Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

If not for folk music, rock music and even hip-hop would have no social conscience. 

The social conscience of folk music was imbued by singers and songwriters who traveled this great land of ours and saw firsthand how people lived and how the country could be improved.  And Pete Seeger, who died yesterday at 94, was an observer of a lot of things.  In songs he wrote or co-wrote, such as "If I Had a Hammer," ''Turn, Turn, Turn," and ''Where Have All the Flowers Gone," Seeger spoke out for a more equitable society, the Biblical wisdom of a time and place for everything, an end to perpetual war.  He lent his voice - singing and speaking - to every cause for social justice, causes fueled by Seeger's memories of the economic depression of his teens and his experiences of the terrible global war and postwar xenophobic paranoia of his youth. 

Early in his career, Seeger was forced into obscurity by conservative forces in the fifties, but his influence manifested itself in the rock and roll renascence of the early sixties, as Bob Dylan brought socially conscious lyrics to the fore in his songs with his move toward rock while the Byrds were inspired to recast songs such as  ''Turn, Turn, Turn" (as well as some of Dylan's songs) in a rock context.  Seeger himself returned during the decade with the rise of the civil rights movement and the escalation of the Vietnam War; refused permission to play an anti-Vietnam War parable, "Waist Deep In the Big Muddy," on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on CBS, protests from viewers allowed him to come back to the show and perform the song, much to Tom and Dick Smothers's pleasure.  More than the British invasion or Dylan going electric at Newport, it was a watershed musical moment of the sixties that signaled to the the country that alternative voices would not be silenced, even if they spoke of a truth many didn't want to hear.  Because many people did want to hear them.

At the 2009 Madison Square Garden concert honoring Seeger on his ninetieth birthday, Bruce Springsteen recalled all the right-wing and pro-war leaders from the fifties through the eighties and laughed at how Seeger had outlasted all of them. Some performers at that concert even suggested that the right-wing era that started with Reagan in 1980 was winding down. Seeger lived long enough to see them proved wrong, but he was likely not surprised by the rise of the Tea Party.  Seeger knew that fighting for what is right against the right wing is an ongoing struggle, which is why he was active for so long - including his environmental work in his home state of New York and his devotion to cleaning up the Hudson River - and why he would likely have wanted to see us continue the fight after his own passing.  Because his enemies didn't silence him - only death could do that.  R.I.P.