Robert Elfstrom
Pete Seeger: A Song and A Stone
Weinderworld Dvd

www.weinerworld.com
 

View Pete Seeger: A Song and a Stone for a slew of engaging glimpses of one of the greatest Americans of the 20th Century in his personal and historical context. We can only wish we had footage like this of Walt Whitman, Stephen Foster and Frederick Douglass. They come to mind because, in his way, Pete manifests elements of their arts and politics in his own time and beyond.

Pete’s unique, poignant, compelling, and courageous persona generates both the deep personal affection so many of us feel for him and his work. He reminded us, every minute of every day, to promote living values – rivers, trees, human beings and their rights – over nonliving values like profit at any cost or war. The footage here, dating from 1972, doesn’t look anything like a Hollywood movie of the time. Though at first it is jarring, you come to feel like you were “there” – at concerts, antiwar demonstrations, conversations with friends and family members, his famous Clearwater Sloop – and you’re revisiting your own home movies. I found it moving partly for that reason.

“A Song” in the title is an obvious choice of words. What about “a Stone”? I won’t give too much away by revealing that this dedicated proponent and practitioner of nonviolent protest acknowledged that sometimes it doesn’t suffice. View the film to discover Pete’s literal stone.

The film serves both as an inspiring and a cautionary tale. A uniquely sophisticated musician, songwriter, and activist can move a lot of people to sing and to act in concert (in both senses) while leaving fundamental policy – war, weapons, car culture, pollution, global heating, suppression of knowledge – unchanged. Unfortunately, plutocrats, war-mongers, industrialists, and the politicians who work the machinery cobbled together by the Constitution rarely heed folksingers and their fans. To “kumbaya” an “issue” has become a derogatory characterization.

My fellow Sing Out! and Pete fans are likely to find A Song and a Stone very rewarding.

— David Cantor