| LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD The Life and Times of Pete Seeger Anita Silvey New York: Clarion Books, August 2016 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-547-33012-9 | ||||
| ISBN 0-547-33012-X | 104pp. | HC/BWI/LF | $17.99 | |
The above hints at the cosmopolitan breadth of Pete Seeger's composing. He drew inspiration for his songwriting from many sources: A poem by the late Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet became "I Come and Stand at Ev'ry Door," a haunting lament for the children who died in the bombing of Hiroshima. And the above lines, as any Seeger fan can guess, became "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?," one of his most popular works.
He also adopted songs from many nations, learning to sing them in the original language. A few examples are "Tsena, Tsena," "Abiyoyo," and "Guantanamera."
He was the third child of well-to-do parents, both classical musicians, and although they split when Pete was eight, they imparted to him both a love of music and a hatred of social injustice. However, he rejected classical music, preferring to find his own way. He loved to write and to paint in watercolors, but neither journalism nor art worked out as a career. Meeting and working for Alan Lomax ignited his passion for folk music, and he became in time its most effective American promoter. He cared little about money or fame; what mattered to him was sharing the music with the world and thereby engaging in cheerful combat with bigotry and injustice.
It was a hard road at first. Performing brought in barely enough to let him scrape by. Then, when thanks to an endorsement by the poet Carl Sandburg he began to get lucrative gigs, the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s arose to taint him for a long-abandoned flirtation with the Party.1 Blacklisting brought some tough times, as the author notes in her Introduction. But Pete held on to his integrity and ultimately prevailed. His voice was an important part of the civil rights movement, and later vital to the success of environmental causes — especially the drive to clean up the Hudson River, which he spearheaded. Throughout a long life, he pushed steadily and without rancor for doing the right thing, and few even approached his knack for getting audiences to join in singing. He will not be forgotten.
This book is classified as Juvenile Literature ("Juv-Lit"), and although it is certainly not a complete biography of its subject, I would challenge any adult to identify a passage that is sketchy or condescending. It captures the essence of Pete Seeger very completely in its 104 pages. Photographs are well chosen, well presented, and well captioned. All quotations are cited in the endnotes. The Index is good, and there is a Bibliography. (And I found no grammatical or typographical errors.) I give this one top marks. The only reason I don't rate it a keeper is that so many other fine books about Pete Seeger are out there.
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