It was wonderful to hear Pete's voice on that Fresh Air interview from so long ago. Most interesting to me was how seriously he took the effect of his refusal to take the 5th. Even so many years later he still felt that entire episode was damaging to his career. Looking at him now, it seems unbelievable that he would have found a comfortable place on television or the entertainment circuit. For me, as a child of the 50s, I cannot imagine Pete's style fitting into any of those places.

Yesterday Dudley Laufman's daughter, Heidi, posted this wonderful story from Scott Alarik's book about Pete in Spain. Probably not news to many here but nice to recall. The man had balls:

THE POWER OF SONG

In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs. Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, "I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs." He grinned at the crowd and said, "So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them." He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years. What could the government do? Arrest a hundred thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world. - Scott Alarik, Revival