PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)

Subject: PETE SEEGER
From: GUEST,steves
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 01:25 PM

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/pete-seeger-leads-protesters-on-foot-and-in-song/?src=twrhp

Subject: RE: PETE
From: Pete Jennings
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 01:59 PM

Wow, I thought I'd become famous for a moment!

LOL Pete

Subject: RE: PETE
From: Elmore
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 02:02 PM

Thanks Steves. With all the wonderful folk singers who have passed away in recent years, it's good to see Pete still out and about.

Subject: RE: PETE
From: GUEST,Matt
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 02:31 PM

Such an amazing night. I was up there leading with Pete and Tao and Tom and everyone else. What an amazing experience. Even though I've played with Pete a goo ammount of times (including revival) as a high schooler, I though I had missed my chance to march with Pete and Arlo, but last night was so moving. Losing my voice after singing this little light of mine for the 15th time in a night, finding someo new at every stop of the way who knew all the words and could help me out, making up new verses to old songs. This is folk music as is it should be. This is the purest, most unadulterated form of the folk process I've seen.

Subject: RE: PETE
From: gnu
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 02:57 PM

Walking briskly! Goon on him.

Subject: RE: PETE
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 02:58 PM

Which Goon? Eccles or Bluebottle?

Subject: RE: PETE
From: EBarnacle
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 03:00 PM

Here's another link. If you watch the third video, you will see Tao, Rick Nestler, Tom Chapin, Arlo, David Bernz, David Amram and a bunch of other well known Sloop Singers up there with their instruments. This was at 1 AM at Columbus Circle. The march was downtown from Symphony Space, where they had been doing a fund raiser for Clearwater. Tao did the organizing so that people who were not at the fundraiser could join in.

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/684510/pete_seeger_takes_owsers_on_a_singing_march--watch_video/

Subject: RE: PETE
From: Don Firth
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 04:14 PM

WOW!! Why do I feel like the cavalry has just arrived!??

Don Firth

Subject: RE: PETE
From: katlaughing
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 06:05 PM

No kidding, Don! I've got tears of pride, joy, and hope running down my face. Thanks all for the links. What an incredible happening and LEADER!

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Bobert
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 08:47 PM

What Kat said...

B~

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: GUEST,from Tokyo
Date: 22 Oct 11 - 11:00 PM

This song/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-o3CJytIPE

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: ChanteyLass
Date: 23 Oct 11 - 02:47 AM

I was in Columbus Circle a few months ago, but I wish I'd been there for this!

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Tigger the Tiger
Date: 23 Oct 11 - 05:59 AM

Hooray for some life on the planet. Nice to see people from the early days out there still. When the young people start to understand the complexities of how they have been victimized,I expect more participation.You just about have to understand credit default swaps,the Federal Reserve, Fannie and Freddie,Hedge Funds, and the Tax Code to be clear on what has been done to America. You also need to know that enough industry has been removed to put us back at production levels after WW2. Credit availability was increased to give younger people the idea they were doing quite well,when all they had was debt. Whoever could have thought they could sell our country out from under us?

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Don Firth
Date: 24 Oct 11 - 12:44 PM

I popped open Earthlink this morning to check my e-mail and as usual, it opened to a news page that linked to my mailbox. Before I could click on "Go to Inbox," what hit my eye was the top news story:

CLICKY,

Bon apetite!!

Don Firth

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: The Sandman
Date: 24 Oct 11 - 12:53 PM

good on you pete

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 24 Oct 11 - 05:37 PM

Even the Wall Street Journal carried the really nice story from the Associated Press about it: Pete Seeger enters 9th decade as an activist, with some good highlights on Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, who organized their march at OWS.

~ Becky in Tucson

Associated Press

Tao Rodriguez-Seeger was halfway through Friday night's march down Broadway to support the Occupy Wall Street movement, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his grandfather Pete Seeger at his side. Suddenly a New York City police officer stepped from the crowd and grabbed his elbow.

"Are you Tao Seeger?" the officer asked tersely. "Was this your idea? Did you think of this?"

Rodriguez-Seeger, a New Orleans-based musician, was certain arrest was imminent. The officer reached for his hand and he readied for the cuffs. Then something unexpected happened.

"He shook my hand and said, 'Thank you, thank you. This is beautiful,'" Rodriguez-Seeger said. "That really did it for me. The cops recognized what we were about."

That moment affirmed the message that his grandfather has preached tirelessly across nine decades. The causes and movements have changed from time to time over 75 years, but his message has always been the same: Song is the key to understanding and change.

"Music does something to you," Rodriguez-Seeger said. "It can cross rivers of meaning that entire books can't get across. ... You take any one of Bob Dylan's songs and you get to the heart of the matter where it took Homer volumes and volumes of books to get to the same point."

Today, Pete Seeger is approaching the far end of a life lived walking hand in hand with American history, often at odds with the government that runs things. It failed to shut him up. The courts had no chance. Changing tastes and values? Never. Even time seems to have taken a step back in deference to the musical rabble-rouser's resolve and determination.

This time around, the 92-year-old Seeger was carried along by two canes, not the sound of his banjo. But his presence, in a crowd of nearly 1,000 with guitar players and chanting sign-holders and police swirling around, gave the new protest movement something it seemed to lack over the last month.

A momentary clarity, longtime friend Guy Davis thinks. A purpose. A direction.

"It's his humanity," Davis said.

Seeger's voice first rose in the 1930s against Hitler. He met Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax and Lead Belly, and began to advocate for migrant workers and miners in the 1940s. He stared down Sen. Joseph McCarthy and endured a blacklisting he simply shrugged away. In middle age, he was a key figure in the folk revival that produced Dylan and, later, the protests that helped shape modern America.

Seeger still takes delight in lending his presence to important things, even if his voice doesn't carry like it used to. He found himself attracted to the studied inorganization of the Wall Street protesters.

"Be wary of great leaders," he said Sunday in a phone interview full of songs and stories when asked what he identifies with in the Occupy Wall Street message. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders."

Other than the canes and snowy beard, Seeger hasn't changed much since he began singing out against fascism in the mid-1930s after dropping out of Harvard in frustration.

"The sociology professor said, 'Don't think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it,'" Seeger said. "... But this was 1937 and Hitler had taken power. He was murdering people and was ready to go to war."

You could say Seeger inherited his activism. His great-great grandfather came to America seeking self-determination after reading the Declaration of Independence. His great-grandfather was an abolitionist. His father was a socialist who spoke out against World War I.

His views didn't always make him popular. He was a member of the Communist Party, something he later apologized for. He was initially for staying out of World War II, but changed his mind when Hitler broke his nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. He also spoke out against the war in Vietnam, a move that got him censored on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," and visited North Vietnam in 1972.

Seeger's influence is incalculable, however. He's the rare artist whose music and message transcends time, speaking to his children and their children and on and on.

The son of a musicologist and a violinist, he began leading others in song at 8 and was introduced to protest music around 12. Early on, he saw beauty and possibility in traditional songs often considered regional hokum or race records unfit for an upstanding white audience.

His message found an eager audience in the young generation of kids who would go on to define rock 'n' roll, changing American and world culture in myriad ways. He introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to "We Shall Overcome." In his hands, songs like "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" and "Turn, Turn, Turn!" became galvanizing anthems.

He remains a voice for the disenfranchised — the poor of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and victims of racism and greed.

Kira Moyer-Sims, a 19-year-old participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement, was introduced to Seeger's music on mix CDs from her high-school social studies teacher. Those songs, from a time that seems far away in the age of the iPod, spoke to her with modern urgency and helped push her into the protest ranks.

"Hearing this new music for me was huge and made me realize totally the importance of our nation's history and the fact that we can change it if we want to," she said. "Seeing Pete Seeger there in solidarity with the thing I've been living the past 38 days ... was phenomenal for me."

The idea of protesting for progressive change seemed to have gone out of vogue in the U.S. — or at least disappeared from public view. After the flower children moved on to mid-life and minivans, Americans turned their focus inward. Fewer people had time for simple songs with complex meanings.

Rodriguez-Seeger said he was attracted to the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement when he joined a support march two weeks ago in Las Vegas. He was drawn to the anti-establishment message but noticed immediately that something was missing.

"I saw a lot of people getting angry at us for marching, getting out of their SUVs and giving us the finger and screaming obscenities" and using anti-gay slurs, Rodriguez-Seeger said. "I thought, if we were singing right now my gut tells me they'd be less inclined to behave like that because it's very difficult when you're hearing music to get that angry."

Davis, a 59-year-old Bronx bluesman who has been friends with the Seegers for 50 years, saw more than a little something of the grandfather in the grandson when he looked over at the pair Friday night. Rodriguez-Seeger helped organize the march, which came together in 30 hours and was driven for the most part by social-media sites like Twitter, Facebook and now YouTube, where dozens of videos mark the night.

"Pete is seeing his life come to fruition," Davis said. "He is seeing the fruits of his labors. All the years he invested in Tao, all the years I used to see him take Tao around when Tao was just a teenager, have paid off beautifully."

And the grandfather doesn't mind the fact that a new generation of Seegers is lifting its voice, even as he gladly slides into the background. Pete Seeger, in fact, says he's a little bemused by all the attention.

"Of course it's a great honor, but I'd just as soon be anonymous," he said. He would like to go down to Zuccotti Park, the heart of the movement, but he hopes he can just do it on the sly without the star power. Maybe next week on Halloween. "I won't be recognized," he muses. "Everybody will be in costume."

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Wesley S
Date: 24 Oct 11 - 06:09 PM

Where else WOULD you expect to find Pete Seeger? I just wonder how many people there knew who he was?

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: EBarnacle
Date: 25 Oct 11 - 09:43 AM

Thw sad thing about the event was that as soon as Tao moved to "take Grandpa home because he's tired," the police shut it down.

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: EBarnacle
Date: 25 Oct 11 - 09:49 AM

Pete handed off to Rick Nestler, who was one verse into his song when the police announced that the event was over. They indulged Rick by allowing him to finish his song.

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Lizzie Cornish 1
Date: 25 Oct 11 - 09:54 AM

"WOW!! Why do I feel like the cavalry has just arrived!??"

Hell, I hope not! They killed off nearly all their Indigenous People!
The best example of The Corporate Bastards ever!

I know what you mean, Don...but maybe it's time to let that phrase go?

And now, back to Pete Seeger..and good on him! :0)

Subject: RE: PETE (Seeger at Occupy Wall Street)
From: Don Firth
Date: 25 Oct 11 - 01:30 PM

The cavalry was not only used against the indigenous peoples, Lizzie. The phrase refers to rescue and relief from overwhelming odds in ANY context.

Don Firth