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Preview Onside with Seeger

RAB PATTERSON looks forward to a timely May Day concert celebrating a folk legend

THIS coming May 3 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of the late Pete Seeger, the US folk singer, songwriter and campaigner for social and environmental justice.

To mark it, and as part of the Edinburgh and Lothians May Day celebrations, there’s to be a pretty unmissable concert at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh, with Jimmy Ross and Finlay Allison and others performing a selection of the new and expanded version of Pete Seeger 100 — Which Side Are You On?, their successful touring show celebrating the great man’s life and times.

A prolific radio performer in the 1940s, Seeger had a string of hits in the early 1950s as a member of the legendary Weavers, who were blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, the counterculture and environmental causes.

Among his best-known songs are Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, If I Had a Hammer and Turn! Turn! Turn! a number one hit for The Byrds in 1965.

We Shall Overcome — recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists — became the acknowledged anthem of the civil rights movement.

The nature of those songs — performed at union rallies, on picket lines and at Communist Party events the length and breadth of the US — often led to blacklisting by concert halls and the media.

“Only commies sing about justice, freedom and love,” Seeger said, explaining why the song If I Had a Hammer was so often banned. “This song says we’ve got the tools and we are going to do it.”

Seeger’s beliefs saw him brought before the McCarthy witch-hunt trials, at which he didn’t plead the 5th amendment, which often led the accused to implicate others.

Instead he pleaded the more dangerous 1st amendment and faced the accusations head-on, refusing to accept the charges or to incriminate others.

Found guilty of contempt, he was sentenced to jail and it took years of appeals to keep him out of prison and to clear his name.

Blacklisted in the US, Seeger arrived in Scotland in 1961 where he worked with Hamish Henderson, Morris Blythman and Allan Lomax.

He learnt Scots to be better able to sing Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye and the four produced anti-Polaris and Scottish republican songs including Ding Dong Dollar, which contains the lines: “The Yanks have just dropped anchor off Dunoon/Ye cannae spend a dollar when yere deid.”

On returning to the US, Seeger set up the Newport Folk Festival which launched the careers of a new generation of folk artists such as Bob Dylan, Phil Oakes, Buffy St Marie and Joan Baez.

Ross and Allison’s tribute acknowledges Seeger’s peace and anti-imperialist work with songs such as Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Knee Deep in the Big Muddy and their inclusion of Deportees is particularly relevant in today’s climate for migrant workers and refugees.

It concludes with a tribute to Seeger’s environmental campaigning in later life, in particular his efforts to clean up the River Hudson.

When someone pointed out to him that his environmental work was like someone trying to counter-balance a heavy rock on one end of a see-saw by filling a woven basket with sand using a spoon on the other and the sand falling through the basket, Seeger replied that more and more people were arriving with spoons and it was only a matter of time before the rock moved.

Prescient words at a time of developing environmental activism.

Finlay Allison and Jimmy Ross will be performing Pete Seeger 100 — Which Side Are You On? at the Scottish Telling Centre, High Street, Edinburgh, on May 3, tickets: scottishstorytellingcentre.com and then in Glasgow, Ayr and Braemar from May-October, contact: [email protected]. Rab Patterson is secretary of Midlothian Trades Council.

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