Pete Seeger gets YouTubed

pete seeger album coverThis morn­ing I’m work­ing on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ sec­tion of Quak​er​song​.org, the web­site of Annie Pater­son and Peter Blood (I’m their web­mas­ter). Parts of their site are amaz­ing – the “Quak­ers and Music”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakers_and_music/ page has become a direc­to­ry of sorts for all the many Quak­er musi­cians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still most­ly a col­lec­tion of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.
So I was won­der­ing what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and start­ing surf­ing around. There’s a great “fan page”:http://www.peteseeger.net/ which is reg­u­lar­ly updat­ed but has brave­ly decid­ed to main­tain its orig­i­nal design since it was found­ed eleven years ago. And “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_seeger does its usu­al fine job at a biog­ra­phy. But the “gold mine is YouTube”:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pete+seeger&search=Search.
A year ago a user uploaded three clips from _Rainbow Quest_, a short-lived TV pro­gram Pete put togeth­er for a low-wattage UHF sta­tion out of Newark in the mid-60s (it’s now a Tele­mu­n­do affil­i­ate broad­cast­ing recy­cled Mex­i­can soaps for its prime time sched­ule). I don’t know what kind of copy­right issues there are on some­thing like this but it’s great fun to see these old clips. Mak­ing this mate­r­i­al wide­ly avail­able is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watch­ing “recap­tur­ing the inno­cence of our over-commercialized youth”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-shed-20-years-in-20-seconds.html). I’ll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and John­ny “I’m soooo stoooned” Cash a few years before they married.

571 thoughts on “Pete Seeger gets YouTubed

  1. Long ago (okay only months) I found your web­site and began stop­ping back often for thoughts and insights. Thank you for this morn­ing’s gift of Pete Seegers. Folk music is root­ed in trife, peace, and harmony.

  2. Thanks so much for this clip of Pete, I saw him last evening at the high school in Bea­con, NY. He was per­form­ing along with Richie Havens and Sarah Lee Guthrie & her hus­band for the ben­e­fit of the Clear­wa­ter. 87 years old, and still joy­ful­ly play­ing and singing, it was a beau­ti­ful night and I am so hap­py I got the chance to see and hear him.

  3. Thanks for shar­ing the sto­ry Claire, I’m glad to hear he’s still play­ing and singing though I hard time imag­in­ing he’ll stop till he’s in the ol’ pine box – heck even then he’ll prob­a­bly be hum­ming tunes about ol’ Joe Hill, John Hen­ry and the rest of those ne’er do wells!

  4. Hi Jami: He’s long trav­eled in Quak­er cir­cles in his per­form­ing and many Friends love him but no, he’s not one of us.

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