Long time activist Pete Seeger joins OWS

Folk music and '60s protest legend Pete Seeger has joined in the Occupy Wall Street protest, replacing his instruments with two canes as he marches with throngs of people to Columbus Circle. The 92-year-old Seeger occasionally sang "We Shall Not be Moved" and other anthems of protest as about a thousand people walked peacefully Friday and police watched from the sidelines. Composer David Amran and bluesman Guy Davis were also in the crowd.

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Pete Seeger

He was originally a communist supporter, and has since left that political group and opposed the cold war arms race, among other things. He's written songs to call out presidents, he's practically an American hero! How many famous faces must go to Wall street before the government takes notice?

Here is my favorite Seeger tune. From 68 I think
Adam the Inventor

My favorite song is Abiyoyo. I listened to him in the early '60s when I was a kid.

hhahahaha an old commie to the rescue. Do you know he sang at Obama's inauguration as well? I'm not at all surprised he is supporting both Obama the Marxist, and the communists at OWS.
You say he stopped being a communist? I don't believe it. Think he doesn't know Obama is marxist? Think he's not joining his fellow travelers at OWS?

Still, the party kept sending its legions to the cultural front lines, even after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact abruptly ended the Popular Front coalition-building. The American Communist Party’s bluntest expression of the idea of culture as a revolutionary tool came in writer V. J. Jerome’s talk “Let Us Grasp the Weapon of Culture,” presented to its 15th national convention in New York in 1951. “Cultural activity is an essential phase of the party’s general ideological work,” Jerome observed. Federal officials cited the speech as an “overt act” seeking the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, landing Jerome in prison for three years.

It took a while for the Popular Front’s strategy to get results in popular music—and Pete Seeger was the catalyst. Many critics mark Elvis Presley’s arrival in the 1950s as a turning point in postwar American popular culture, not just because he injected a more overt sexual energy into entertainment, but also, they claim, because his rebellious spirit anticipated the political upheavals of the 1960s. But neither Presley nor the newfangled thing called rock ‘n’ roll had any explicit politics at the time (and Elvis would one day endorse Richard Nixon). A better leading indicator of the politicization of pop was the first appearance of a Seeger composition on the hit parade.

For Seeger, the sixties breakthrough came after decades’ worth of mixing music and politics. His belief in music’s potential political power ran in the family, reports biographer David King Dunaway. Seeger’s eminent father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist teaching at Berkeley in the early 1900s (the folk-music archive at Harvard is named after him), found the plight of California migrant workers so disturbing that he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, despite being a pure son of the American upper class with Puritan ancestors;

The Popular Front Left saw such homespun music of poor rural Southerners—eventually labeled American “folk” music—as perfect for molding into a new Marxist cultural vernacular. “[W]hen the Communist Left and its intellectuals . . . tried to sink roots in American tradition, radicals turned a new ear to traditional folk tunes,” notes Dunaway

Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax took on this project with gusto. Lacking a real tradition of social protest in American folk music, the pair set out to create one. The music served as the crucible of Seeger’s own style: “Folk songs, radicalism and patriotism blended in his mind,”

www.city-journal.org...

Here's a great little gem from an interview of him

JW: Your slogan is “think globally, act locally.” What do you mean by that? PS: I got that phrase from the great biologist, Rene Dubos, who taught at the Rockefeller Institute

www.rutherford.org...


That slogan is used in the UN Agenda 21 Sustainability program, so think he's not still a communist?

Ha!

who cares what some 120 year old geezer has to say?. OWS is in trouble if they have "supporters" like him.