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.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ peter blood
Quakersong.org
March 10, 2006
Website for Peter Blood & Annie Patterson, musicians most well known for their insanely-popular songbook Rise Up Singing. They sell books and tapes on the site (e‑commerce handled ably and simply by Paypal) and they also have lots of high-quality content including a lot of hard-to-find Pete Seeger CDs. Movable Type is used as a content management system (CMS).
Technologies: Movable Type, Paypal. Visit Site.
Random updates
December 22, 2005
Just a quick note to everyone that I haven’t posted more lately. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keeping up with articles and links to the “Christian Peacemakers”:/quaker/cpt.
I’ve also been doing some freelance sites. One is launched: “Quakersong.org”:www.quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Patterson and Peter Blood of _Rise Up Singing_ fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an interesting site.
Geek-wise I’ve been interested in the Web 2.0 stuff (see “this Best Of list of sites”:http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm, link courtesy “C Wess Daniels”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/). I’ve talked about some of this “back in June”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/i_dont_have_anything_to_say_either.php but it’s getting more exciting. In the Fall I was asked to submit a proposal for redoing the website of a Quaker conference center near Philadelphia and it was all Web 2.0‑centric – maybe too much so as I didn’t get the job! I’ll post an edited version of the proposal soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will undergird a fabulous new “Quakerfinder.org”:www.quakerfinder.org feature that will allow isolated Friends to connect to form new worship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new “Quakerbooks.org”:www.quakerbooks.org site.
In the meantime, I encourage everyone to order “On Living with a Concern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 888305-38‑x, the new book by New England Yearly Meeting’s Brian Drayton (it arrived from the printers yesterday). It’s being billed as a modern day version of “A Description of the Qualifications” and if it lives up the hype it should be an important book for the stirrings of deepening faithfulness we’ve been seeing among Quakers lately. While you’re waiting for the book to arrive in your mailbox, check out Brooklyn Rich’s “Testing Leadings”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/12/testing-leadings-part‑1.html post.