Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger (Updated w. Video)

By Al Giordano

Back in January, a few days before the regime change, I wrote about Pete Seeger – in this video of January's inaugural concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Bruce Springsteen calls him “the father of American folk music” – and how full a circle he had run: from blacklisted dissident in the 1950s through the Civil Rights movement and every other worthy cause to, finally, this year, embraced by the same country that persecuted him and that would be a far worse place if not for him.

Pete turns 90 today and will celebrate the milestone with 20,000 close personal friends at Madison Square Garden in New York, including the aforementioned Springsteen, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Silvio Rodríguez, and 60 more músicos ranging from mega-pop stars to folk and country-western legends.

On Friday, I celebrated May Day (International Worker’s Day) by attending a much smaller birthday party for Pete in his town of Beacon, New York, at the local clubhouse of the Hudson River Clearwater Sloop boat, where Chris Ruhe and Alvin Bell led about 100 friends in singing

“Ninety times around the sun

Happy birthday, let’s have fun

Everybody look what Pete has done

Gone ninety times around the sun…”

Another national treasure named Connie Hogarth – who 35 years ago picked this 14-year-old delinquent off the streets and taught him to apply his craft to something useful, like blockading nuclear power plant gates – arranged for a cake. And before long an arsenal of guitars, banjos, mandolins and voices began plinking and singing along with each other.

Now, if you ever miss that feeling of being among the youngest in a crowd, I highly recommend attending your pal’s ninetieth birthday party. It’s the perfect way to get that warm enfant terrible feeling all over again. I had a wonderful time strumming and harmonizing with Pete and his posse. At one point when the folk song army was conducting a rather croonish version of “Amazing Grace,” Pete got up from his chair, interrupted, and told the story of how the words were written: how the captain of a slave ship had a moment of clarity and turned the ship around back to Africa. He then led the assembled to raise their voices to sustain each word and note, converting it back from a mere folk song into a gospel spiritual again. The guy’s still got it.

They just don’t make humans like Pete Seeger anymore, so I’ll be toasting him again tonight at the Garden, capping off this visit to the United States, and then will look for a Mexican restaurant… which means it’s gettin’ on time to head back home real soon…

Update: Here's video of one of the moments described above:

That's my pal Connie in the black shirt clapping and singing along. (My posse and I are slightly off camera to her right, your left. You can't see us, but you can hear us if you listen real hard!)