Peter Seeger - Songs of Hope and Struggle

I only discovered Pete Seeger when he died in 2014. For most of my life I was a 'goth-punk', that strange feral sub-culture formed in the shadow of the failed 1960s revolution. I didn't hate hippies but I knew they were weak and uncool. I had no time for some 'hippie' playing folk songs on a banjo - give me synth or give me death! So I tossed away a whole heritage of resistance.

Pete Seeger wasn't a 'hippie', he was born in 1919. If you have the ears to hear it these folk songs hit as hard as the most savage industrial music. These songs hit with the weight of human lives and hopes, of mass movements and union drives, of broken bones and miner's lung coughs. They are also pretty humorous (see Bourgeois Blues & Talking Atom) and catchy too.

They have to be catchy because they are not Seeger's songs, Seeger is just singing the songs he heard around him, so they are, in a very real sense, our songs and heritage as North Americans, these songs were passed from lip to lip & from banjo to banjo until society more or less imploded during the 1970s & 1980s (we sang TV theme songs on protest lines in the 1990s...) but now these songs are on Youtube.



So put this collection of songs on and celebrate May Day and sing along because these songs are meant to sung! Steph and I will be singing along with you.