(from Sunday's Chicago Tribune):

Seeger protests Stalin --better late than never

ALBANY, N.Y. - Pete Seeger has the Joe Stalin blues.

Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, the 88-year-old banjo-picker has written a song about the Soviet leader that's as scathing as any tune in the folk legend's long career.

"I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land," Seeger wrote in "The Big Joe Blues."

Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and apologized years ago for not recognizing that Josef Stalin was a "very cruel misleader." But he told The Associated Press on Friday that the song he finally finished this year is a first for him, despite three visits to the Soviet Union beginning in the '60s.

"It's the first overt song about the Soviet Union," Seeger said during a phone interview from his Hudson Valley home in Beacon. "I think I should have though, when I was in the Soviet Union -- I should have asked, 'Can I see one of the old gulags?'"

Seeger calls it a yodeling blues song and said it's the sort of song his old buddy Woody Guthrie might have written in the '50s.