"Under cover of anonymity, I will admit that I've never liked Pete Seeger's singing...." Pete was emulating (from about age 16 on) the placid-sounding Bascom Lamar Lunsford and H. N. (Hilary Nathan) Dickens, both Southerners born in the 1880s, who were a schoolteacher and a truck driver respectively (among other things). If you listen to the way Lunsford tells a little story just before doing a song, even that timing and enunciating of the storytelling Pete was emulating. So Pete's approach _was_ "authentic." In contrast (imo) to e.g. Josh White's and Joan Baez's.