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The Education of Pete Seeger

by Philip Weiss
May/June 2007

Illustration by Tim Bower

Early this spring, a tire washed up on a bank of the Hudson River 60 miles north of Manhattan, and an old coot in a red knit cap picked it up and took it home and inflated it. Then he brought it back to a shack on the river called the Beacon (N.Y.) Sloop Club, to be given away to anyone who needed it.

At 88, Pete Seeger has lost most of his voice, but he hasn’t given up his passions: picking a banjo and cleaning up the Hudson River. This summer, an idea he has championed for many years—to put a floating pool in the Hudson for children to wade in—will come to fruition in the river, not far from that sloop club.

The river pool seemed a good excuse to leave a note for Seeger on the steep dirt road going to his house in the hills outside Beacon. Few know that the musical legend was a Harvard class of ’40 dropout. He lasted a little over a year, and I wrote that I’d always wondered why he left. Seeger called and said that his memory wasn’t so good anymore, but we could talk at the Sloop Club before its monthly meeting.

The musician drove up fast, wearing a Johnny Appleseed outfit—a curious green knit jacket and thick sweater over blue jeans. He built fires in the club’s fireplace and woodstove as we talked about the river pool.

“They used to have floating pools in the East River 100 years ago. Men and women swam on alternate days. Then the water got too dirty and they were discontinued in about 1930. About eight years ago, I met an architect who wanted to put them back. I told her to put one up here. I’m forgetting her name. I’m forgetting everything now …”

He heaved a wet log back onto the pile.

I asked what he’d done to make the pool happen. Seeger smiled. “Just talking it up. I’m an incorrigible talker-upper.”

“Were you a talker-upper as a young man?”

“No, I was a camper. An incorrigible camper. Ernest Thompson Seton was my guru. I read every one of his books from age seven to 13. I built myself a teepee, I learned how to cook my food on a tiny little fire inside the teepee …”

“Was that a better education than Harvard?”

“Oh yes. I’m still convinced that a close relationship with nature will save the human race.”

Seeger moved a big log around in the flames, using a long poker in his left hand and a shovel in his right, like a gentleman using a knife and fork to position a pork chop. Then he started talking things up, in his inimitable blue-sky way. “The next few decades are going to be the most exciting this world has ever known. You know how if you throw a tennis ball against the floor, the harder you throw it down on cement, the higher it bounces? These horrible things in Washington will spur on the best things over the next eight years. The greatest people will come forward.”

I said, “Like who?” and the singer thought I said, “Like you?” He said confidently, “Oh no, I’m going to be kicking the bucket in the next few years.”

Back to Harvard. “What did you learn there?

“I learned that professors can be as selfish as anybody else. They’ve got their careers with a capital C.”

“Come on, Pete, there must have been good things.”

“I learned how to use a library. That was the most invaluable thing. I went down to the New York Public when I came here and looked up l-o-g c-a-b-i-n. I learned how to build a little house for my little family, for $900 and a lot of muscle.”

People were starting to come in for the meeting, bringing food. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, came up and pushed some salmon into his mouth.

I asked, “Why did you drop out?”

“I got a little too interested in politics. Me and Arthur Kinoy [a left-wing lawyer in the class of ’41] started the Harvard Progressive, and I got more interested in our little publication than my marks. I lost my scholarship. My family chipped in to help me get there, but they couldn’t chip in any more.” In 1938, Seeger left Cambridge and hit the road, hitchhiking and hopping freights, collecting songs from all over. He met Woody Guthrie and formed the Almanac Singers. Then came the Weavers, and fame. He was blacklisted for awhile because of his politics.

“Any regrets?” I asked, still focusing on Harvard.

“Not really.” He grabbed the blue bandanna from his back pocket to open the hot door of the wood stove and check out the fire. “They weren’t teaching anthropology then. How the human race came to be. All my life I have wondered about that.” He straightened up and remembered something else. Two teenagers had painted a quote from William James on his barn that Seeger recited to me: “I am done with great things and big things and with great institutions and big success and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets … yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”

“What are the hardest monuments to man’s pride?” I asked.

“Sometimes it’s an organization. Sometimes. Well. To a certain extent, the Twin Towers were … I’m losing my memory.”

Seeger is a big, shy man who is most comfortable with other off-the-gridders, and now he’s made half of myth, a dreamy populist who changes the color of the sky as he walks past. That night, a man named Charles Zeitler had shown up at the Sloop Club, about to go off as a volunteer to Malawi. Zeitler had written Seeger, and Seeger had told him to come on down. Zeitler wrote: “There is one song I must mention that strikes a chord in me and rings a note so deep … ‘How Can I Keep from Singing.’” The letter rambled on about Seeger’s impact on his life ending on a note about Christ.

Seeger played a lot that night, on the long-necked banjo with these words on the skin: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” The musicians went round a circle playing songs. Then it was Seeger’s turn and he said, “Give me a D chord,” and announced, “I want you to sing with me.”

He sang, “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone …” We all sang with him. Then he put on that curious green knit jacket and packed up his banjo and headed up the hill.