This 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.