Pete Seeger
What were Pete Seeger's motivations/inspirations to do what he did?
Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Though Pete Seeger's parents were both professional musicians, they didn't press him to play an instrument. On his own, Pete gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it, while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. Then in 1936, while traveling with his father (who was at that time a director of Roosevelt's Farm Resettlement program), Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina,[9] and his life was changed forever. For the next four years, he devoted much of his time to trying to master the instrument.
Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but, as he became increasingly involved with radical politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938.[10] He dreamed of a career in journalism and also took courses in art. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing (still with four-string banjo) at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. Then, following a summer stint of touring with The Vagabond Puppeteers, a radical traveling puppet theater inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico,[11] he took a job in Washington, D.C. assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father's, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger's job was to sift through commercial "race" and "hillbilly" music and select recordings that best represented traditional folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938-53).[12] Lomax also encouraged Seeger's folk singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's three-times weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940-41) alongside of Josh White, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer's Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast, which made news when it performed in March 1941, at a command performance at the White House organized by Eleanor Roosevelt, called "An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers",[13] before an audience that included the Secretaries of War, Treasury, and the Navy, among other bigwigs. During the war, Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin.
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