HE WHO FEELS IT, KNOWS IT.

There'll be a lot of garbage talked about Pete Seeger's politics today. (At the moment there's a post-mortem hush, and even Ann Althouse is gracious, but the assholes are already crawling out.) There'll probably be some cavilling about the quality of Seeger's ethnomusicology, too, and about appropriation and authenticity and all that shit.

But today I'm thinking of him as a player -- because though he has a fat political legacy on which others can speak eloquently, he was also, I would say foremost, a musician, someone in love with songs and sounds who had the gift to transmit that love to large groups of people. He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music, and if his diction was a little sharper than was traditional, you could still tell he felt it. His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.

"Wimoweh" starts about 1:35 in this clip from Wasn't That a Time, the doc about The Weavers' 1980 reunion. Watch Pete. He's possessed by the sound, as much a raver and a wailer as that other great appropriator, Buddy Holly.



At the time he was 60 years old, and he kept right on going till the end. Music is so much more important than politics, really.

UPDATE. Charlie Pierce understands. Many good lines:

He loved the country and its people and the idea of it that outlasted so many attempts to hijack it for other purposes. Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise. That is the only real qualification. It gets more dear as the years go by.

UPDATE 2. Somebody called Howard Husock at National Review:

In other words, Pete Seeger led the way in devising the formula that pushed popular culture leftward: the music (or the movies) had to work as art and must avoid heavy-handedness.

Yes -- the art had to work as art! Ingenious, these communists! No wonder, as Husock complains, "the cultural Right has long, and unsuccessfully, been trying to match his example" -- they don't even know that art and politics are different things. What miserable lives they must have.

UPDATE 3. Donald Douglas goes into comments, calls one of the other commenters a "cum-receptacle"; said another commenter wonders if his employer would like to see that comment; Douglas puts up a post called "@Edroso Commenter Threatens Workplace Harassment Over Pete Seeger Communist Blogging." Later, he comes back and threatens another commenter. I've banned him; he can issue his Cries For Help elsewhere. What is it with these people?