Seeger, Pete

Related Category: Music: Popular and Jazz: Biographies

1919–, American folksinger and composer, b. New York City. Seeger, the son of a musicologist and a musician, left Harvard in 1938 and made a journey through the United States, collecting songs and meeting Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. In 1940, Seeger organized the Almanac Singers, and in 1948 he formed the Weavers. A major influence in reviving national interest in folk music, Seeger is intimate and casual as a performer, often inviting the audience to sing along. Among the many songs he has composed are “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” A leftist activist who was blacklisted and charged with contempt of Congress, he has supported civil-rights, antiwar, environmental (with a late-life emphasis on the Hudson River), and other causes.

See biography by D. Dunaway (1981).