Pete Seeger

This machine cashes paycheques.

Pete Seeger has died. A lot of the obituaries will lament how his career was supposedly blighted by being blacklisted in the Fifties. But my impression is just the opposite: I marvel how he had such a long and successful career with virtually no talent.

I love folk music. But really, it is not technically challenging, is it? To make a career, you need to bring something special to the table: a poet's sensibilities, or a voice that conveys some special feeling. Seeger wrote a few popular songs, but the lyrics were quite limited and childish. "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"; "If I Had a Hammer"; "Turn! Turn! Turn!" Very few words, in a simple, predictable pattern. Something easy to remember and easy to sing, that's all. Nothing revelatory. And his voice was bland and without resonance. Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert, his partners in the Weavers, really did have good voices. Yet their careers ended long ago, while Seeger continued to headline.

Nothing wrong with being average. Folk music is for such voices and expects such simplicity. It just seems strange that this man with no special talent sustained a very profitable career doing what millions of others could have done just as well or better.

And the answer to the riddle is, I think, politics. Just as a serious artist like Bob Dylan must avoid political entanglements to preserve his art, a political affiliation is the great opportunity for a talentless hack. If you can't sing and you can't play, you still have hopes that some will some and see you to support the political cause. Some will invite you to sing, and pay you to sing, for their political events.

Folks have it completely wrong, therefore, when they say that his politics hindered Seeger's career, and they have it completely wrong when they say that he contributed honourably to his political cause, however misguided. It was all on the other side: his politics was his meal ticket. And he prostituted his art for it.

Rest in peace.