Well I got a hammer and I got a bell
And I got a song to sing all over this land
It’s the hammer of Justice, it’s the bell of Freedom
It’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
Pete Seeger, If I had a Hammer
“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
Words inscribed on Pete Seeger’s banjo
There is a shrinkage that comes with age, as if the horizons are drawing in physically closer to wherever you stand, as if your mind is no longer good enough to imagine or appreciate what lies beyond the power of your sight. And because of that shrinkage, things that lie beyond the horizon become less and less interesting, while things within the valley you occupy acquire more and more focus. This is a gradual process which begins at some unknown time in a long life, a time that may well differ for each of us, but which arrives relentlessly nonetheless. But the results of its operations become increasingly apparent the older you get.
As your focus narrows, you realize that the worth of a few who shared the valley during your time is far greater than that of the rest. These scarce few stand out as markers of place and time, a place and time now consigned to the past or, in the case of these few, to history. For me, one of those few was Pete Seeger.
I was not privileged to know Mr. Seeger in the sense that verb is usually employed, but, like many of my generation, I came to know him well even if I never met him face to face. He seemed a modest man, always apparently surprised by the power of his own voice. It was this inherent modesty that made him stand out, for he always seemed to be about the needs of others rather than his own. His empathy was enormous, and he always put action to words even when old age, disability, and a fading voice would have silenced a lesser man.
The power in his voice sprang from the simplicity of his message and the strength of his belief that music could prevail over evil. He constantly lectured us to wield the hammer of justice, to ring the bell of freedom, and to treat everyone else as a brother or a sister. He never wavered from this message. He always lived up to his own standards, speaking out to the point of emasculation of his own commercial success. Consider the commercial wisdom of the following lyric aimed directly at President Lyndon Johnson during the build up of the disaster that was the Vietnam War (Waist Deep in the Big Muddy):
Well, I’m not going to point any moral;
I’ll leave that for yourself
Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
You’d like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Mr. Seeger not only had the courage of his convictions, he had the courage to ignore his own needs in favor of greater truths; he not only had the courage to stand up for what he believed, he had the courage to do so in the heat of the spotlight while on center stage. He had the courage to speak out when what he regarded as evil was all about him; he always sang best when he sang his songs into the teeth of what he believed to be an ill wind.
When William Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, his acceptance speech concluded as follows:
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
If Mr. Faulkner was wrong, Pete Seeger’s voice would have been the last puny inexhaustible voice on that last red and dying evening, but he would have been singing, not talking; if Mr. Faulkner was right, Pete Seeger’s courage and songs are ample evidence of the compassion and sacrifice and endurance of which Mr. Faulkner spoke.
Somehow or other, unlike the rest of us, Mr. Seeger’s horizons never shrank; his world was always wide and ever welcoming.
