By Lethbridge Herald Opinon on February 11, 2014.

music that serves as the voice of the people has gradually disappeared beneath wave of pop music

Trevor W. Harrison

UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE

Pete Seeger’s recent passing gives pause to reflect on the role of music in today’s politics and of the distance that the concerns of everyday folk have all but disappeared from public discourse.

I never met him, nor heard him live in concert. I do remember as a kid the Kingston Trio singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer.”

But I did have one fleeting contact with Seeger about three years ago. At the time, I was researching the life and times of a musician who was rumoured to have once made a banjo for Seeger. I sent an inquiry to Seeger at his home in Beacon, New York, not certain if I would get a reply. A few weeks later, however, a letter arrived. Short and friendly, almost apologetic, he wrote back saying he had no memory of the musician or the instrument.

Like his friend, Woodie Guthrie, Seeger wrote songs that were often directly political. But more often, he wrote songs about everyday people, their real lives; songs in which they could actually see their experiences reflected. The folk tradition within which Seeger wrote had long, deep roots, of course, going back hundreds of years in Europe and elsewhere, its mirror found in the raw blues of the Mississippi delta.

The end of war in 1945 unleashed a torrent of revolt in favour of an expansion of political, economic, and social rights. A predictable backlash soon followed, however. In the context of the Cold War, right-wing politicians and media elites quickly labelled Seeger and others – Paul Robeson comes to mind – as leftist agitators, even communists. Then, as now, the label “leftist” was a convenient stick with which to beat anyone opposing powerful interests.

Seeger’s values transcended simple political labels, however. He believed the people deserved justice, a “square deal,” in the lingo of pulp writers at the time. He believed the United States was being taken over by political, corporate, and military interests that were opposed to the genuine interests of the people. So he wrote, performed, marched and protested in favour of civil rights and, later, against the Vietnam War – indeed, the many wars that his country unwisely stumbled into again and again. And, as several columns have noted, he influenced whole generations of other songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and, later, Bruce Springsteen.

Unfortunately, the times were indeed a-changing, and not altogether for the good. Even into the 1970s, folk music had a place on musical charts. On various radio stations, and on television, folk music could be heard side by side with other genres, including rock and country. Gradually, however, folk music disappeared beneath a wave of popular or “pop” music.

Folk music is not, of course, a static form. Any music – including blues, rock, country, reggae or punk – could be folk, or at least folk-inspired, in the sense of speaking with the voice of the people. And it continues, happily, in small clubs and on street corners and on independent and public radio stations across North America. But the vast majority of radio channels today are corporate entities that play popular music.

The thing about pop music is that it does not even pretend to speak for the people. It is by and large a commercial, mass-produced opiate, test-driven for its musical hooks and electronic gimmickry, and then sold to the public. Pop artists – Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber among them – are marketed as originals, but in fact are manufactured like toothpaste; the Spice Girls were assembled to hit all the right demographics.

Occasionally, of course, pop music does pretend to deal with real issues, but this too seems often a marketing ploy. Few pop artists would ever seriously denounce the corporate structure in which they are embedded. When the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines’ a few years ago opined that President Bush was a liar and fool, the corporate music industry became apoplectic; the band was banned from popular music stations, and live venues for their music evaporated.

At its best, popular music – and popular culture in general – is trivial entertainment. At worst, it is a marketing tool that too often also reinforces sexual, racial, class, and ageist stereotypes. But pop music does something else perhaps even more damaging.

Pop music, in the main, is all about the individual: their problems are their responsibilities. By contrast, folk music brings together the individual with his or her community and society. In the folk tradition, there is no individual problem that is not also, as the American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued, “a political issue.” Pete Seeger sang and wrote this truth. His legacy will live on as long as the people have a voice.

When not being a music critic, Trevor W. Harrison is a professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge and Director of Parkland Institute.

1. Hugh G Rection says:

   I first heard Pete Seeger perform when I was five or six, when I was a red-diaper baby and he was blacklisted and drunk. What I recall most about the encounter was that the tip of his needle-nose glowed bright red. He was performing for a children’s group of some sort at a time when his Communist background kept him out of public venues. His records — not just the Weavers albums, but the early Asch 78′s of the Almanac Singers — were daily fare in my home, along with Woody Guthrie’s children’s songs. My parents knew Guthrie casually; my father once organized a concert for him at Brooklyn College, and my mother was Arlo Guthrie’s nursery-school teacher.

   I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born, born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud, a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused was a put-on from beginning to end.

   There is no such thing as an American “folk.” We are a people summoned to these shores by an idea, not common ties of blood and culture. There is folk music in America where pockets of ethnicity resisted assimilation: African-American blues, for example, or the English songs frozen in amber in white Appalachia. That is why the best American popular music always came from black sources, performed either by black musicians or white emulators from George Gershwin on down.

   Seeger’s (and Guthrie’s) notion of folk music had less to do with actual American sources than with a Communist-inspired Yankee version of Proletkult. The highly personalized style of a Robert Johnson and other Delta bluesmen didn’t belong in the organizing handbook of the “folk” exponents who grew up in the Communist Party’s failed efforts to control the trade union movement of the 1940s. The music of the American people grew out of their churches. Their instrument was the piano, not the guitar, and their style was harmonized singing of religious texts rather than the nasal wailing that Guthrie made famous. Seeger, the son of an academic musicologist and a classical violinist, was no mountain primitive, but a slick commercializer of “folk” themes with a nasty political agenda. His capacity to apologize for the brutalities of Communist regimes — including their repression of their own “folksingers” — remained undiminished with age, as David Graham reported in the Atlantic.

   I’m willing to forgive Seeger his Stalinism. Some of my most-admired artists were Stalinists, for example, Bertolt Brecht, whose rendition of his own “Song of the Unattainability of Human Striving” from The Threepenny Opera is the funniest performance of the funniest song of the 20th century. I can’t forgive him his musical fraud: the mind-deadening, saccharine, sentimental appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste in his signature songs — “I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” and so forth. Bob Dylan (of whom I’m not much of a fan) rescued himself from the bathos by poisoning the well of sentimentality with irony. His inheritance is less Dylan than the odious Peter, Paul and Mary.

   One of Seeger’s great selling points is that during the great leveling of the 1960s, any idiot who could play three chords on a guitar could plunk and howl through most of his repertoire. Try to play like Robert Johnson. There’s a great gulf fixed. Johnson may have been self-taught, but his music sought to rise above adversity and sorrow with craft and invention. The folkies aimed lower. Tom Lehrer got it exactly right half a century ago. I know how mean-spirited and vengeful this sounds, but after suffering through this pap through my childhood, I feel entitled. Everyone deserves a few free passes at petty rancour, and I am going to use one of mine on Pete Seeger.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yygMhtNQJ9M

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