Gone to Flowers, Our Best One

I saw him perform live back in the '80s. He sang "This Old Man" with new lyrics referring to Ronald Reagan and everybody roared.

The audience was full of middle-aged lefties who sang every word of every song with him.

Even then, in ostensible "peacetime," his music and words were so powerful. I couldn't imagine what it must have been like to sing his songs at wartime protests in the '60s. Until I sang them at wartime protests in the aughts.

The Permanent War may have outlasted Pete Seeger, but it will never outlast his songs.

Songs to Fight the Plutocracy By: "Which Side Are You On?"

In the depths of the Reagan Dark Ages, I was fortunate to hear Pete Seeger live in concert. The place was full of genuine hippies, who were then still in their prime. I can still feel the socio-political despair lift from the crowd as Seeger began to sing, and disappear entirely as the crowd sang along, for joy, for memory and for hope.

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In the mountains of Kentucky in 1931, the coal miners of Harlan County went on strike. Officers hired by the mining company roamed the countryside hunting for the union leaders. The independent coal miners fought back gallantly against the hired company deputies and blood was spilled on both sides. "Which Side Are You On," was written by Florence Reece, the wife of Sam Reece, a union leader who had escaped into the Kentucky mountains for safety. Class warfare continues in the United States and in most nations throughout the world. Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell of the Almanac Singers made this song famous in 1941.

The Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger

I had the privilege, many years ago, of seeing Pete Seeger in concert. I even heard him sing the same "forbidden" verses of "This Land is Your Land" that he sang for Obama's Inauguration. And yes, the crowd back then - dirty fucking hippies all - wept as we sang along, because it was the Reagan Era, and Pete reminded us of the values we thought were gone.

Now that peace and social justice are coming back into style, Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes that it's time to honor one of the movement's last living legends.

This past Sunday, Pete Seeger became the oldest person to perform publicly as part of Barack Obama's inauguration festivities.

Singing the "greatest song about America ever written" (Bruce Springsteen's words) before 500,000 people and tens of millions more on television, the 89-year old legend crooned two little-known verses of his friend Woody Guthrie's 1940 patriotic standard, "This Land is Your Land" -- one about Depression-era poverty, the other about trespassing on private property -- restoring the song to its former glory over the sanitized version that ruled for so many years.

Watch the performance:



Seeger has been an inimitable ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism over the course of a remarkable lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs have engaged people, particularly the youth, to question the value of war, to ban nuclear weapons, to work for international solidarity and against racism wherever it is practiced, and to assume ecological responsibility.

A particular hero to the civil rights movement on whose behalf he worked so tirelessly, Seeger made his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, and returned in '65, again at King's personal invitation, to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Amid the tension and heat, Seeger went from campfire to campfire when the march stopped for the night, raising people's morale with rollicking sing-alongs of new freedom songs.

One of the seminal political events in his life, and the one which solidified his intent to make actively combating racism a lifelong pursuit, was the 1949 Peekskill race riots. In this short video, Seeger recounts his experiences:



Without doubt the most influential folk artist of the past century, Seeger deserves at least one more moment on the world stage -- at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. The prize is only bestowed on the living. Although still spry, Seeger turns 90 on May 3. And, as writer and activist Peter Drier writes on the Huffington Post, a Nobel Peace Prize would be "a fitting and much-deserved final tribute for the world's preeminent troubadour for peace and justice" and would serve as important recognition for the many progressive causes to which Seeger has lent his name.

To advance the idea, a new campaign has begun in earnest to persuade the American Friends Service Committee -- which is entitled to put forward submissions -- to enter Seeger as its nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2009. Join the cause by signing the petition asking the AFSC to nominate Seeger by the February 1 deadline and check out nobelprize4pete.org for more info on how you can help.