Common Dreams / Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by Reuters
When Pete Seeger was recording songs like "Wimoweh" with the Weavers folk quartet in the 1950s, he didn't give much thought to the fact the people who originally created the music generally got nothing in return.
Now Seeger is lending his name to the Campaign for Public Domain Reform, an effort to create a system for part of the royalties from folk tunes to reach the corners of the world where the songs originated.
If anyone in the music world has the moral authority to spearhead such a cause, it's Seeger, who just turned 85.
In a performing career spanning more than six decades, Seeger was as likely to turn up at union halls, peace marches and picket lines as in large concert halls or on television. He wrote or coauthored such anthems as "If I Had a Hammer," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and he adapted and arranged other standards including "We Shall Overcome" and "Guantanamera."
"When a song is in the public domain and you record it, it's standard practice in the music industry to say 'adapted and arranged by' whoever sings it," Seeger said in a recent interview. "Why let the record company keep all the royalties? They didn't write the song."
But who did? The answer isn't always clear. Seeger said he was once told by Joseph Shabalala of the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo that when the word "traditional" is used, "it means the money stays in New York."
A RELUCTANT SUCCESS
"I didn't want to become a famous person," Seeger told Reuters from his home in Beacon, New York, overlooking the Hudson River. "I didn't want to become rich. My wife and I were quite content to live on a few pennies here on the side of a mountain."
The success of the Weavers following World War II took him by surprise, he said. The group's 1949 recording of Leadbelly's song "Goodnight Irene" sold 2 million copies, and the group also popularized such songs as "On Top of Old Smoky," "Kisses Sweeter than Wine" and "This Land Is Your Land."
But when Red hunters of the McCarthy era caught wind of the political views and associations of some members of the Weavers, the group was blacklisted -- banned from the airwaves and blocked from performing in most mainstream venues.
In 1955 Seeger was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he refused to say whether he had performed for Communist-sponsored events.
"I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody," he told the committee.
His defiance earned him a one-year prison sentence for contempt of Congress -- later overturned on appeal -- and a hero's place in the hearts of a generation of progressives and peace activists. Attending a Seeger concert became a political event in itself.
Seeger dropped out of the Weavers after a few years. "I just don't like singing in nightclubs," he said. "I don't drink, I don't smoke and I don't drink coffee. But I really wanted to help the peace movement and the union movement and the civil rights movement."
Seeger said he now hopes to revise some of the autobiographical writings he published in years past.
"Now I can be more frank -- how I was once in the Communist Party," he said. "That was a little difficult 30 years ago. And I can also be more frank about other mistakes I made."
Seeger said he long ago turned over his share of the royalties from "Wimoweh" to Solomon Linda, the Zulu choral leader who first recorded the song as "Mbube" in 1939. But he said he was unhappy that Linda and his family received nothing after the song found new life as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," first as a chart-topping hit by the Tokens in 1961 and later in the hit movie and Broadway musical "The Lion King."
But then, Seeger said, he realized he was equally guilty for taking an old song called "Abiyoyo" from a book of African folk tunes. The song came from the Xhosa people of South Africa. "I'd been doing it for 50 years and never sent any money to anybody," Seeger said.
THE POWER OF SMALL THINGS
To help set things right, his publisher is working out an arrangement to send half the royalties from the song to a nonprofit organization that funds scholarships for Xhosa children.
Seeger has stopped touring and appearing in concerts on his own -- mainly because he says his voice is gone, though otherwise he seems as spry as ever, keeping up a full slate of chores like shoveling gravel and making his own maple syrup.
He still likes to lead audiences in song, as he did on a recent evening in midtown Manhattan, playing his banjo and teaching a group of political activists the chorus to what he calls his "best new song" -- a syncopated tribute to nonviolence called "Take It from Dr. King." The number is included on a two-CD set of songs by Seeger and friends called "Seeds: The Songs of Pete Seeger, Volume 3" (Appleseed Recordings).
Much of Seeger's effort in recent years has gone toward cleaning up the Hudson River and improving the waterfront in his hometown.
"I'm still trying to do some little things," he said. "If there's a human race here in a hundred years, it won't be any big thing that will save it -- a big slogan, a big movement, a big organization of any kind. It'll be saved by literally hundreds of millions of little things going on.
"There are more good little things being done in America now than at any time in history. Big things can be destroyed. The powers that be are so powerful they can destroy any single thing they want. But what are they going to do about millions of things?"
