On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Dunno. I never thought much of Pete Seeger. Too much of that sentimental
> pop fronty folky crap for me.
If you get a chance, you should watch the 90 minute American Masters documentary on him _The Power of Song_. It's as impressive as that documentary about Nader, _An Unreasonable Man_. Seeger had an equivalently huge effect on American culture, and mostly for the good. Even if those tunes sounded tired when we were young, there was a time when they were as brand new as cutting edge world music is to us and extremely effective. He basically invented the sing-along because he wanted to enliven crowds. There's a reason his songs have gotten tired and old -- it's because no one else has had the genius to invent something new to takes its place.
And not only politics -- he had a large effect on ethnomusicology.
Anyway I came away from it with the same kind of gestalt shift that the Nader film gave me. And unlike Nader, who got kind of sour at the end, he started whole new project to clean up the Hudson when he got old, and succeeded remarkably well at that too.
Michael