Pete Seeger: folk music's granddad plays it green - Interview

E: The Environmental Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Scott Harris

Your wife Toshi has long been a director of the Revival.

This was her last year working on it. Toshi and I are in our 70s now and she is going to let some younger people run it. She is on a committee of 19 volunteers who work all year planning this festival. It's just like politics--you want to reach everybody, but you have to put together a coalition. History moves forward that way. There's a lot still to be done. Our next job is to see that the river banks are not taken over by the rich: We want the shores to be accessible to everybody. I guess there'll be compromises.

We need to straighten up and learn a few things, like ancient lessons taught us thousands of years ago. But people still don't listen to them or act on them.

It doesn't take a big organization. It just takes a few people who put their heads together and say, "Let's do something." It might be getting the kids involved in cleaning up the mess that other people have left. How can we keep folks from dropping litter and glass all over the place? It's an education job and kids have got to lead it. Consider this: Every society has the task of facing an on-rushing horde of barbarians, their own children.

How often do you sail on the Clearwater?

Once a year I set foot on the boat to say hello to the captain, but most of the time, from April to November, the boat is sailing up and down the Hudson, Long Island Sound and New York Bay. From November through March it spends time in a little town called Saugerties, New York. It is a little mill town up near Albany. Every weekend volunteers come up and they sand and do all sorts of labor-intensive jobs so that the boat can sail the next season.

What topics have cropped up at the festival in the last couple of years?

People often ask me, "What is the most important thing to work on?" I like the phrase, "think globally, act locally." How can you save the world when you can't even save the corner of it where you live? Don't travel to some glamorous place far off and think you're going to solve the world's problems there. Solve them right where you are; don't run away from them.

We've got a pollution crisis, everybody knows that. We've got chemists who are having a lot of fun discovering new chemicals and not paying any attention to which ones might be dangerous. So now most of us are walking around with small amounts of dioxin in our bodies. We breathe it, drink it, eat it in our food. And the cancer rate is steadily going up, up, up! When somebody close to you dies, you wonder what you could have done to stop it. What you can do is start reading right now. Read about the environmental crisis and realize that it's going to kill you and your children if you don't solve it.

Can you tell us how the People's Music Network began?

Every year, about 150 or 200 people gather for a weekend of song swapping at Camp Willow Tree in Pine Bush, New York. They learn how to use music in the school, in the churches, in unions--singing in the streets, singing with a family, singing in choruses, singing different kinds of music. They sing gospel music, blues, latin music, and use different kinds of instruments. It's a very informal organization, I compare it to a convention of chefs, all sampling each other's recipes. It's not a festival, so don't come to hear your favorite songs sung by your favorite singer. More often than not, people are testing out their new songs, whether they are professional musicians or amateur musicians.