Pete Seeger “Live In ‘65” (Appleseed, 2009)

Iconic American folksinger captured at his peak

Which Pete Seeger do you know? Is it the iconic folksinger, the man who kick started the American folk revival in the 1950s? Is it the author of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “IF I Had A Hammer”? Is it the purist who (allegedly) tried to take an axe to the power cable that drove the electric Dylan performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965? Perhaps the political activist, the man unafraid to speak out regardless of the damage (and it was considerable) it did to his career. Maybe you wondered at the name of the rough and tumble album Bruce Springsteen cut a few years ago. They’re all Pete Seeger and all of them can be seen on this album but the main Pete Seeger on display is one less well-known, Pete Seeger the entertainer, when entertaining was a legitimate aim for all artists and entertainer was not as pejorative word as it is today in some quarters.

A remarkable album, this is a double disc recording of a complete show at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh. It appears to be a straight un-overdubbed or doctored in any way tape. Song slides into chat slides into song with nary a break between. Perhaps just past the peak of the Sixties folk revival, this was a time when songs like “Guantanamera” had real current political resonance, rather than the slightly twee Scout hut jamboree images they evoke today. Scholars will see how traditional songs like “Peat Bog Soldiers” (originally from Germany), “Greensleeves” and “The Bells Of Rhymney” made the trip across the Atlantic and changed in the process.

All that’s by the bye though compared to Seeger’s performance, which is simply astonishing – one man and his banjo holding an audience spellbound. The seeming casualness of it belies the skill involved, the way Seeger slips in his political messages between fun songs like “Uh, Uh, Uh”). He has problems tuning, frequently forgets words, restarts songs and generally appears more than somewhat amateurish. But... he has the audience in the palm of his hand from the start. Ok, he’s undoubtedly preaching to the converted but the applause isn’t polite, it’s thunderous. He knows how to work a crowd, how to keep them happy and make sure they’re having fun while making sure he slips in whatever political message he wants to convey. There’s no preaching, shouting or hectoring, no chanting or swearing, all staples of the majority of today’s political performers.

All of Seeger’s best known songs are here, so it effectively functions as a Greatest Hits, in fact it’s better than that because Seeger was and is first and foremost a live musician, and the way to hear his music is live. At the age of 91 that’s an opportunity unlikely to be available to most of us, but in its absence this album is as close as it gets.

Date review added:  Monday, February 08, 2010
Reviewer:  Jeremy Searle
Reviewers Rating:
Related web link:  Artist website