Wednesday 29 January 2014

OBITUARY: 'Simple, complicated Seeger changed American music' - folksinger Pete Seeger dies


Seeger, who died Monday, was many things. Sometimes he lived in the country, sometimes he lived in town. He was equally at home on the range and in the union hall, on top of Old Smoky and in the apartments of Greenwich Village as a skinny teenager making music on World War II's eve with men who would become legends and end up on postage stamps.

From the beginning, everything about Seeger's background seemed to point him toward his destiny. He was descended from dissent, from Americans who challenged authority. That stayed with him until the end, whether the authority was the mass media, large corporations or the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklists of the 1950s. He waited, kept singing, and outlasted it. 

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