Peter's mother, Constance de Clyver Seeger (née Edson), raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.

When Peter was eighteen months old, Charles and Constance set out with him and his two older brothers in a homemade trailer to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South.

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

[23] The teenage Seeger also 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.

Benton, a lover of Americana, played "Cindy" and "Old Joe Clark" with his students Charlie and Jackson Pollock; friends from the "hillbilly" recording industry; and avant-garde composers Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell.

This anti-war/anti-draft tone reflected the Communist Party line after the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which maintained that the war was "phony" and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia.

A June 16, 1941, review in Time magazine, which, under its owner, Henry Luce, had become very interventionist, denounced the Almanacs' Songs for John Doe album, accusing it of scrupulously echoing what it called "the mendacious Moscow tune" that "Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war".

The order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, at which time the Communist Party quickly directed its members to get behind the draft and forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war—angering some leftists.

[41] With Pete Seeger as its director, People's Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt's former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket.

On the other side was a reissue of the legendary Six Songs for Democracy (originally recorded in Barcelona in 1938 while bombs were falling), performed by Ernst Busch and a chorus of members of the Thälmann Battalion, made up of volunteers from Germany.

[4] Other Weavers hits included "Dusty Old Dust" ("So Long It's Been Good to Know You" by Woody Guthrie), "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (by Hays, Seeger, and Lead Belly), and the Zulu song by Solomon Linda, "Wimoweh" (about Shaka), among others.

"Kumbaya", a Gullah black spiritual dating from slavery days, was also introduced to wide audiences by Pete Seeger and the Weavers (in 1959), becoming a staple of Boy and Girl Scout campfires.

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

The two searched out a local panyard director, Kim Loy Wong, and proceeded to film the construction, tuning and playing of the then-new national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago (https://whensteeltalks.ning.com/video/music-from-oil-drums-1956).

[54] To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger worked gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps, and traveled the college campus circuit.

Seeger also 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.

[56] By this time, Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village, as a longtime columnist in Sing Out!, the successor to the People's Songs Bulletin, and as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine.

Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, the Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Hedy West, Donovan, The Clancy Brothers, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, the Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, Malvina Reynolds, Sonia Malkine, and Shawn Phillips.

To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War, the phrase implied that "Alby Jay", a loose pronunciation of Johnson's nickname "LBJ", did not listen to anti-war protests as he too had "beans in his ears".

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

[77] Phạm Tuyên composed "Let me hear your guitar, my U.S. friend" ("Gảy đàn lên hỡi người bạn Mỹ") as a tribute to Seeger's support for the DRV.

For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger's book, From Yale to Jail ... [84] At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a "hard driver" and not a "supremely cruel misleader".

In 2006, David Boaz—Voice of America and NPR commentator and president of the libertarian Cato Institute—wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian, entitled "Stalin's Songbird", in which he excoriated The New Yorker and The New York Times for lauding Seeger.

[98] On May 3, 2009, at the Clearwater Concert, dozens of musicians gathered in New York at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Seeger's 90th birthday (which was later televised on PBS during the summer),[99] ranging from Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Eric Weissberg, Ani DiFranco and Roger McGuinn to Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Joanne Shenandoah, R. Carlos Nakai, Bill Miller, Joseph Fire Crow, Margo Thunderbird, Tom Paxton, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Arlo Guthrie.

[104] A performance of the song by Seeger, Wyatt, and friends was recorded and filmed aboard the sloop Clearwater in August for a single and video produced by Richard Barone and Matthew Billy, released on election day, November 6, 2012.

Thousands of people crowded Pete Seeger by the time they reached Columbus Circle, where he performed with his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, David Amram, and other celebrated musicians.

[110] On December 14, 2012, 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.

This two-CD spoken-word work was conceived of and produced by noted percussionist Jeff Haynes and presents Pete Seeger telling the stories of his life against a background of music performed by more than 40 musicians of varied genres.

[112] The launch of the audiobook was held at the Dia:Beacon on April 11, 2013, to an enthusiastic audience of around two hundred people, and featured many of the musicians from the project (among them Samite, Dar Williams, Dave Eggar, and Richie Stearns of the Horse Flies and Natalie Merchant) performing live under the direction of producer and percussionist Haynes.

Michael Moynihan of The Daily Beast wrote an obituary entitled "The Death of 'Stalin's Songbird'" and included these remarks:Along with countless other sensible people, I have often bristled at the mindless deification of Pete Seeger, the nonagenarian folk singer who died yesterday at age 94...we all remember good-but-overpraised songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and the treacly classic "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"