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(18,630 posts) Sat Apr 7, 2012, 01:50 PM Apr 2012

Interview with Pete Seeger: Now 92 years old, the legendary folk singer recalls his pioneering days

Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Protest Songs Gone?
Now 92 years old, the legendary folk singer recalls his pioneering days touring college campuses and discusses his favorite songs
By Aviva Shen
Smithsonian magazine, April 2012

Do you have a favorite song that you’ve performed or written?
I keep reminding people that an editorial in rhyme is not a song. A good song makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you think. Now, Woody Guthrie will have his 100th birthday this July 14. He wrote thousands of songs. Every day of his life he was jotting down verses on a little pad in his pocket and once his pad was full he’d get a new one. We were riding in a plane once to sing for some strikers in a union in Pittsburgh, and I was reading a newspaper or magazine. Lee Hays, the bass singer, fell asleep, but Woody was jotting down something on a piece of paper they had given him and he left the piece of paper in his seat when he got up to go. I went over to get it. He had verses about, what are these people below us thinking as they see this metal bird flying over their head, and what’s the pretty stewardess going to do tonight, where is she going to be. I said “Woody, you should know how I envy you being able to write songs like this.” He literally wrote verses every day of his life. And if he couldn’t think of a verse, he’d go on and write a new song. Quite often though, when he got his verse written, he’d think of some old melody that people knew which fit his verses.

Haven’t you done that?
There was an Irish lumberjack song, and I didn’t know I was using it or misusing it. But I was writing in an airplane, and the verse of this Irish lumberjack song, “Johnson says he’ll load more hay, says he’ll load ten times a day.” I was making up a verse: “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing.” Well, it probably will reach more people than any other song I’ve written. Marlene Dietrich sang it around the world. When her youthful glamour was gone, she had Burt Bacharach put together a small orchestra and for several years she sang around the world. If she was in an English-speaking country like Australia she’d sing it in English, but if she was in Buenos Aires or Tokyo, she’d sing the German verse. The German translation sings better than the English: “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind.” When she went back to Germany, the old Nazis were out to run her down, “don’t listen to this woman, she sang for the soldiers fighting us!” But that very month her song was number one on the German Hit Parade.

How do you feel about your songs getting covered and interpreted by so many other people?
I’m very proud. It’s a great honor to have different people sing it—even if they sing them differently. Ani Difranco got a group of young men, I think all 10, 11, 12 years old called Roots of Music, and they have a brass band, trumpets and clarinets and so on down in New Orleans. They used a song, which I recorded; I didn’t write the song but I recorded it with my banjo and it became well known: “Which Side Are You On.” By the time they got done rearranging it, you wouldn’t think it had anything to do with my song, except the title.

Read the full interview at:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Pete-Seeger-Where-Have-All-the-Protest-Songs-Gone.html#

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Pete-Seeger-Where-Have-All-the-Protest-Songs-Gone.html#ixzz1rNUvnhc7
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Pete-Seeger-Where-Have-All-the-Protest-Songs-Gone.html#ixzz1rNU6wfKd