Yesterday the great singer-songwriter Pete Seeger died. A month ago I still posted some thoughts on the occasion of his 94th birthday, when he appeared on stage at a small birthday party to sing “Turn, Turn, Turn” with his friends and the audience (which were more or less identical). Now Pete died, and leaves us not only with songs which became evergreens and often covered by other musicians, but also leaves us with memories of a great personality. And here are my first memories of Pete Seeger:
When in East Germany we had our first english lesson at school, the teacher quickly understoud how to catch our attention: by listening and learning to American and English songs and music. Song texts of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or Jefferson Airplane were not only hard to get, but were indexed by the authorities from being used at the schools. With Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie it was easier: since their songs had a clear political message, left wing, anti-establishment, liberal and pacifistic, the state authorities had to give permission to publish them.
So I had a great LP of american protest songs, many written by Pete Seeger, and I had a song book, with the lyrics and the tunes and the guitar chordes. So we learned English at the age of 12 -16 to a large degree from the lyrics of Pete Seeger songs. When we read “Where have all the flowers gone” and “If I had a hammer”, we watch the cover photo of the song book, showing a photo of a young man with a banjo, in a typical singers position on a folk festival stage. Pete was 54 on this photo, and he was the hero for us teenagers. And also the teenage girls, our class mates, adored him. Somebody as Justin Bieber would have had no chance in those years. When he sang “If I had a hammer”, we understoud that a hammer would be really useful to knock down the wall, that only 1.5 miles away separated our Eastern part of Berlin from the real cool and free world.
When he sang “Where have all the flowers gone ?…. Young girls picked them everyone” we knew that in three years time the stupid army wants to recruit us, and then there wont be no flowers to pick and no girls to meet anymore. But Pete Seegers songs would be there to help us through all the stupidity.
It is sad that Pete Seeger died now, but I am somehow conviced that wherever he will have his incarnation, it will be together with Jimmy Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, John Bonham and Kurt Cobain, and they will form the ultimate All Star Band. And last but not least, Marlene Dietrich will also be there to sing “Where have all the flowers gone”.
