Chuck Darwin on Nostr: I was a child of the Pete Seeger generation. We sang his songs about peace (“Where ...
I was a child of the Pete Seeger generation.
We sang his songs about peace (“Where Have all the Flowers Gone”),
love and justice (“If I Had a Hammer”)
resiliance and the protecting the environment, (“God Bless the Grass ... that grows through the crack”)
in school and in church.
I knew them by heart. They shaped me.
Seeger performed at Oberlin College in 1983 when I was a student there.
He played his long-neck banjo famously inscribed,
“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”
at historic Finney Chapel, leading the packed house in the round of “Wimoweh.”
At one point, he paused to tell the audience that he loved Oberlin because decades earlier the college welcomed him when others didn’t.
He was speaking of his decade-long blacklisting for his Communist Party membership in the 1940s that meant he was unwelcome in most venues.
Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he left the party in 1949.
Seeger was a celebrated presence in the Greenwich Village folk scene into which an unknown singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan would drop in 1961.
https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2025/01/folk-music-legend-got-short-shrift-in-a-complete-unknown-but-his-songs-will-live-on-column.html
We sang his songs about peace (“Where Have all the Flowers Gone”),
love and justice (“If I Had a Hammer”)
resiliance and the protecting the environment, (“God Bless the Grass ... that grows through the crack”)
in school and in church.
I knew them by heart. They shaped me.
Seeger performed at Oberlin College in 1983 when I was a student there.
He played his long-neck banjo famously inscribed,
“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”
at historic Finney Chapel, leading the packed house in the round of “Wimoweh.”
At one point, he paused to tell the audience that he loved Oberlin because decades earlier the college welcomed him when others didn’t.
He was speaking of his decade-long blacklisting for his Communist Party membership in the 1940s that meant he was unwelcome in most venues.
Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, he left the party in 1949.
Seeger was a celebrated presence in the Greenwich Village folk scene into which an unknown singer-songwriter named Bob Dylan would drop in 1961.
https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2025/01/folk-music-legend-got-short-shrift-in-a-complete-unknown-but-his-songs-will-live-on-column.html