Meeting Pete Seeger

Me, far right, in the Gulf at Galveston, on the road to the Kerrville Folk Festival, sometime in the 90s.

News of Pete Seeger’s death flowed from my car radio this frigid January morn, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had met him.

I wracked my brain trying to remember where it had been. Which of the music festivals I’d attended in the early-to-mid-90s? I’d seen Pete at venues large and small, alongside famous headliners and newbie singer songwriters nervously crooning at their first festival gig.

Did I ever go back stage? Did Pete ever come around the campfire late at night to join the all-night sing along?

Truth is, I never “met” Pete.  Except through his songs. Which, the more I learn about Pete, the more I realize, is how you get to know the man.

I remember Pete taking the stage, beanpole tall and lean, but with nearly perfect posture. His voice was thin and reedy, but clarion clear. Every word of every song was audible. These songs were stories, and he didn’t want you to miss a syllable.

Truth be told, at the first festival, when I saw Pete Seeger was scheduled to take the stage, I thought, this might be a good time to make the long hike to the primitive campground latrines.

I was there to discover “new” music: contemporary singer songwriters with a fresh take on the issues of the day. Did I really need to hear a septuagenarian creakily warble “This Land is Your Land?” (You couldn’t come of age in the seventies without having had at least one well-meaning camp counselor attempt to impose her rendition of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on you at least one too many times.)

But for whatever reason I stuck around.

And as the long tall man with the well-worn banjo offered up those old familiar songs, the ones I had sung in elementary school music classrooms and around campfire circles (always accompanied by a teenage guitarist with his eyes glued to the fingering chart in a Roy Clark Big Note Guitar Book) I realized, those songs weren’t so old. Or so familiar.

On that afternoon I was hearing Pete’s songs from a makeshift festival stage, as if for the very first time.

Hearing those songs so clearly, in Pete’s well-worn but never strident voice, sung with such earnest clarity, it was impossible to not be moved. And yet Pete Seeger never seemed to be working too hard, or trying too much. He just sang.

And it was joyful.

And Pete never seemed more joyful than when the audience sang along. You almost felt like his whole long and remarkable life was culminating in this moment, in this place, with THIS rendition of “If I Had A Hammer.”

And whether it was one of Pete’s chestnuts or some obscure sea chantey with an interesting folkloric pedigree, to experience Pete “line out” a song to an audience was to be clay in the hands of a (very tall) master sculptor.

A sing along with Pete was almost enough to erase the memory of the strident camp counselor balladeer (with her music stand and fingering chart, and her helpful assistant counselor holding up Magic Marker lyrics on a big butcher paper scroll.) Although I am sure if those camp counselors had  joined Pete on the festival stage that day, he would have received them just as warmly, and sing along with them just as joyously, as if Odetta had joined him for a double bill.

And so, in a sense, I suppose it is fair to say I DID once meet Pete Seeger:

On a dusty trampled hillside amphitheatre, in the Hill Country of East Texas.

Along with 50,000 others.

Each one of us felt like Pete was singing just to us, with a twinkle in his eye.

And each one of us probably went breathlessly home to tell someone: I MET Pete Seeger this week!

And thousands upon thousands of us, who "met" Pete at thousands upon thousands of gigs, in thousands upon thousands of dusty amphitheatres, when we heard the news this morning, probably wracked our brains trying to remember when exactly it was that we met Pete.