Pete Seeger

We Shall Overcome (Columbia)

John McCutcheon Loves Live Seeger: Folk artist John McCutcheon told us about his love for a classic Pete Seeger live album.

John McCutcheon: I remember that Christmas in 1965  when my parents giddily announced that we were going to get “the best Christmas present ever” in July, a brand-new baby.  Number nine.  I was number one, just turned thirteen and apparently the only one of my siblings that had been subjected to The Talk.  I knew how this all had happened and it wasn’t remotely exciting to me.  It was equal parts disgusting and unimaginable.  My mother?  No way.  My dad?  Sure, but with my mother?



Being the eldest, I was left in charge of the seven younger ones while Dad drove Mom off to the hospital on the first day of July the following summer.  I had watched just enough westerns to know that women regularly died in childbirth, so I waited for the dreaded phone call.  When it finally came and I learned that mother and newborn were just fine, I was so relieved I left my sister Mary Claire in charge of the other six and Schwinned my way down to Wright’s Music Store on the main street of our town and bought my very first LP.  I’d coveted it for over a year, ever since I heard the title cut song on the television.  But I hadn’t heard it on the usual televised sources that teenagers got their music in 1966.  It wasn’t on American Bandstand, or Shindig, or Hullabaloo.  I’d heard it on the news.

The Civil Rights Movement was a big deal to Mom and me.  She had been a social worker before motherhood and knew that there was a bigger world out there beyond the lunch boxes and laundry that now dominated her life.  Me?  I was the product of a devotedly Catholic home and the combination of a modern social movement lead by clergy that used biblical language and whose songs were re-purposed hymns…well, it checked all my spiritual boxes.  And when I heard “We Shall Overcome,” I knew it sounded like a hymn, but I knew it was more than that.  And I wanted to hear it again and again in the way a record album could let me do.

So, I laid down my paper route money and biked back to our hi-fi and the rest of my life.

We Shall Overcome, Pete Seeger Live at Carnegie Hall was the first folk music album I heard, the first live performance I’d ever heard.  Hell, I’d never been to a concert.  I sat there cross-legged and amazed and I must have listened to it ten times in a row.  He sang songs old and new and debuted a couple of unrecorded Bob Dylan songs.  Sang songs written by people who, fifty years later, would be my friends and co-writers.  I heard the way in which music covered turf I heard nowhere on the radio.  Songs from the Civil Rights movement that were being created on picket lines and in jail cells.  Songs that laughed at the powerful and praised the unsung work of those I recognized as the Meek.

But, more than anything else, I was moved by the audience that sang in lusty, full-throated harmony.  Growing up Catholic, I didn’t realize a human being could sound that way.  It was powerful, it was defiant, it was beautiful.  And when We Shall Overcome came on, I heard, for the first time, the new verse “We are not afraid,” which I learned later was composed by a fourteen-year-old girl, Jamilla Jones, hiding and frightened under a desk during a police raid at the Highlander Center in east Tennessee.  We are not afraid.  Damn!  And that was the final straw.  “I want to do that!” I resolved.  And the rest of my life began.

I’m seventy-one years old now, a lifetime removed from that July afternoon, and over fifty years into trying to “do that.”  I met Pete early on and he became a mentor, a friend, and, more than a few times, a partner on a concert stage.  I never told him about that summer day in 1966.  I figured he’d heard stories like that too often.  Besides, he’d told me many times, “Don’t just think about it, don’t just talk about it, get your ass out there and do it.”

So, all these years later I still sing along to the Beatles, get my head blown by Hendrix, get transported by the Messiah.  But, when I want to remind myself what my job is, what our job is, I play that album.

John McCutcheon Loves Live Seeger: John McCutcheon's album Together with Tom Paxton is out October 13.

https://soundcloud.com/appalseed-1/sets/together/s-IqkAneczvkr?si=ec26590392db41de98d03374e03ad616&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

 


 
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