This morning I’m working on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ section of Quakersong.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.