66 Facts About Pete Seeger

Peter Seeger was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and social activist.

Pete Seeger was a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, and had a string of hit records in the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 14 weeks in 1950.

Pete Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual "We Shall Overcome", which became the acknowledged anthem of the civil rights movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960.

Pete Seeger was born on May 3,1919, at French Hospital in New York City.

Pete Seeger helped organize the American Musicological Society and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology.

Pete Seeger attended first and second grades in Nyack, New York before being sent away to another boarding school in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Pete Seeger remained a loyal alumnus through the decades and attended a CRS event at age 93 in July 2012.

Mike Seeger was a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, married Peter's half-sister Penny, a talented singer, who died young.

Barbara Pete Seeger joined her siblings in recording folk songs for children.

Pete Seeger was deeply affected and, after learning basic plucking technique from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo.

The teenage Pete Seeger sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita.

Pete Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship.

Pete Seeger dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art as well.

That fall, Pete Seeger took a job in Washington, DC, assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress.

Pete Seeger's job was to help Lomax sift through commercial "race" and "hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union, of whose music division his father, Charles Pete Seeger, was head.

Lomax encouraged Pete Seeger's folk-singing vocation, and Pete Seeger was appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From alongside Josh White, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie.

From 1942 to 1945, Pete Seeger served in the US Army as an Entertainment Specialist, eventually attaining the rank of corporal.

Pete Seeger had been initially trained as an airplane mechanic, but was reassigned to entertain American troops with music, including in the South Pacific.

In 1949, Pete Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York.

In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League, then at the height of its influence.

In early 1941, while still only 21, Pete Seeger started performing as a member of the Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Butch Hawes and Bess Lomax Hawes, and Lee Hays.

Pete Seeger has said he believed this line of argument at the time, as did many fellow members of the Young Communist League.

Pete Seeger's critics continued to bring up the Almanacs' repudiated Songs for John Doe.

Pete Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.

The Almanac Singers, which Pete Seeger co-founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays, was a topical group, designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement, racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes.

In 1948, Pete Seeger wrote the first version of How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument.

Pete Seeger went on to invent the long-neck or Seeger banjo.

Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region, the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Pete Seeger's championing of and improvements to it.

Pete Seeger combined the long scale length and capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop-D tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks.

Pete Seeger was attempting to include the unique flavor of the steelpan in American folk music.

Pete Seeger left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.

Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, Pete Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment.

Pete Seeger was convicted in a jury trial of contempt of Congress in March 1961, and sentenced to ten one-year terms in jail, but in May 1962, an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

Pete Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled.

Pete Seeger recorded as many as five albums a year for Moe Asch's Folkways Records label.

Pete Seeger was the first person to make a studio recording of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" in 1956.

Pete Seeger was closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall concert, featuring the youthful Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

Pete Seeger helped spark a folk boom throughout the country at a time when popular music tastes competed between folk, the surfing craze, and the British rock invasion that gave the world The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, among others.

The Smothers Brothers ended Pete Seeger's national blacklisting by broadcasting him singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" on their CBS variety show on February 25,1968, after his similar performance in September 1967 was censored by CBS.

In November 1976, Pete Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song "Delbert Tibbs", about the death-row inmate Delbert Tibbs, who was later exonerated.

Pete Seeger wrote the music and selected the words from poems written by Tibbs.

Pete Seeger came to Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring, New York, over the summer many times.

Beyond Chandler's lyrics, Pete Seeger said that "Mrs Jay's little son Alby" had "beans in his ears", which, as the lyrics imply, ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them.

At the November 15,1969, Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington, DC, Pete Seeger led 500,000 protesters in singing John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance" as they rallied across from the White House.

In 1977, Pete Seeger appeared at a fundraiser in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

In 1978, Pete Seeger joined American folk, blues, and jazz singer Barbara Dane at a rally in New York for striking coal miners.

In 1982, Pete Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government.

In later years, as the aging Pete Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism, he found himself criticized for his opinions and associations of the 1930s and 1940s.

Pete Seeger characterized Seeger as "someone with a longtime habit of following the party line" who had only "eventually" parted ways with the CPUSA.

In 2007, in response to criticism from historian Ron Radosh, a former Trotskyist who now writes for the conservative National Review, Pete Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin, "Big Joe Blues":.

Pete Seeger put an end to the dreams Of so many in every land.

Pete Seeger had a chance to make A brand new start for the human race.

Pete Seeger appears in the 1997 documentary film An Act of Conscience, which was filmed between 1988 and 1995.

In 2003, Pete Seeger was a participant in an anti-Iraq war protest.

On September 19,2009, Pete Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival, which was particularly notable because the festival does not normally feature folk artists.

In 2010, still active at the age of 91, Pete Seeger co-wrote and performed the song "God's Counting on Me, God's Counting on You" with Lorre Wyatt, commenting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

On October 21,2011, at age 92, Pete Seeger was part of a solidarity march with Occupy Wall Street to Columbus Circle in New York City.

In January 2012, Pete Seeger joined the Rivertown Kids in paying tribute to his friend Bob Dylan, performing Dylan's "Forever Young" on the Amnesty International album Chimes of Freedom.

On December 14,2012, Pete Seeger performed, along with Harry Belafonte, Jackson Browne, Common, and others, at a concert to bring awareness to the 37-year-long ordeal of Native American activist Leonard Peltier.

On September 21,2013, Pete Seeger performed at Farm Aid at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1943, Pete Seeger married Toshi Aline Ohta, whom he credited with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible.

I've had preachers of the gospel, Presbyterians and Methodists, saying, "Pete Seeger, I feel that you are a very spiritual person".

Pete Seeger was a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York.

Pete Seeger remained engaged politically and maintained an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley region of New York throughout his life.

For years during the Iraq War, Pete Seeger maintained a weekly protest vigil alongside Route 9 in Wappingers Falls, near his home.

Pete Seeger received many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including:.