their families.
In the end, he played at the inauguration of our current
president, received Kennedy center honors and received a lifetime Grammy award,
but I don’t think those things mattered much to a man who funneled royalties
into various funds for the causes he supported.
He knew that it wasn’t about him as much as it was about the message he
spoke. We lost a legend, but in reality,
we only lost his physical body. His
voice, his heart, his truth are all still out there, pulsing through history
and music as alive now as they ever were.
He gave us those gifts long ago.
It’s up to us to keep the music going.
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