"The Water is Wide" (Traditional)

Photo taken by me at the John Seeger Memorial.
Pete is there with John's children, Kate and her husband and Tony Seeger

The Last Time I Saw Pete Seeger

We were all gathered in Hancock Vermont at Camp Killooleet for the John Seeger Memorial in the summer of 2010. It was a full day, that included the Seeger family making music (which is when I shot the picture posted), an outdoor picnic, a campfire sing-along and mainly sharing remembrances of John and Ellie Seeger and our collective memories of this beautiful camp in Hancock Vermont that nurtured my love of folk music that has lasted my entire life. Pete was a fixture at the camp throughout my childhood there, along with the rest of the Seeger family, and they all instilled in me my love of sharing and swapping songs, and the sense of community that comes from raising our voices in song together.

Just a quiet moment with Pete Seeger in the main house at Camp Killooleet from that day in the summer of 2010. Pete came in to get his famous banjo (with the writing “this machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”) while I was looking around the room that hadn’t changed at all in the 44 years since I was last there as a camper. We talked about the books on the wall that Pete said were there from when his brother John Seeger and his wife Ellie bought the camp in the 1940’s.

We got to talking. One thing led to another, as it often does with Pete, and he started to discuss one of the secrets to his longevity: he said he sleeps every night with his feet propped up by pillows, higher than his head, to keep the blood flowing to his heart. He told me he learned this from his father, Charles Seeger (musicologist and teacher), who Pete said had studied Yoga and practiced it well into his old age.

He then shared a humorous anecdote: He said that Charles Seeger practiced yoga every morning in the nude, upstairs at his home. One day, a young woman journalist who had been sent there to interview him got the shock of her life when she arrived a little earlier than expected and saw the aging Charles Seeger, doing a headstand in the nude!

We had a good laugh about this, and spoke of many other things in our moments together that day. He noticed my guitar case and knew who had made it for me. Encouraged me with my music as he always did, and then moved out to help set up for the memorial service for his older brother, John. When I strolled down to the lake, I was shocked and amused at the sight of then 90 year old Pete, picking up the long benches that the guests were to sit on, and moving them into place all by himself. But that was Pete!

The video clip below is from a performance I gave at a Folk Festival in 1994 of a traditional tune that I learned at Camp Killooleet. I am pretty sure that Tony Seeger, Pete's nephew and son of John Seeger, taught me the arrangement.

"The Circle Game" by Joni Mitchell

I took this shot of my daughter on the beach in LA

 

In 1967, when I was still in jr high school, I attended my first anti-war rally in NYC, protesting the Vietnam war. 1968 brought the My Lai Massacre, as well as the murders of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and riots in the streets. I had been too young to understand what it meant when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, other than a day off from school. But the murders of our leaders in 1968 hit me and my generation hard. I was in utter despair that we would ever stop the killing, or find the leaders who could inspire us to do so again. I did not give up and I continued to protest. What else could I do? My friends and neighbors were dying. The final blow was Nixon's narrow election in 1968 with his so-called "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. None of us in the anti-war movement believed him, and it took years of protest and action to eventually end that war. And we did.

In 1968, I saw Joni Mitchell live for the first time. She was playing at Hunter College auditorium in November of 1968. I was a Tom Rush fan, and I noticed she wrote a few songs on his Circle Game album. So I went and bought her first album, and I was entranced by her guitar, her voice and her songs. The night I saw Joni Mitchell, I was front row center for her so I could carefully watch what she was doing on the guitar. She helped me to put aside the trauma of that year for a while.  I learned how to tune to her turnings that night, and the chord formations for many of her early songs, including Circle Game in G tuning.

The clip of me singing Circle Game is from 1994 at a folk festival in the Santa Cruz mountains, where I was living at the time. Singing this song brings me back to those years long before I turned 20.  I will never forget.