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P e t e ...S e e g e r |
Pete Seeger
A previously unreleased, full length 2-CD concert set of quintessential Seeger – topical, traditional, whimsical, wise and joyous!
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track listing
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Only hermits or long-shipwrecked castaways may be unaware of the resurgence in the public consciousness of one of the 20th Century’s true icons, folk singer Pete Seeger, in this new millennium. In the last decade, Seeger has received just about every humanitarian award he didn’t already earn, performed for an audience of hundreds of thousands at President Obama’s inauguration ceremonies, received a Grammy for his most recent CD and reached new generations through the musical endorsement of Bruce Springsteen. Now comes Live in ’65, a new 2-CD recording of a previously unreleased, sonically updated Seeger concert from February 1965 that encapsulates 90-year-old Pete’s lifelong mission to entertain, educate, and galvanize listeners through the power of contemporary and traditional music of all cultures and his own contagious commitment to making a difference. Live in ’65 documents a “typical” Seeger show at the midpoint of a tumultuous decade in which civil rights, the Cold War, and generational conflicts were aflame. Seeger uses his inclusive repertoire to unify his audience with the perspective of songs of older but similar conflicts (“Peat Bog Soldiers,” “Los Cuatro Generales,” “The Freedom Come-All Ye”); folk classics (“Oh Susanna,” “Old Joe Clark,” “Greensleeves”), modestly racy tales of bawdy houses (“Queen Anne’s Front”), conjugal relations (“Never Wed an Old Man,” “Uh, Uh, Uh”), and the socioeconomic value of horse turds (“Manyura Manya”); inspired versions of fellow ex-Weaver Fred Hellerman’s soothing “Healing River,” Bob Dylan’s apocalyptic warning, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and Woody Guthrie’s anthemic “This Land is Your Land”; and Seeger’s own portfolio of unforgettable original or adapted songs (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Guantanamera,” If I Had a Hammer,” “The Bells of Rhymney,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!”). Performing solo – just vocals and banjo or 12-string guitar – Seeger provides his audience with historical contexts for the songs he sings, teaches lyrics and leads singalongs, and otherwise involves yesteryear’s and today’s listeners in this spellbinding concert, almost two full hours. Originally recorded on reel-to-reel tape in 1965, the recordings were transferred for this release using the Plangent Process to restore the performance to the proper playing speed and otherwise clean up any tape degradation. The occasional remaining sonic fluctuations are the result of an exuberant Pete bobbing and weaving around the microphones as he sings and exhorts the crowd to join him.
Appleseed Recordings has been a catalyst in Pete’s latest renaissance through its acclaimed trio of multi-artist tributes to his music, starting with 1998’s award-winning Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger Vol. 1, for which Springsteen was approached to record a track. Springsteen chose to record the Seeger-adapted civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” and several other tracks that remained unreleased until his 2006 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions CD and subsequent national and international tours. Suddenly Pete was back in the spotlight. One of the lesser known tracks on Live in ’65, “He Lies in an American Land,” performed here as a solemn account of a workplace fatality written in Slovakian by a Pittsburgh steel worker, Andrew Kovaly, may actually be more familiar to Springsteen’s fans than Seeger’s – inspired by Seeger’s “folk process” of rendering old songs new, Bruce entirely rewrote the song as “American Land,” a joyous celebration of immigration in America, and has used the song as an encore at more than 130 Seeger Sessions and E Street Band shows. Never content to rest while there’s an audience to entertain and inform, whether it’s a local grade school class or the delighted crowds at the Newport Folk Festival and the Monterey Jazz Festival this past summer, Pete sees no end in sight to his career of spreading pleasure, historical perspective, and the power of ideas through his music.
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other releases
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