<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Courtesy of USA Today at:</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/01/28/pete-seeger-obit-appreciation/4781403/">http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/01/28/pete-seeger-obit-appreciation/4781403/</a></span></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"> </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">------------------------------------</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><h1 itemprop="headline" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 32px; line-height: 34px; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 20px 0px 0px 70px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Folk singer Pete Seeger dies at age 94</h1></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">To Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, the singer/songwriter/activist who died Monday at the age of 94, was "the father of American folk music."</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But Seeger, who popularized</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>This Land Is Your Land</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">and</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>We Shall Overcome</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">and wrote</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>If I Had a Hammer </i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">and</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>Turn, Turn, Turn</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, never liked the term folk music.</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"It's been defined as the 'music of the peasants,' " Seeger told USA TODAY in a 2009 interview, "and then you get someone saying (of Seeger), 'he's no peasant!'''</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeger, who dropped out of Harvard University in 1938 to ride a bicycle across the country, quoted his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist: "My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.' "</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But whatever you called him, Seeger influenced scores of other singers, including Springsteen, Joan Baez, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp and Arlo Guthrie. All performed in 2009 at Seeger's 90th birthday party at sold-out Madison Square Garden, a fundraiser for his favorite local cause: cleaning up New York's Hudson River.</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">That night, Springsteen introduced Seeger saying, "He's gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He's gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself."</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="font-weight: 700;">PHOTOS: </span><a title="http://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/life/2014/01/28/a-look-at-the-career-of-pete-seeger/4957281/" href="http://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/life/2014/01/28/a-look-at-the-career-of-pete-seeger/4957281/" style="text-decoration: none;">A look at the life of Pete Seeger</a></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeger opposed McCarthyism, marched beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and led environmental campaigns. In 1969, he helped build a sailing sloop called the Clearwater that continues to serve as a "floating classroom" and rallying point for cleaning up the Hudson.</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Songs won't save the planet," Seeger told his biographer Dav</span><i>id Dunlap, </i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">author of</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>How Can I Keep From Singing?</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"But, then, neither will books or speeches. ... Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons." He liked to quote Plato: "Rulers should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung."</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeger is the only singer in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who was convicted of contempt of Congress. In 1955, he refused to testify about his past membership in the Communist Party. (He later said he quit the party in 1949 and "should have left much earlier. It was stupid of me not to. ... I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin and had no idea how cruel a leader he was.")</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1961, his conviction was overturned on appeal, but Seeger continued to be blacklisted by commercial TV networks until 1967. Even then, CBS censored parts of his anti-Vietnam War musical allegory, <i>Waist Deep in the Big Muddy</i>, when he sang it on the <i>Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour</i>.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 2006, Springsteen helped introduce Seeger to a new generation when he recorded</span><i>We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, an album of 13 songs popularized by Seeger, including</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>John Henry</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">and</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>Shenandoah</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">. Three years later, Springsteen persuaded Seeger to sing</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>This Land Is Your Land </i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">with him at President Obama's inaugural concert in frigid temperatures on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"He was so happy that day," Springsteen said later. "It was like, 'Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man.' It was so nice."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Much earlier, poet Carl Sandberg crowned Seeger "America's tuning fork." But when Bob Dylan called Seeger a saint, that was going too far.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"What a terrible thing to call someone," Seeger told USA TODAY on the eve of his 90th birthday. "I've made a lot of foolish mistakes over the years."</span></div><div><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-weight: 700;">TIMELINE: </span><a href="http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20140128/ENT0401/140128006/TIMELINE-Looking-back-legendary-figure-1919-2014?nclick_check=1" title="http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20140128/ENT0401/140128006/TIMELINE-Looking-back-legendary-figure-1919-2014?nclick_check=1" style="text-decoration: none;">Pete Seeger 1919 - 2014</a></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But no one was better at leading sing-alongs. "There is no such thing as a wrong note," he liked to say when leading group renditions of songs like</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>Amazing Grace</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, "just as long as you're singing along."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">At the end of our interview in 2009, I mentioned that my father had attended one of Seeger's free outdoor concerts decades earlier. As my father told it, Seeger noticed my dad wasn't singing and urged him to join in. My father said he shot back, "It's a free country. If I don't want to sing, I don't have to."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">When I told Seeger that story, he asked if my father was still alive. No, I said.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"That's too bad," Seeger replied, "because I have some new songs he might like."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeger was born in New York on May 3, 1919, to musical parents: His father was a Harvard-trained composer. His mother, Constance, was a concert violinist.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After dropping out of Harvard, Seeger met Woody Guthrie, who taught him how to jump freight trains. They becam</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">e part of the left-wing Almanac Singers who sang in opposition to the peacetime draft of 1940. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Seeger enlisted in the Army and trained as an airplane mechanic. He ended up being assigned to entertain the troops in the Pacific. When he was asked what he did in the war, he'd answer: "I strummed my banjo."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeger co-founded the Weavers, who had an apolitical hit,</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span><i>Good Night Irene</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950, but within three years they were blacklisted from radio and TV because of their left-wing politics.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Long after the blacklists ended, Seeger continued protesting. In 2011, he joined a march in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">For more than 60 years, he lived in Beacon, N.Y., with his wife, Toshi, in a cabin he mostly built himself on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River, 60 miles north of Manhattan. Toshi, whom he called "the brains of the family," died at 91 in 2013, after nearly 70 years of marriage. Seeger is suvived by a son, Daniel; two daughters, Mika Seeger and Tinya Seeger; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">If he didn't being want to be called a folk singer, what term did he prefer?</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"How about river singer," he suggested. "I sing up and down the Hudson River."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The last time I saw Seeger perform was in 2010 at an environmental fundraiser in an old church in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. He looked as pleased to be singing with a local children's chorus, with kids named Destiny Burroughs and Maddy Murphy, as he had at Madison Square Garden with Springsteen, Baez and Mellencamp.</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">--------------------</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">"Down By the River Side" by Pete Seeger</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">(Performed by Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee - ca. ?)</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eDU045u_E">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9eDU045u_E</a></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><img src="cid:65690E02-B11C-4BEB-98D0-19D89FB73C42" alt="image.jpeg" id="65690E02-B11C-4BEB-98D0-19D89FB73C42" width="640" height="474"></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">------------------------------------<br><br><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"Moscow Cares"</span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><a href="http://www.moscowcares.com/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">http://www.MoscowCares.com</font></a></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Tom Hansen</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Moscow, Idaho</span></div></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"><p style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent."</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br></span></p><p style="margin: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">- Pete Seeger</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>