Pete Seeger’s banjo: ‘This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender’

The L.A. Times has a great story about Pete Seeger, featured recently in Pete Seeger: The Power of Song on the PBS series American Masters.

Here’s the Asheville connection. There’s always an Asheville connection:

More than Dylan, certainly more than the comparatively little-heard Woody Guthrie — who taught him to ride the rails — Seeger was the voice of the midcentury folk revival. It was a homely voice, a good voice without being too obviously a great voice — anyone’s voice, but better. His lack of affectation made all music available to him: Whether singing Appalachian ballads, blues, gospel sounds, country songs, Spanish Civil War songs, African songs or a bit of German to accompany his banjo version of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” he always sounds authentic — that is to say, exactly like himself.

His family was not just musical, but musicological; a teenage Seeger was converted to the five-string banjo at a folk festival in Asheville, N.C., he’d attended with his father, composer and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger. He would become a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the instrument.

As well as laying out the facts of a life, “The Power of Song” amounts to a brief history of 20th century American moments and movements — the Depression-era labor movement, the Second World War (Seeger went off banjo in hand), the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and finally the environmental movement. He joined and later “drifted out” of the Communist Party (“I was against race discrimination and the communists were against race discrimination; I was in favor of unions and the communists were in favor of unions”), which led him in due course to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he simply said that his politics were none of their business. And he quit the Weavers, with whom he had known success, because he did not want to sing in a cigarette ad.

Through it all, Seeger, whose banjo reads, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender,” strove to make music an instrument of change. He says of wife Toshi, accounted by more than one person in and out of her family to have made possible Seeger’s non-careerist career, “Her running joke has been, ‘If only Peter would chase women instead of chasing causes I’d have an excuse to leave him.’ ”

At once a great American and a citizen of the world, for whom difference is a matter for curiosity and not contempt, he’s just the sort of fellow you — by which I mean, me — could wish for as president, except that he’d never want or take the job. (Perhaps the more accurate way to put it is, I wish the presidency were a job that would suit a guy like Seeger.) But if he had a hammer, he’d hammer in the morning, all over this land. And seen here straight and spry (and still singing) in his late 80s, he can still handle an ax pretty well.