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Edited on Mon May-04-09 10:10 PM by Bjorn Against
This morning I returned to Minnesota after spending the weekend in New York for a once in a lifetime opportunity to celebrate the 90th birthday of the legendary folk singer and political activist Pete Seeger. Pete Seeger is a man who not only wrote many of the songs that I was taught in grade school, but he is a man who has consistently stood up for what he believes in and has done more than nearly any other living individual to show us that ordinary citizens can make a difference in this world.
My opportunity to travel to New York arrived a few weeks ago after my friend and fellow activist Coleen Rowley told me that she would be going to the 90th birthday concert at Madison Square Gardens. She was going to be trying to get back stage to recruit musicians to lend a statement of their support to a group of eight young political activists known as the RNC 8 who are currently being prosecuted and threatened with years in prison for nothing more than organizing protests against the Republican National Convention. I wrote Coleen to ask her if she would like me to send letters to some of the musicians who were playing the event to see if I could help get her backstage and she wrote back to tell me that not only would she appreciate my help but that she also had a couple of extra tickets to the show and if I bought a plane ticket I could go. I have not done a lot of traveling in the past and flying out to New York seemed a bit overwhelming to me at first, but after thinking it over for a couple of days I decided that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up and I bought my plane ticket.
I arrived in New York with Coleen, her husband Ross, and another Twin Cities activist named Bob Palmer on Friday morning and we immediately proceeded north of the city to the area near Beacon, NY which is very close to Pete Seeger's home. Upon leaving the city I was immediately struck by the beauty of the Hudson River Valley, it was a beauty far beyond anything I had anticipated with forests stretching for miles over small mountains with very little development visible from the road. I knew that Pete Seeger had been working hard for many years to protect the environment in that area, and to see just what he was protecting with my own eyes only made my admiration for the man grow stronger as we traveled.
We arrived in Beacon to meet up with a close friend of the Seegers who Coleen knew at the Beacon Sloop Club and there was word that Pete Seeger himself might show up as well. When Coleen called Pete's friend on her cell phone however we found out that not only was Pete going to be there, but they were going to be having a private birthday party for him. I could hardly believe it, not only would I be going to Pete's big party at Madison Square Gardens but I was about to have the opportunity to attend a small birthday party with him and some of his closest friends as well.
The Beacon Sloop Club met at a small cabin on the Hudson River, it was nothing fancy at all but it was the perfect environment for a celebration such as this. This was a simple place in which people gathered to play music and organize to protect the river, and there was no sign of big money anywhere to be seen. The food was all brought in pot luck style and it was clear that most of the people there were not wealthy but were rather ordinary working class citizens, it was not what you would expect at a private birthday party for one of the most legendary musicians of all time but it truly showed that Pete Seeger never left his roots and he still stands alongside the ordinary people that he has stood up for all these years.
There were about one hundred people at the Sloop Club, and while I never had an opportunity to have a conversation with Pete Seeger I did get to walk up to him and wish him a happy birthday as well as sing along with him to some of his songs. My singing voice is horrible, but when you are in the company of Pete Seeger that doesn't matter because he makes it clear to everyone that he doesn't judge them he simply wants people to find joy in music and not worry about how they sound.
It was an amazing experience and a great honor to be able to be in the same room as a man who has stood so firmly throughout the years in support of peace, economic justice, environmental sustainability and civil rights. He is a man who has truly earned his place in the history books as a man who was blacklisted by his own government but did not allow that to silence him and he continued to fight in the years ahead when he sang his song “We Shall Overcome” with those who marched for civil rights and he supported Martin Luther King during the years in which it was unpopular to do so. He later used his music to express his opposition to the Vietnam War and to bring the troops home, and he stood up for environmental protection and had the Clearwater Sloop built because he knew that the Hudson River could be clean again even though people laughed at him and mocked him for his efforts. No one is laughing at Pete Seeger any more however, because he has been proven to be right time and time again even when he was taking very unpopular stances. I never thought I would be able to be so close to a national hero such as Pete Seeger on the weekend of his 90th birthday, and I don't even know how to express my gratitude to him for opening up his small party to people like me who he had never met before.
The next day we had more events on our schedule to honor Pete Seeger, and for the first of those events we attended his weekly peace vigil near Beacon. Seeger himself was not able to attend this week as he was too busy getting ready for the Madison Square Gardens event, but we stood on the same corner as he does holding up our sign that said “Bring Them Home” in honor of Seeger's anti-war anthem of the same name. Beacon is located close to West Point so there are a lot of military families in the area and we received a much more mixed response than we do back here in Minnesota as a result. While we did have a large number of supporters drive by, we also had many people who gave us the finger and yelled out the window at us. I imagine Seeger and his friends go through the same thing every week, and it is great to see that despite the abuse he is able to stand up firmly for his beliefs even as he turns ninety years old.
After the peace vigil we drove south to Piermont to board the Clearwater itself for a sail on the Hudson River. Just as Pete turns ninety the Clearwater is about to turn forty this month itself, and in that forty years since Pete called for it to be built enormous progress has been made in cleaning up the Hudson in large part as a result of Pete's efforts to use the Clearwater to educate people about pollution and help motivate them to work to clean the river. Today the Hudson River is the cleanest it has been in a century, and with a recent court victory that will require the cleanup of many PCBs from the river it is likely to improve even more in the near future. The Clearwater is a truly majestic boat, its sail weighs three thousand pounds making it the second largest sail in North America and it was a great experience to ride on a boat with such a history. There was not much wind that day so we did not travel far, but just sitting out on the river for a few hours and admiring the beauty that surrounded us made for a great time.
What made the ride on the Clearwater even more special however was that all proceeds from the concert at Madison Square Gardens on Sunday were going to benefit the Clearwater Sloop. One of Seeger's close friends told me that Pete usually doesn't like to do big stadium shows and he said that the only way he would allow them to put on this party for him is if they did it as a benefit for the Clearwater so that the work of cleaning up the river can continue for years into the future. None of the artists who played at the show got paid for their performances, they all volunteered yet despite the lack of pay they had no shortage of artists who wanted to perform and they actually had to turn people away because they did not have enough time to fit everyone in. There were a lot of big names on the bill including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, John Mellencamp, Joan Baez, Dave Matthews, Arlo Guthrie, and Ani DiFranco among many others.
The show was excellent and was a great a tribute both to the life of Pete Seeger and to Clearwater. Many different artists teamed up to do new versions of classic songs from both Seeger and other folk legends such as Woody Guthrie. Highlights of the show included a great solo performance of the Seeger classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Joan Baez, a surprise appearance by Oscar the Grouch as he got political and sang about the garbage that is polluting our environment, an excellent acoustic performance of “The Ghost of Tom Joad” by Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello, and of course Pete Seeger leading all the performers as well as the audience in signing “This Land is Your Land”.
Aside from the music something else happened at the show however, a letter was read from Barack Obama recognizing Seeger for his ninety year battle for social justice. Here was a man who had been blacklisted by our government a half century earlier now being honored by our President. As Bruce Springsteen said of Pete he had “outlasted the bastards”, and while I am sure Pete knows that we still have a long way to go we certainly have come far and we would have never made it this far if it had not been for Pete Seeger and others who stood up for the things he spent his whole life fighting for.
This vacation was one of the greatest experiences of my life and it was a true honor to be able to go out there to see Pete Seeger, view his hometown and see his accomplishments with my own eyes. Seeger is a true American hero, and I was proud to be able to honor his work. While we never made it backstage we did come out of this event even more committed to fighting in the footsteps of Pete Seeger (and we are still going to try to reach the musicians so if anyone knows how to reach these or any other well known musicians who would be willing to sign a statement of support for the RNC 8 please send me a message). Pete Seeger is still fighting for justice after ninety years, and it is up to us to help him continue his legacy in the years and decades ahead.
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