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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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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And all heaven will rise up singing.
*hugs*
Nine
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It is very strange to think of him gone out of the world. It wasn't merely knowing that he was still alive, touching memory of an earlier time. He was performing as late as last fall. His songs had better not go anywhere.
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He was one of the best.
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Link? I found a version in an abbreviated concert from Australia, but I'll take more.
He was one of the best.
Yes.
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*sigh*
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Yes. He was part of the folk tradition; everyone knows songs don't die.
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His memory for a blessing. I grew up on his voice as well.
A friend of mine on Facebook was expressing outrage recently at a site that had posted a "pre-mortem obituary" for him. That seems sadly ironic now.
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The Weavers formed in 1948. My mother grew up on him.
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He was ninety-four and he'd outlived his wife of sixty years by six months. His life was a contribution. But I still don't even know how to write about his absence. He was always singing, always there. He was as bedrock to this country as one of his own songs.
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Down the YouTube rabbit hole! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VucczIg98Gw)
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That's what I did as soon as I heard: listened to Precious Friend (1981) all the way through and then searched out songs on YouTube. This is a ferocious "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy."
Speaking of Tom Paxton, here he is on Rainbow Quest (1965), almost unrecognizably young. Even his voice is most familiar only when it sharpens toward satire.
Also, the Clancy Brothers.
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Yes.
I remember him from Sesame Street. He was one of the luminaries of "Put Down the Duckie."
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This is the best way of putting it that I've seen yet.
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You are one of two people to link me to those poems today. It made me happy. The dead don't stop singing.