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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."
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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.
no subject
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.