The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #118181   Message #2622254
Posted By: mark gregory
30-Apr-09 - 07:21 PM
Thread Name: For Pete's Sake Sing Day - Pete's 90th, May 3
Subject: RE: For Pete's Sake Sing Day - Pete's 90th, May 3
In today's Australian

Pete Seeger is unlikely to have thought he'd find himself serenading a
US president-elect. After all, whenever he found himself in the
vicinity of the White House through the decades, it was invariably to
picket or protest.

Yet on the day before Barack Obama's inauguration last January, just
as the We Are One concert at the Lincoln Memorial was drawing to a
close, Bruce Springsteen invited a white-bearded figure in a knitted
woollen cap to step out from the shadows. "Lead us, Pete," he
implored.

And lead Pete did, in a manner familiar to all who have seen or heard
him perform, turning the celebration into an uplifting singalong of
Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land, a song that became well known
despite "never being played on radio or sold", Seeger says. It found
its way into school repertoires, but without its most potent verses.
"How wonderful to rhyme 'tried to stop me' with 'private property',"
he says. "Only Woody could have thought of that." Anyhow, "nobody said
you couldn't sing them" at the Lincoln Memorial, so he did.

Click here to read the full article

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25410026-16947,00.html