Another Article about Pete Seeger mentioning Seton: Time to stand up for what you believe: An Article from The New Yorker

Time to stand up for what you believe: An Article from The New Yorker: "Wednesday, July 26, 2006
An Article from The New Yorker
I can't help but share this article about Pete Seeger...

The New Yorker
April 17, 2006

THE PROTEST SINGER

Pete Seeger and American folk music.

BY ALEC WILKINSON


It was the ambition of the singer and songwriter Pete Seeger, as a child, in the nineteen-twenties, to be an Indian, a farmer, a forest ranger, or possibly an artist, because he liked to draw. He went to Harvard, joined the tenor-banjo society, and studied sociology in the hope of becoming a journalist, but near the end of his second year he left, before taking his exams, and rode a bicycle north from New York through New England. He was tall and thin and earnest and polite. He would make a watercolor sketch of a farm from the fields, then knock on the farmhouse door and ask if he could trade the drawing for a meal.



In the nineteen-forties, Seeger was a member of a group called the Almanac Singers, which included Woody Guthrie. The name derived from their belief that many farming homes had two books: a Bible and an almanac. The Almanac Singers appeared mainly at strikes and at rallies held to support the rights of laborers. Seeger says that they were 'famous to readers of the Daily Worker,' the newspaper of the Communist Party. When the Almanac Singers broke up, Seeger played on his own for a while, then became a member of the Weavers, whose version of 'Goodnight Irene,' by Leadbelly, was, for thirteen weeks in 1950, the best-selling record in America. The Weavers quit playing in 1952, after an informant told the House Un-American Activities Committee that three of the four Weavers, including Seeger, were Communists. (See"