![]() ![]() As Linn puts it, during the festival “young Seeger took one look at a five-string banjo and fell in love. In 1936 Seeger accompanied his father on a trip to a North Carolina music festival. ![]() He grew up longing for roots but accustomed to travel, a boarding school student who dabbled in Marx, sang in choirs, and played the ukelele. While Seeger was young his parents moved from university to university across the country. His father was an ethnomusicologist and composer, his mother a classical violinist who taught at Juilliard. Seeger was born into a family “whose chromosomes fairly burst with music, ” to quote Philadelphia Inquirer contributor Amy Linn. ![]() Simon calls Seeger “an uncanny mixture of saint, propagandist, cornball, and hero ” whose “emotional generosity and companionship with his audiences around the world has invariably been returned affectionately by the … people he has entertained and inspired. Seeger was instrumental in popularizing both the five-string banjo and the songs of populist America that could be played on it his own works such as “If I Had a Hammer, ” “We Shall Overcome, ” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? ” served as anthems in the anti-establishment protests of the late 1960s. The indomitable Pete Seeger has weathered a number of storms to become, at age seventy, the most influential folk artist in America. ![]()
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