You Never Can Tell:
A Conversation with Pete Seeger
By David Kupfer(interview conducted June, 2003, in Beacon, NY)
Pete Seeger is an individual who is easy to describe with superlatives, though I believe he hates to be called things like a folk icon, legend, pioneer, or hero. He has had an epic life, full of amazing contributions to our culture and politics. In person, he conveys a comfortable, homespun way about himself that puts you at ease. He truly is a humble, modest soul, and in conversation is slow to credit himself on his lifework's impact. Seeger has 65 years of performing behind him. It can be safely said that in the 20th Century no other individual so successfully combined folk music and progressive politics. Pete has sung for the labor movement and the civil rights movement, the anti-war movements, anti-nuclear power and the environmental movement.
Along with Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, and Carl Sandburg, he is part of the first generation of professional folk singers in America whose pioneering efforts helped to transform folk from an orally transmitted body of traditional songs found mainly among rural dwellers to a mass-market form of entertainment, popular on college campuses and in New York coffeehouses. He was also deeply involved in the civil rights movement from the beginning during the Montgomery bus Boycott. His songs, including his adaptation of "We Shall Overcome," helped to inspire the movement.
He has known as friends and colleagues many of the preeminent figures in American music, from Woody and Leadbelly and Paul Robeson, to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and on to Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco--not to mention political figures like Martin Luther King and Abbie Hoffman. The man once indicted by Congress and blacklisted from national television and major concert venues has more recently found himself recognized as a pillar of American music and society, honored by the Kennedy Center and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
For decades, singer-songwriter Seeger has also been an important folk music teacher and educator, through his writing, publishing, storytelling, and extensive performing for young people.
Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919 in New York City. His mother was a concert violinist and his father was Julliard musicologist Charles Seeger, one of the first researchers to investigate nonwestern music and teach ethnomusicology. The elder Seeger became the head of the Department of Music at Berkeley, California, "and then he got himself fired, because he was outraged by the slaughter of World War One, and went around making speeches about the imperialist war, and next thing you know he was out of a job. He came East again, where he was raised, and he and my mother taught in the Julliard Institute in Manhattan. Their marriage broke up, and they sent me off to boarding school at an early age, but this part of the world, the mid-Hudson Valley, is where my grandparents grew up, and I've lived there most of my life," recalled Pete.
Pete was educated at several exclusive private schools, including Harvard, where he majored in sociology. He began playing banjo in his teens, and developed an intense interest in folk music that only grew over time. He began to spend his time listening to all forms of folk music, traveling through the southern and midwestern states, meeting and observing people who sang and played in the mountains, valleys, and plains. In 1938 he dropped out of college to hitchhike across the US. Along the way he met many legendary folk musicians including Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. When he returned to New York in 1940, Seeger formed the Almanac Singers, which had a rotating cast of folk singers (at times including Woody Guthrie) that blended topical, politically progressive lyrics with folk tunes. The songs of Woody Guthrie, Seeger, and the Almanac Singers were components of a political movement aimed at organizing and strengthening the labor movement and, by extension, the left in America. They performed at many union rallies, strikes, and similar events. The Almanac Singers disbanded during World War II, when Seeger was drafted.
During World War II, Seeger's talents were put to work for the government as he entertained troops throughout the world. After the war, in 1948, he helped form the Weavers, the first mainstream American folk group. The Weavers made the Hit Parade and brought themselves considerable national acclaim with several big hits in the early 1950s, including 1948's "Goodnight Irene," which stayed at No. 1 for weeks on end, setting a chart record not broken until the 1970s. During the McCarthy-era Red Scare the Weavers--less political than the Almanac Singers, but still outspokenly socialist--suffered boycotts that severely curtailed their success. It was in 1955 that the group bounced back with a legendary performance at Carnegie Hall, setting the stage for the urban folk boom of the late 1950s.
Though a somewhat controversial figure for his radical politics and shocking refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities committee, Seeger elected to begin a solo career in 1958, and quickly became a star in his own right. Known for songs such as "If I Had a Hammer" (a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary), "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "Turn, Turn, Turn" (later popularized by the Byrds), "Guantanamera," and, most famously, "We Shall Overcome," Seeger became a fixture at civil rights rallies, college campuses, labor strikes, and anti-war protests, where audiences would often sing along so loud that Seeger himself could hardly be heard.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Seeger shifted away from typical American folk, embracing African music, Latin-American folk songs, and other forms of world music.
At this time Pete became active in the nascent environmental movement, drawing attention to pollution of the Hudson River through boating trips; he later formed the activist group Clearwater, which teaches schoolchildren about water pollution. He and some friends built the Clearwater Sloop, a reproduction of an earlier river sloop, and sailed it up and down the river, spreading the word about pollution and raising money to clean up the river. Because of his efforts and the efforts of many others, the Hudson River is now open for swimming in many places.
One thing that's endeared him to audiences all over the world is that he always gets people to join in. It's almost a religion with him. "The world will be saved when people realize we all have to pitch in. You can't just pay your money and hope that someone else will do the job right." He continued performing into the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, most often at charity shows and benefits.
As Seeger strides ahead in his 80s, a set of recent releases testifies to the vitality of his music and life. To name a few: a recently remastered Greatest Hits set brings us his own classic performances from the '60s, and three volumes of The Songs of Pete Seeger collect tributes by a wide range of artists, from The Indigo Girls to Jackson Browne (see reviews in TL 8.3, 11.3, and on page 58 of this issue).
Pete is also an accomplished author. He has written songbooks with Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie and the Weavers; more than 25 books in all, including The Caroler's Songbag, The Weavers' Songbook, American Favorite Ballads, How to Play the Five-String Banjo, Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, The Incompleat Folksinger, Abiyoyo, and Pete Seeger's Storytelling Book. He also has written or co-written several seminal books about folk music, including Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures (Norton, 1989). Carry It On (Simon and Schuster, 1985), co-written with Bob Reiser, is a unique celebration in word, song, and picture of the working men and women who helped to build this country. The Incompleat Folksinger, written by Pete with Jo Metcalf Schwartz (Simon and Schuster, 1972), which includes words, music, and chords for many songs, is arguably the best book written on the history, social phenomenon, and character of folk music around the globe. In a thoroughly enjoyable romp through the folk scene, Seeger includes many stories about his life and times, songs about sailing and mining, traveling and loafing, as well as candid portraits of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Finally, his musical autobiography, Where Have All the Flowers Gone (Singout Publications, 1996), contains not just songs with melodies, but a social history of folk music's evolution over the past 50 years. His classic drawings are sprinkled throughout the text.
Pete Seeger embodies the spirit of this nation more than anyone I've met. He is still harvesting maple syrup from his trees, working on the drainage of his dirt driveway, staying physically active, and, as this interview indicates, his mind remains sharp and he is quite engaged!
DK: What are you writing now?
PS: For every twenty songs I complete, I get a song someone else will sing too. Many songwriters are lucky if one or two of them are sung after they are dead and gone. Irving Berlin had dozens. Stephen Foster had a few. For one of my songs I added a little refrain to a Jesse White melody and the lyrics were written by a songwriter Richard Lederer out in California. I am a strong believer in the folk process, which means that songs can be added to a little at a time. I got that phrase from my father, Charles Seeger, who was a musicologist. The folk process, he said, has been going on for thousands of years.
My song goes: "English is the most widely used language in the history of the planet. One out of every seven human beings can read or speak it. It has the largest vocabulary, perhaps two million words and a noble body of literature, but face it, English is cuh-ray-zee." That is the song's title. I pluck the guitar. "In what other language do you drive on the parkway and park on the driveway? Recite in a play and play in a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? English is cuh-ray-zee. There is no egg in eggplant, no pine or apple in pineapple. A writer writes, but do fingers fing? Grocers groce? Quicksand works slowly, boxer rings are square! English is cuh-ray-zee! (second stanza) You have to marvel at the lunacy in which a house can burn up when it burns down. When you fill out a form, you fill it in! Your alarm clock goes off when it goes on! If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? English is cuh-ray-zee!" I get the audience to join in on it.
DK: How do you occupy your days?
PS: Most of my days are occupied with chores, answering mail, cleaning the house, helping my wife in the garden. This morning I patched up my road, which will get washed away with the next rain if I don't keep the cross ditches working right. If it weren't for those crosshatches there wouldn't be any road. It is a little like life. People say they wish there weren't so many bumps in the road, but maybe if there weren't so many bumps in the road we wouldn't get through it!
DK: You and Toshi have been married for sixty years next month. To what do you credit this longevity?
PS: Well, her patience with me. She is really the secret of the family. I have had a lifelong problem of starting projects that I don't have time to finish. Sometimes projects work out so well that other people carry them on. That's what happened with the Clearwater.
DK: You are pretty proud of what you have accomplished with establishing the Clearwater Hudson Sloop.
PS: The Hudson is swim-able again. I've gotten involved with starting a floating swimming pool here in our hometown of Beacon. We call it a river pool. It is a self-contained swimming hole that will be three to four feet deep and have an underwater floor built like a tennis racquet with tight netting so people can stand on it. Eventually we hope to have a large seventy-five foot pool where you can swim laps but that will probably take a hundred thousand dollars or more. We are starting out with a smaller wading pool and it could be built in the next few months. But there are a whole lot of federal, state, and county laws we have to deal with. We are working with a whole lot of government departments, the health department, the bureau of fisheries, the Corps of Engineers. We have to prove that our ideas work. An architect, a New York woman, invented this pool.
DK: And the Clearwater has met with success in cleaning up the Hudson!
PS: It was only three years after Clearwater was established that the water pollution amendments in 1972 were passed in Congress. It was rather an interesting political situation. Nixon and Washington in general had a lot of problems, mainly the Vietnam War, but there were other ones too. One of the minor issues was how come we have money to go to the moon, but we don't have money to keep our rivers clean. So it's as if they said, there is a whole batch of wolves chasing us. Maybe we can throw some bones to them and at least get one of them off our back. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent on sewage treatment plants and most of America's rivers are cleaner then they were thirty years ago. However, they could be cleaner, and if floating swimming pools work here in Beacon, they could be repeated elsewhere.
DK: It sounds like a model idea!
PS: These river pools could eventually be reproduced en masse and would be quite inexpensive. Regular pools need filtration and chlorinating and are often initially quite expensive. Some people are allergic to chlorine, so if the river is clean it has many real advantages. It could be quite exciting.
DK: So this is one project you are pretty active with?
PS: Well I have been down testing the water over these last few weeks. Yesterday I got up at five o'clock in the morning because it needed to be high tide when we collected our sample. High tide was at 6:30. A friend of mine and I rowed around, took the samples and took them to the county lab.
DK: You are a pretty avid organic gardener too.
PS: My wife is, and I help when I can, but I really don't help out half as much as I should.
DK: What are your views of the current politics in the US?
PS: I tell everybody that I am more optimistic about the future of the United States than I have been since August 1945, when the truth sunk through my thick skull about the significance of the atom bomb. I tend to agree with Albert Einstein that everything has changed except our way of thinking. Our way of thinking is deep in our chromosomes. Two and a half million years ago our ancestors started walking on two feet. Ever since then, we've loved to swing clubs and throw stones, which probably accounts for the popularity of baseball and cricket and other games. And when somebody does something that we think is outrageous, we want to kill them! I often tell audiences, "You realize that you and I, all of us, we are all descendants from good killers! The ones who were not good killers did not have descendants!"
On the other hand, we are also descended from people who knew how to argue with each other. Most scientists agree that the reason our ancestors survived and there are no more Neanderthals in the world is that the Neanderthals probably didn't have as good verbal skills or skills of numbers. This is the part of the human heritage that we have got to develop now, how to cool it when we get angry, and see if there is some way we can reach those people. If words won't reach those people, maybe we can try pictures. If pictures won't do, let's try melodies!
DK: You are sounding quite hopeful!
PS: You know the metaphor I have with a seesaw. I have improved it. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a basket half-full of rocks on it, and the other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it has a basket one quarter full of sand. Some of us are using teaspoons to fill it with more sand, and a lot of people are laughing at us saying, "Don't you see it is leaking out as fast as you put it in?" We say, "Well, we are getting more people with teaspoons all the time, lots more people, and we think one of these days that whole seesaw will go zoom in the other direction, and people will say gee, how did that happen so suddenly? Us and all of our little teaspoons!"
DK: The culture during the Depression had aspects that seemed really expansive and very optimistic. Do you see certain parallels to where we are now?
PS: Oh yeah! Isn't it funny? There is hardly anything bad in the world that doesn't have something good connected to it. And I suppose nothing good in the world doesn't have anything bad connected with it. It is not as simple as the Bible says--a good tree brings forth good fruit. It is a lot more tangled than that. It may be the human race is going to be brought together because of the deep Depression that we are headed into now. People are ready to manufacture things but nobody has money to buy them!
DK: What are some of the lessons that the social change movement on the left has learned that can be applied now?
PS: I think we should learn to beware of large organizations in general, whether it is a large political movement, big political parties, big religion, even big scientific groups. Big things tend to attract power hungry people. What makes me optimistic now is that there are not thousands, but millions of little organizations springing up all over the place. They don't all agree with each other, but at least they agree that it is better not to shoot at each other. This makes me optimistic, all these little things going on. A big organization can also be put out of business by the powers that be. They can attack it from the outside, they can attack it from the inside. There is hardly any single organization that can't be done in if it gets too successful. But how are you going to handle millions of organizations when they become successful? This is why I am optimistic.
Now, I confess, in a sense I have been kind of pessimistic much of my life. You know I started off a nature nut. Ernest Thompson Seton and Henry David Thoreau were my heroes. When I was a teenager I was disabused of that. I wanted to be a hermit, and they said, you think that is your idea of morality? You are going to be nice and pure yourself and let the rest of the world go to hell? So I got more involved and I have been more involved ever since. I now strongly agree with Ren� Dubos, who coined the phrase "think globally, act locally." He said many of the most important organizations will be neighborhood, local, regional organizations. If they do a good job, who knows where else the idea will be picked up.
DK: How do you see the present political landscape?
PS: Well, the big picture is still pretty bad. They've got the basket of rocks firmly on the ground. I'd say that little things are still going on. That February 15th rally where there were ten million people rallying for peace on one day!
DK: As a veteran, how have you felt about our recent foreign military incursions?
PS: I am a member of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars. It is a tiny little chapter and I put on an Army cap and attend a meeting once a month. I know many others at our post probably disagree with me, but we can all sit together in the same room--learn from each other. Last Memorial Day we had a program and all the local kids were there and we had them all singing "This Land is Your Land."
DK: When you were young, what were the first songs you heard that had a significant role in social protest?
PS: I was only a teenager about the same time I joined the Young Communist League and I met Aunt Molly Jackson, a Kentucky miner's wife, and an accomplished midwife who delivered hundreds of children in this little mining community. She was outspoken (sings) "I am a union woman, as brave as I can be, I do not like the bosses and the bosses don't like me."
My father was the one who got me thinking about radicals. Way back in 1929, like a lot of people, he thought the crash was the end of the free enterprise system. He started a group called the Composers' Collective. Aaron Copeland was a member and Marc Blitzstein and half a dozen others. They were trying to think of the kind of music this new social situation demanded. However, their efforts were almost laughably failures. They went in for dissident, counterpoint Shoenberg, Stravinsky, and so on. The working people were quite uninterested in learning their songs. My father brought Aunt Molly around to the Composers' Collective, and they listened to her, and said, "But Charlie, this is all music from the past, we are supposed to be composing music for the future." He took Molly back to her apartment on the Lower East Side and said, "Molly I am sorry they did not understand you but I know some young people who are going to want to learn your songs." And I was one of them.
DK: And that helped to seed those songs in you at such a young age?
PS: Yeah. My father backed out of the Communists League in 1938, when he read a transcript of the Moscow purge trials, and said this is no way to run a world revolutionary movement. But he let me find my own way. After I dropped out of college in 1938, I joined an artists' group, part of the Youth Communist League, making posters. I drifted out of the Communist Party in the early 1950s. When I was handing out flowers at this past Memorial Day, someone asked me, "Seeger, are you a Communist?" And I said, "Depends on the description. I became one at age seven and in a sense I still am one. I would like to see a world with no millionaires."
DK: Do you think what is going on with the US economy will ultimately steer the nation toward more socialistic policies?
PS: First of all, I caution people who think that they agree on what socialism is. When you use words like socialism and communism or, for that matter, freedom and justice, you have to pause for a moment and make sure the person you are talking with agrees with your use of the term. It's almost a joke, the difference in definitions. The word folk music used to mean the music of the peasant class, ancient and anonymous. Now it means someone who plays an acoustic guitar and makes up songs and sings at the coffeehouse and tries to sell records. I still read left wing magazines from time to time. I started with The New Masses and The Daily Worker. Woody Guthrie had a column in there and used to say, "I write a column for the newspaper called The Sabbath Employee." He meant The Sunday Worker.
To answer your question, I'd say yes in the sense that we'll realize that our future is very much intertwined. The human race is either going to make it or we are not going to make it. I give us fifty or a hundred years. We have to learn to talk and communicate with each other, even though we know we have different definitions of words. When we can't communicate with words we'll find arts or sports, or food. We'll communicate with each other rather than shooting at each other quite so often.
This is why the environmental crisis may be what will pull the world together. When the oceans rise, and I am pretty sure they are, unless we do something about climate warming... People say "Gee this was a cold winter, how can you say the climate is warming?" I say "Well, look at the long picture. The Greenland ice cap is melting. Alaskan glaciers are melting. Glaciers down in the Antarctic are melting. Where is that water going? If the oceans rise even as little as five or ten feet, it's going to be a disaster for some parts of the world, for many of the cities of the world. A crisis like this can often pull people together. You know, when there is a flood in a town everyone works together tossing sandbags at the foot of main street. The baker and the town drunkard--at least temporarily, they are all working together.
DK: Do you see signs that the many constituencies are coming together?
PS: Yes I do. Some very conservative people are very alarmed, and rightly so. On the other hand, the Washington gang is a very smart gang. They don't do things suddenly. They talk things over, analyze them from this angle and that angle and the other angle and fifteen other angles and then decide this is what we will do. They've gone back over the 1980s and 90s and asked, what did we do wrong? Now we are going to do it right! And they are very shrewd, doing all sorts of clever things.
DK: The young radicals of the sixties frequently created divisions along generational lines in their politics.
PS: I disagreed with them. I failed to get either Jerry Ruben or Abbie Hoffman to agree with me. They wanted me to come out to Chicago in 1968. They said, "You're the only older person we want to have out there." I asked, "Why don't you want to have older people out there?" And they said, "Well we are going to carry this through ourselves." I think they were wrong.
DK: Do you think these divisions are still present now?
PS: There are lots of divisions now! Eighty percent of young people don't bother to vote. They are the real silent majority Nixon talked about. Nixon sure had a great phrase: "We are a nation of vociferous minorities and silent majorities." The real majority is the sixty percent of people who don't vote and the eighty percent of young people who don't bother to vote.
DK: But you have been heartened by the unity of folks who came together to oppose the war?
PS: Oh yeah, February 15th was a rainbow gathering. That's why I sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Incidentally, did you know that scientists are almost certain that Noah's Ark did take place seven thousand six hundred years ago? With the carbon-14 process, they know when ocean water spilled over and filled up the Black Sea, which had been a salt puddle during the ice age. Within a couple decades the Black Sea filled up. And who knows, there might have been some man named Noah who thought to save his family.
DK: Well, you know how stories change as they are passed from one generation to another.
PS: The folk process!
DK: One of your great contributions has been your ability to bridge traditional songs and cultures, connecting the past and present. Who is carrying on in your footsteps?
PS: Oh, not dozens, not hundreds, there are thousands! I really mean it! In this country, and around the world, there are all sorts of musicians getting together with poets saying, let's write a song! Often they take over a song and change it, add to it. There is an explosion of song writing going on, and some of these songs are quite beautiful. There are people who are not professional songwriters but who happen to write a good song just the same.
DK: What are you looking forward to?
PS: Well, I'd like to live to see what is going to happen in the next twenty years because this is such an exciting period, truly the most exciting period I have ever lived through, with all the good and bad all tangled up. All you can do is laugh if you don't cry.
DK: Didn't Columbia Teachers' College just award you a diploma?
PS: Well, I have been offered honorary degrees for nearly fifty years, but I have turned them all down because I am not in academia. My family was mostly teachers. Both my parents were teachers, as were my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and my great grandparents ran a school a hundred and fifty years ago. So I figured I'd go down to Teachers' College and see what they are all about. The schools I went to were called progressive schools back in the 1920s. The teachers would take a weekend off every year and go down to meet with John Dewey at Teachers' College.
DK: In the 1950s you seemed to be almost directly seeding the youth movement that sprung forth the following decade. At the time, did you ever give thought to the impact of your actions?
PS: You never can tell what effect you have until later on. I am pleasantly surprised when I meet white haired people and they tell me they got into my songs when they were in school. Some people come up to me and say, "My grandma said that you came to sing for her in nursery school." I've actually been singing in schools for sixty-five years this year. My Aunt knew I was looking for a job as a journalist and failing. I was keeping house at my older brother's, cooking meals and cleaning house for free rent. My Aunt said "Pete, come sing some of your songs in my class and I will give you five dollars." Well, a lot of people had to work an entire day or two days to get five dollars in those days. It seemed like stealing to do what I had always done for the fun of it. But I went and took the money, and pretty soon I was singing in another school, and another!
DK: And that was your introduction into performing?
PS: Then I'd sing in summer camps. Then I'd met Lee Hays and we formed the Almanac Singers. We'd sing for unions and left wing causes, here and there and everywhere.
DK: There is nothing comparable to the Almanac Singers these days, is there?
PS: Not quite, but almost. There are some groups that just concentrate on singing with unions. There are some that just concentrate on having the direct lefty line. I think most people are a little more open now, I just got through with a gathering called the Peoples Music Network, about a hundred people who get together twice a year and swap songs and ideas. Some are revolutionary types and some are pacifist types, but they all think that songs can be used.
DK: You are a member of the Committee for Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism?
PS: I am a big admirer of Angela Davis and Charlene Mitchell. But I am a member of all sorts of things.
DK: What is your take on 2004 elections?
PS: Bush may just get reelected. His gang is so clever. And they have a huge amount of money to put their tricks into practice. On the other hand, who knows! Who knows? Something may happen, as it happened to Tricky Dick, quite unexpected. A slip up somewhere. You know, he has to remember all those lies he has told, so Bush could actually trip himself up. [Ed. note: This interview occurred in June 2003, before some of the current administration's misrepresentations started coming home to roost.]
DK: It's hard to be a prophet.
PS: There is no prophet in the world that hasn't been surprised; left wing prophets, right wing prophets, religious prophets or atheist prophets. I don't think there is a single person who hasn't been surprised by some of the things that have happened recently. Pessimistic prophets or optimistic prophets. All you can do is laugh. I have an older brother who is a radar astronomer. He once sent out a paper to his friends that said it is difficult for even the scientist to realize how extreme is the spread between all the space in the universe and all the matter. If you added up all the visible and invisible matter and added up all the space, it would have the same relationship as one hydrogen atom to seventeen cubic meters of absolutely nothing at a temperature of almost absolute zero. And there are something like four hundred million hydrogen atoms on the head of a pin. He says you might say the universe is almost at complete perfect emptiness except for a tiny almost infinitely small imperfection. Samuel Beckett's father said that perhaps life is an imperfection of matter. A slight imperfection has a slight imperfection itself! In Waiting for Godot, Beckett said that technological society is a slight temporary imperfection in life.
DK: What is the most pronounced thing that you have seen that a protest song has been able to accomplish?
PS: I'd say the civil rights movement more than the union movement. Songs did a lot for unions, but the civil rights movement would not have succeeded if it hadn't been for all those songs. Sung in jails and in picket lines and parades. People hummed them when they were most beaten. I've read about Martin Luther King; I didn't realize King graduated from high school at age fifteen. He was very much a reader and after four years at Morehouse, he did three years of divinity school up in Pennsylvania. There were two professors of philosophy in Boston University he admired greatly and he did two more years with them. He must have done well with them, because he was offered three good jobs to join the philosophy departments of three separate northern universities. He turned them all down to take a lower paying job at a little Baptist Church in Montgomery, because he knew that was where the job had to be done. And he knew who had to do it.
DK: Were you impressed by him in person?
PS: He was very quiet, had a good sense of humor. But he was basically very serious. I wrote a song about him: "Take it from Dr. King." It is not a great song, but it could be used on his birthday. It will be forty years this August since his "I Have a Dream" speech--worthwhile celebrating that date. His great talent was in not just using words and making extraordinary rhythmic, poetic, almost musical speeches, but his ability to hold together a coalition of people who kept wanting to split apart: the cautious conservative ones, and the angry radical ones who wanted to throw things. Sometimes he would get them both to talk, he'd call a halt to everything they were doing and say for two or three days we are going to have a retreat. He'd get one group to talk and the other to ask questions and then the others would talk and the first ones would ask questions. After two or three days they would finally reach an agreement on what they were going to do. Because he said if we don't work together we are not going to succeed but if we do work together, we can win this. They made a few mistakes. In Albany, Georgia, they made a few mistakes. The following year in Birmingham they learned from their mistakes and had a tremendous victory, even though it took extraordinary courage, do you realize, for those young people to parade when they knew that the dogs were going to bite them or they would have water hoses turned on them. God what courage! I have been reading the new edition of the book Letters from Montgomery. They've brought out a new edition of it with a new introduction--oh, my memory--by Julian Bond.
DK: Your memory is still doing pretty well.
PS: Well, I used to have a very good memory, but it is going.
DK: You sound to be functioning just fine. To what do you attribute your physical prowess?
PS: I came from a skinny family and my parents were health nuts. They ate whole wheat bread. I thought it was silly. As soon as I was on my own, I became a real junk food addict, a junk food junky. I lived in New York and ate hamburgers and hot dogs. I lived on them. My father did yoga exercises half an hour a day, and he lived to be ninety-two, when he fell down the stairs and went out like a light. He left the way he would have wanted to go. He didn't want to linger.
DK: What have you been singing lately?
PS: I have been singing an old left wing song this morning as I was raking and shoveling. It is called "In Praise of Learning" by Bertold Brecht, the lefty playwright. It has a rather strident German melody by a man named Hans Eisler who was a student of Shoenberg. The song is a little like German stamping music. So I was singing; "Learn now this simple truth, it is not enough but learn it still. It is not too late. Do not be down hearted. You must be ready to take over." This is the intellectual speaking to the manual worker. Learn the simple truth, you must be ready to take over.
I decided I would prefer to sing, "You must be learning to be leaders." I'd say you must be learning how to organize. It is not enough to take over, you must learn how to organize. But this was the days of Leninism. I think Lenin made the mistake, not Stalin. I tell people I am a Luxenbourgian Communist. Rosa Luxembourg wrote a letter to Lenin before she was assassinated the year before I was born. She said, "Comrade Lenin, I read that you have press censorship and you restrict the right of people to have peaceable assemblies and to express their opinion. Don't you realize that in a few years all the decisions in your country will be made by a few elite, and the masses will only be called in to dutifully applaud your decisions?" Isn't that exactly what happened?
DK: Some other Communist might have done better.
PS: Ho Chi Min might have. He was extraordinary. He was always cracking jokes.
DK: Describe where you are now.
PS: I am eighty-four and I live an almost laughably rural life, surrounded by several thousand acres of woods with a highway a quarter mile away and a beautiful view. I can look out and see what success has achieved in the Hudson Valley. Cleaning up the Hudson Valley has achieved several things. It's gotten us good train service. We used to have terrible train service: slow, late, infrequent, dirty, cold in winter, hot in summer. Now it is just the opposite: fast, frequent, clean, on time, warm in winter, cool in summer.
Why do we have it? Because of the real estate business. When we started cleaning up the river, the real estate business took notice. We've filled up Long Island and New Jersey. Now we will fill up the Hudson Valley, and we will make millions. Give them good train service! At the rate things are going, the whole Hudson Valley is going to look like Westchester in another fifty years. I look across the river and see what was once a beautiful little town, Newburgh, but urban renewal has almost ruined it. They bulldozed hundreds of old brick buildings. My own home town of Beacon is half the size of Newburgh and we're doing a little bit better, partly because of the Clearwater Club. We've had Festivals on the waterfront now for thirty-three years and we make sure that black, white, and Latino people are all welcome.
Little Beacon is doing better than Newburgh. Along comes a multimillionaire and sees an old factory for sale cheap, and now the most modern art you can find is on display in this old factory, and they have a thousand visitors a week and our old town is on the verge of gentrification. People who have lived here all their lives and their families who lived here for centuries won't be able to live here. That's the good and bad all tangled up together. Part of the solution may be putting up high-rises so the apartments are inexpensive. Another may be good mass transit and bicycle use so the town doesn't get clogged up with traffic, as so many cities do. Did you know that not only Curitiba, Brazil, but also Bogota, Columbia have mayors who use bicycles and are putting in great mass transit?
I have a friend, a retired ecology professor, who said that if you people in the country really wanted to save the environment, you'd move back to the city where you don't have to have a car. Heating an apartment building costs much less fuel per capita.
Here's a contradiction! All my life I have hated cities. I was three years old when I was woken up in my parents' apartment on Madison Avenue by honking. I looked out the window and it was bumper to bumper traffic. That was way back in 1922, late at night, and I said to myself. "Cities are stupid. Why does anybody live in a city? They are too crowded, too dirty, too noisy. Why don't people live in the country?"
But people have learned to make cities fun to live in. I go down to New York City occasionally to sing for the Green Guerrillas. They have eight hundred community gardens. For one of my best songs I put words to the second movement of Beethoven's seventh symphony. My words are: "We'll work together though we work differently, when we consider all of the dangers. Visions of children, asking us to save them, building their gardens, throughout the world." That's the soprano part. The alto part is slightly different. It's an absolutely beautiful melody. This is Beethoven's thoughtful symphony.
DK: So you are feeling rather upbeat about certain things, aren't you?
PS: I really do feel optimistic about all these little things. The cities are being improved by gardens and community block parties, and what is put into use in one city will be picked up by others--like the bus stations in Curitiba. I am encouraged beyond belief to see religious people talking to other religious people in coalition. We have a real sense of unity in my small town.
The Hudson Valley used to be reactionary, conservative, Republican, Ku Klux Klan, and all. Now it has swung around. New Paltz just elected a Green Mayor! A nice guy. He is one of the actors in the Arm of the Sea Players, a group that performs at the annual Clearwater Festival. In New Paltz, the establishment made the mistake of changing the voting day to June when they thought the students wouldn't be around, but they turned out en masse!
In Burlington, Vermont, the establishment wouldn't deal with the policemen's union, and Bernie Sanders said, "Everyone deserves to have a union, the police do too. Elect me and I will deal with you. He got elected and stayed elected. The right know that they don't want to make mistakes and they are very careful. But sometimes they lose people they thought were solidly on their side--like George Soros. He's traveling around the world now, trying to find out how the capitalist system can be amended so it can save the world instead of destroying it.
Oren Lyons, the elected leader of the Onondaga Tribe in Upper State New York came to speak at Clearwater. He said, "I found myself speaking to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. I was in the same room with men who were the CEOs of billion dollar corporations, and I asked them, 'Do you realize that in the way you are using up the world's resources, you are heading for a brick wall?' They said to me, 'Mr. Lyons, of course we know that, but you should realize that we have been put in our jobs to make as much money for our stockholders as possible. If we don't do that, then we are out of a job.'" Lyons asked them, "'Are any of you grandfathers?' They said, 'Oh yes,' and wanted to show me photos." Then Lyons asked, "'When do you stop being a CEO and start being a grandfather?'" They were silent. Isn't that a great question?
DK: Who have been your principle sources of inspiration?
PS: My wife, Toshi, is an inspiration every time she cooks a meal. She does with food what other people do with folk music, adding a little of this and that. And my father taught me an awful lot. And I read magazines like Annals of Earth and quote people like Paul Macready. I have read Annals for twenty years. I also read Orion magazine and Yes, Hope, and Talking Leaves, and several music magazines and political magazines like In These Times, Mother Jones, Progressive, and The Nation. I skim them, I don't have time to read them all. I tell people technology may save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.
DK: What words of wisdom might you convey to your (as yet unborn) great grandchildren?
PS: Don't give up. You never can tell. You'd be surprised. There is no one who hasn't been pleasantly surprised. Remember what Mark Twain said: When I was sixteen, my father was the stupidest man in the world. I was surprised by how much he had learned by the time I got to be twenty-two!
DK: What will it take to take back the White House?
PS: I think before we take back the White House we will take back a lot of little towns and cities, maybe some big cities, maybe some states. It is going to be very hard to take the White House. One of the most important political lessons I have learned in my life is this. When you face an opponent over a broad front, don't aim for your opponent's strong points. You aim for little outlying points. Who could say that riding in the front seat of the bus was that important? Why didn't King aim for education, jobs, or health, or voting? But no, he spent thirteen months trying to get the right to sit on the front seat of the bus. That could have come later. You win a small thing first, and then you go on to other bigger things. That is the single, most important political lesson I got from Dr. King.
I want us to move on from New Paltz--to who knows where--Poughkeepsie? There are college towns all around the country that have coalition mayors, whether they call themselves green or purple, I don't care. It's a place to start.
DK: Pete, thank you so much for your time. Any final thoughts?
PS: Take it easy, but take it!
Contact info.: The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater Inc., 112 Market St., Poughkeepsie. NY 12601, (845) 454-7673, www.clearwater.org.
A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Annals of Earth, Volume XXI Number 2, 2003. Contact: Nancy Jack Todd, 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540.
David Kupfer is a writer, environmental consultant, and teacher who lives in the Yuba River Watershed in the Shasta Bioregion of Northern California. His articles have appeared in Progressive, Whole Earth, Earth Island Journal, AdBusters, Yes, Earth First! Journal, Diva, Backpacker, and elsewhere. He was employed by the California Office of Appropriate Technology and the University of California AT Program under the Jerry Brown administration. He has also worked in various capacities to "green" Hollywood, Tassajara Zen Center, Bill Graham Presents, and assorted musical events. Several of his articles can be found at http://wildnesswithin.com/kupferz.html.
�2003 Talking Leaves
Fall/Winter 2003/2004
Volume 13, Numbers 3 & 4
Voices of the Earth: People in Harmony
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