Pete’s Seeger’s musical memoir, The Incompleat Folk Singer, includes the following entry for August 5, 1964.  I hope he’ll pardon me for quoting it in its entirety, but I think it informs our conversation here about music, tragedy, and political change quite well.  “Those Three Are On My Mind,” which we discussed yesterday, emerged later.  This is one of the closest reports we have from Seeger about the events of that summer, and it includes his description of breaking the news to his audience that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman’s bodies had been found.

August 5, 1964

        Written in Meridian, Mississippi.

Pete Seeger performing for COFO volunteers

For a few days, I am down here seeing if I can help, in a small way, some very wonderful people bring more democracy to their state.

Everything has been going smoothly.  The only discordant note was a man in the Jackson airport.  He had overheard me talking with a reporter on the plane.  In the airport, he accosted me with blood in his eye.  “Are you coming down here to sing for the Ni——rs?”

“I’ve been asked down here by some friends to sing,” says I, trying to be at my most gracious.  “I hope that anyone who wants to hear me can come, either Negro or white.”

“Well, you just better watch your step.  If we hadn’t been on the plane when I heard you talking, I would have knocked the s–t out of you.”  I tried to mollify him, but he wasn’t interested in listening.

The friends who picked me up, Bob Cohen and his wife, are two young Yankees who are spending the summer here.  They have organized what they call the Music Caravans, and have written hundreds of musicians such as myself, asking us to spend a few days or a week or more here.  They give us food and transportation, and the time is spent in giving a number of short programs for what are known as Freedom Workshops.

There are about ninety of these workshops throughout the state.  The NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and SCLC have pooled their forces in what is known as COFO (Council of Federated Organizations).  They run classes in voter-registration requirements, and now classes are held in history and geography, mathematics, languages, and other subjects.  The students are mainly young.  Older people are often scared of losing their jobs or being evicted from their homes, but they get the materials through the children.

The teachers are mainly college students, both white and Negro, mainly from the North or West, who are volunteering their summer vacation time.  About eight hundred are in the state, I’m told.  But not all are young.  I met a woman of fifty whom Woody and I stayed with twenty-five years ago when we were singing for the lumberjacks in Minnesota.  Her husband was then a labor lawyer.  Now she is a widow and a California schoolteacher.

Pete Seeger singing in Meridian, Mississippi

Most of the classes are held in churches.  Since a number of the churches have been bombed (a stick of dynamite thrown from a moving car at night), when they can’t get a church they buy or rent some other building.  My first concert was held in the backyard of such a building.  It had been slightly damaged by a bomb three weeks before, but none of the young people seem scared.  I think, like soldiers in the trenches, they had survived initial nervousness and had learned to live with danger.  There are certain safety measures always taken, such as always checking in and checking out, especially when any trip is taken.


My program was essentially not too different from what I always give.  A few old songs, hinting at the history of our country.  A few songs from other countries, hinting at the different types of people in this big world—but also good songs which will give us a feeling of friendship to them.  A few stories or songs for kids, such as “Abiyoyo,” the allegory on the power of music. But my audience was happiest when, near the end, I concentrated on what they call “our” songs, the spirituals and gospel songs with freedom verses which have swept through the South in the last few years.


And, when I started one of these songs, did they sing!  It was inspiring to me to hear them.

My audience tonight was mostly young–from ten years old to twenty-five years old, plus a few older women.  All Negro, except for a handful of white college students.  And the town sheriff stood silently in the back during the whole performance.  Just two local white people dared to come.  I was told that they worked at a local radio station and were students at a nearby college.  They’ll take some rough questioning when they get home.

And what am I accomplishing? some will ask.  Well, I know I’m just one more grain of sand in this world, but I’d rather throw my weight, however small, on the side of what I think is right than selfishly look after my own fortunes and have to live with a bad conscience.  The voter-registration campaign is inching forward slowly, and there’s no doubt that within a few years Mississippi is going to be a much freer and happier place in general.

No doubt, there’s some hurting going on now.  There was during the American Revolution, too.  And G.B. Shaw once said, “I can no more show a play without causing pain than a dentist can do his job without causing some pain.  The morals of the country are in a bad way and of course it hurts to touch them.”

From the Randall (Herbert) Freedom Summer Photographs; Legendary folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger meets with students in a Freedom School classat Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on August 4, 1964, as part of Freedom Summer. Anthony Harris is on Seeger’s left and Herbert Knox is to the right, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. (Caption from the University of Southern Mississippi Digital Collection)

The right to vote is the crucial thing.  Better schools, jobs, and housing will flow from this.  And, if we believe this is one country, the United States, then we must be concerned with a part of it which has for so long lagged behind the rest of the country.  How long will it take?  It will be easier to predict this after the coming elections.  If the Negroes who do vote are able to continue without losing their jobs or homes, tens of thousands will follow their example next year. [footnote here: And in 1969 I start to realize how much I have to learn.]

And perhaps this is one of the more peaceful revolutions of history.  Last night I had to announce to my audience that the bodies of the three young civil rights workers had just been found.  But no one was shouting for revenge.  Rather, one felt simply an intense determination to continue this work of love.  Afterward, people came up to me to get the words to a new song I’ve been singing:

O healing river,
Send down your water,
Send down your water
Upon this land
O healing river,
Send down your water
And wash the blood
From off the sand.
(By Fran Minkoff and Fred Hellerman).

“O Healing River” by Fran Minkoff and Fred Hellerman (Spotify)

“O Healing River” performed by Stephen Johns (Spotify)
_____

It’s difficult for me here to give a full or adequate account of the respect I hold for Pete Seeger.  In thinking about the fate that befell the non-violent activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, it’s morally obvious for me to view them as embodying the kind of devotion to service and spirit of sacrifice on behalf of justice and freedom that people normally attribute only to soldiers.  It is true in every meaningful respect that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman died for their country, and for the liberty of their fellow citizens.

With Pete, as an artist, there’s a particularly strong kind of courage and devotion to neighbor (broadly-construed) as well.  It’s clear to me in the account above, and in some of his other writings and speeches–especially his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee nearly a decade earlier–that he too has always been dedicated to the best kind of patriotism and commitment to liberty.  That testimony and the above account from Mississippi show his enduring democratic commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association, and a kind of patriotism devoted to making whatever part of the world he could touch–usually the part he lived in most of the time–a better place. As a singer, and an artist, his particular genius has been in gathering people around the power of song.  In that, he’s provided a point of connection between and within groups of people that’s worthy of respect, admiration, and gratitude.  

Some time ago, nearly 20 years ago perhaps, I woke up from a dream in which my now fellow blogger, Pat, and I had been having an argument about the relative merits of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.  I forget the precise details, but I did shortly thereafter get on whatever kind of instant messaging platform we were using in those days and tell Pat about the dream.  I opened with the line “¿Quien es mas macho, Woody o Pete?” (a variation on a Bill Murray Saturday Night Live skit–also reprised in a way by Laurie Anderson in “Smoke Rings.”).  I think this question was essentially the substance of the dream debate.  The ensuing real-life conversation was about as farcical then as it would be now, but we both agreed: “iWoody!  Claro que si.”   I include the anecdote mostly for your amusement (ok, maybe just Pat’s) in a heavy week.  There’s nothing to be made of such a silly comparison, but I’ll reiterate that I have no shortage of esteem for Seeger’s courage and compassion as a performing artist, a leader of people in song, and as a citizen.  

Next up

I’ll return to thinking about “Those Three Are On My Mind,” in conversation with a few other musical responses to this tragedy of Freedom Summer, and invite us to consider where the song properly fits–as murder ballad, memorial, and/or remonstrance against injustice and human failing.