Pete Seeger

"Arlo, folk songs are serious."—Pete Seeger to Arlo Guthrie

At the end of an hour long interview with Pete Seeger, the musical legend and political and environmental activist laughs and says to me, "This is my habit. I can run off at the mouth for hours. It was a family joke. 'All I did was ask Pop who was Queen Elizabeth, and two hours later, he was still talking.'"

Pete Seeger has plenty to talk about at the age of 86. Few can claim a life so extraordinary, and his brain is bursting with political and historical information, as well as the details of his own experiences. He talks about Sojourner Truth, the Wizard of Oz, Rosa Luxemburg, the melding of musical genres, being on "The Dick Cavett Show" with James Brown, Barbara Walters, communism, birth control in Thailand, and the origins of the English language. He quotes Plato and Dr. Seuss just moments apart. Every tidbit of information is enjoyable, and I could listen for another hour. But today I mostly want to hear about the upcoming benefit concert at Beacon High School with Arlo Guthrie, where Seeger will be a guest performer. They are raising money for two Hudson River projects—the sloop Woody Guthrie and a river pool in Beacon. Proceeds will be split, half going to each cause. Seeger tells how his involvement began with the Clearwater group, which has worked to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and clean it up.

Arlo Guthrie

"Here in the little town of Beacon, about 14,000 population, we've had a little Clearwater club on the waterfront. It started when the sloop Clearwater started sailing. In 1971, we had one friend on the city council, and he said, 'You know the old diner on the waterfront? It's just been rotting away. We were going to bulldoze it, but if you want to fix it up and use it as a meeting place, go ahead.' I'm sure his colleagues at City Hall said, 'Why'd you give those hippies our building?' He probably said, 'We can keep an eye on them this way.'" Seeger goes on to describe their meetings, which he says have met as regular as church on the first Friday of every month for over 30 years. "It's a contest between people who want to talk, and people who wish they'd shut up." He laughs. In addition to the meeting, there's a potluck and singing into the wee hours. Run by volunteers, the club takes guests out on free sails from the Beacon harbor on a smaller version of the sloop Clearwater called the Woody Guthrie, named after Seeger's old colleague and activist buddy. The sloop's deck is desperately in need of repair. Another committee is trying to build a floating swimming pool to put in the Hudson, now that the river is safe enough to swim in. "It'll have to be very lightweight, so it can be pulled out of the water every October and pushed into the water every May," Seeger explains. The Beacon River Pool will be located just off the north shore of Riverfront Park and will be open to the public. The water quality at the site is one of the best in Dutchess County, and the pool will be partially submerged, allowing river water to flow through.

Most Chronogram readers should be familiar with Pete Seeger as a folk singer and political activist; he was a major contributor to folk and protest music in the 1950s and '60s, writing well-known songs such as "If I Had a Hammer," "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," "Turn, Turn, Turn," and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" before being blacklisted in the McCarthy Era. He had hooked up and traveled with Woody Guthrie many years earlier, the author of the now-famous song "This Land is Your Land." Becoming close friends with that family, Seeger has known Guthrie's son, Arlo, since he was in diapers. Arlo has had a stupendous career in his own right, his most famous work being "Alice's Restaurant," a story song that lasts over 18 minutes. A satirical protest against the Vietnam War, it's based on Guthrie's own experience being rejected for the draft. A 1969 film was based on this story. Guthrie is now on tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of "Alice's Restaurant," and he will bring this work to the Beacon benefit along with some other gems. No doubt "City of New Orleans" will rear its head, the concert coming close on the heels of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy.

I'm unable to catch an interview with the touring Guthrie, but Seeger fills me in a bit on some details of the upcoming concert. "Arlo is the main thing," he says. "He gets the whole crowd singing. He's a very, very conscious performer, and I've seen him take a song and develop it, and work on it until it's honed to a fine edge. And he makes sure he keeps that fine edge on it. The pauses in it, the tone of voice when it rises or falls, he's an absolutely superb performer. The greatest opera singer in the world doesn't pay as close attention to his or her voice as Arlo does. When the '60s were over, a lot of people said, 'Well, now I guess all those protest singers are gone,' but Arlo just got bigger audiences all the time. Went from singing for 5,000 to 30,000."

The elderly Seeger admits his own voice is about 90 percent gone. "I called Arlo on the phone the other day and I said, 'Don't count on me for any solos.' What I do these days is I find a song the whole crowd knows and I get them singing. I've done this all my life, but I've had to depend on it more and more in the last 10 years. It may be an old spiritual, it may be a pop song. I often get people singing a Clearwater version of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" or "Over the Rainbow." I've written a new song about Dr. King. Arlo doesn't know it, but I'm sending him the words and the chords so he can help accompany me on the piano. I'll probably be doing six or seven songs, maybe ten. We sang one or two songs in Toronto a year ago, but we used to sing together every year, a whole batch of concerts. It'll be fun, 'cause I haven't sung with Arlo for awhile. We'll fill the beautiful, new auditorium at the Beacon High School. It seats about a thousand."

Seeger sings to me repeatedly during our interview. He sings one of Guthrie's hilarious little songs. He sings the four verses of Bill Steele's "Garbage" in its entirety. I ask him what was the catalyst that pushed him from being a political activist all those years into being an environmental one. It was the classic book by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring, originally published in 1962. "I thought until 1963 that the main job in the world was to help the meek inherit the earth. So, I worked with unions, the communist party, the civil rights movement. I tell people I've been a communist since age seven when I read Ernest Thompson Seton, who was a nature writer and held up the American Indian as an ideal. All of our ancestors were tribal communists. When I read Silent Spring, I realized the meek might inherit the earth eventually if we kept on working hard, but they'd inherit such a poisonous garbage dump, it wouldn't be much fun to inherit."

Seeger admits that he's more optimistic and enthusiastic about America in general now than ever before. "I'm now convinced that if there's a human race in 100 years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of small things going on. Small religious groups, small scientific groups, small sports groups, small cooking groups, small artistic groups, theater groups, publications, choruses. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Samaritan-type organizations around the country. When somebody asks me, 'What church do you belong to?', I say, "I belong to a Samaritan-type church called the Beacon Sloop Club. We believe in doin' good."