Remembering Pete Seeger’s Rhode Island Ties at His Centennial: Guest MINDSETTER™ Renehan

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Guest MINDSETTER™ Ed Renehan

Pete Seeger PHOTO: Anthony Pepitone/Wikipedia

May 3, 2019 marks the centennial of the birth of American folksinger, composer, and activist Pete Seeger, recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts, inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (as an influence), and close friend (with his wife Toshi) of my family for nearly 50 years. Those few who don’t know of Seeger as a performer will likely nevertheless know some of the songs he wrote: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “If I Had a Hammer,” to name just three. Carl Sandburg called him “America’s Tuning Fork.”

Although Pete made his home in the Hudson Valley, he had many close associations with Rhode Island and was here often. He regaled me once with the story of how, when a young 19-year-old Harvard student, he weathered the Hurricane of 1938 under a tree somewhere around Cumberland. He’d been cycling from Cambridge on his way to his family home in New York, traveling with a small backpack and sleeping bag, with no idea of a storm coming in. When it started to gust up and rain hard, he found some shelter under the largest and densest tree he could find. As the winds grew in intensity, he laid down across his bicycle to keep it from blowing away. That, he told me, was his first welcome to Rhode Island.

The biggest mark Pete made on the Ocean State was when he and Toshi joined with George Wein, Albert Grossman, and others to launch the Newport Folk Festival. First staged in 1959, the festival became a rich part of Rhode Island’s cultural landscape, just as it remains to this day despite a 15-year intermission between 1970 and 1985. In 1969, Pete sailed the environmental movement’s new flagship, the CLEARWATER sloop, down from Maine to its permanent home port on the Hudson River. Pete and his “singing crew” – which included Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Don McLean – made a stop at the festival and performed an extraordinary concert. Pete made his very last performance at the Festival eight years ago, in 2011, at the end of which he and George Wein took a bow before a standing ovation, their hands clasped. (George’s autobiography, Myself Among Others, is dedicated to three people: His late wife Joyce, and Pete and Toshi.) Since Pete’s death in 2014, the Festival has incorporated a special program, For Pete’s Sake, highlighting bluegrass, gospel, and roots music. The program last year was curated by John Stirratt of the band Wilco.

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Through the years Pete also performed at URI, Brown University, Slater Mill, and many other sites in Rhode Island, using the opportunity to also visit with his daughter Mika who lives in the state. He emceed a memorial gathering for songwriter Malvina Reynolds at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in 1993 and performed at the Rhode Island Labor & Ethnic Heritage Festival in Pawtucket in 1996. He also inspired and encouraged Rhode Island’s own Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Bill Harley and likewise inspired Joyce Katzberg and others to start another treasured Rhode Island institution: The Stone Soup Coffeehouse.

Pete remained very active for a very long time. Ten years ago, on his 90th birthday, he was still in fine form leading the crowd in singing “Amazing Grace” at a Madison Square Garden birthday celebration organized by Bruce Springsteen. (The event featured such performers as Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Richie Havens, Dave Matthews, Kris Kristofferson, Taj Mahal, and John Mellencamp.) Three years later, in October of 2012, he and I (both being wooden boat junkies) visited the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport. I remember him bounding up a steep set of stairs in order to gaze down into the belly of an ancient schooner in the midst of being rebuilt. About this same time, when Pete was a guest on The Colbert Report, Colbert asked him how he stayed so fit. Pete answered that he still split logs every day with which he and Toshi heated their home, but he complained that despite this exercise he nevertheless found he was growing a pot-belly for the first time in his life. He still seemed strong in September of 2013 when he joined Willie Nelson, Neil Young and others on the stage for Farm Aid. But this was soon to change.

When Pete died on January 27th, 2014, we got the word through an early morning phone call carefully timed to wake us before we woke ourselves and heard the news in a less personal manner, through television or social media. I’d seen him in New York the previous October, less than a month after Farm Aid. The event was an invitation-only memorial service for Toshi who’d died in July. Pete had suddenly slowed. In the matter of just a few weeks he’d lost much of his physical agility and was having lapses of memory. He introduced me to blues player Guy Davis and referred to Guy as the “daughter” of his friends Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. At his annual Carnegie Hall concert with Arlo Guthrie on Thanksgiving weekend, he came on stage pushing a walker. My sense was that he was ready to go. But he left his mark on the world, and on Rhode Island.

Remembering Pete Seeger’s Rhode Island Ties at His Centennial: Guest MINDSETTER™ Renehan

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