he legendary folk singer Pete Seeger left behind a powerful legacy of political music.
LISBON - But who nowadays is left to continue Seeger went down swinging. Even in his 90s, one of the godfathers of contemporary protest music was still working the crowd at an Occupy movement rally in New York City while turning We Shall Overcome into one big, righteous sing-along.
Seeger, who died recently at 94, leaves behind a formidable legacy. He was a controversial, outspoken figure who sang hit songs and children’s songs, but mostly songs that called for change. He walked it like he sang it; he was once indicted for contempt by the same government he so frequently called out in his music (the charges were later overturned). He and Woody Guthrie sang together in the early 1940s, and he helped launch the folk-protest movement later on in that decade with his group, the Weavers. “We all owe our careers to him,” Joan Baez said of herself and fellow guitar-strumming rabble-rousers like Bob Dylan, Odetta and Phil Ochs.
But where is Seeger’s voice of dissent today? Steve Earle, one of Seeger’s foremost disciples, once defined his job in a way that would make the master proud: “The original function of songwriting is to tell a story that might otherwise die.” Many casual observers of popular music might say that it is the protest song that is dying. Where is the indignation of Seeger’s I Ain’t Scared of Your Jail, Dylan’s Masters of War, the Staple Singers’ Freedom Highway or Gil Scott-Heron’s Johannesburg today?
–There was certainly no sign of it in the recent spectacle of the Grammy Awards, which presented a sanitised version of American popular culture. But there is plenty happening on the margins that suggests the protest song is still very much alive, if not widely popular in the commercial, big-media sense of the term. (FraM Martins).
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