You and me and Rockefeller

Pete Seeger. I grew up on his voice. More than one generation did. All my family's long car trips after 1981 (i.e., all the ones I can remember) were conducted to Precious Friend with Arlo Guthrie, which I am playing as I type. I fell asleep to him and the lights of passing cars, washing over the back seat when it had grown too dark to read. If I was awake, I sang along to "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine."

I was telling derspatchel, I want to find some videos I ran across a few years ago, Seeger on television in the early 1960's. I was used to the beard, the banjo, the fisherman's cap: a hippie look. I recognized the banjo, but that inimitable high-wire voice was coming out of a sharp-faced, clean-shaven man with short receding hair in a very unravely cardigan, resolutely dorky-looking (with his shirtsleeves rolled up, he looked like nothing so much as a middle-aged undergraduate). His face keeps flickering, uncertainly, enthusiastically. The voice and hands might belong to an entirely different person than the rest of the body. I thought of Odysseus in the Iliad, who looked like nothing much when he got up to speak—like a man who had no idea what he was doing there—but then he opened his mouth and his words were like snowflakes, dense, crystalline; they changed the landscape.

He changed the landscape.