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http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0504/breaking34.htm
The funeral took place in Derry today of Michael Bradley, (59), who was one of the fourteen civilians wounded when British army paratroopers opened fire on demonstators during a civil rights march in the Bogside area of the city on January 30th, 1972.
Mr Bradley sustained gunshot wounds to his chest and arms as he attempted to take cover behind a wall in the car park behind the then Rossville Street flats complex.
Thirteen other civilians died on the day and the outcome of the Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday killings is expected to be published in the form of a 5,000 page report this coming autumn.
Mr Bradley, who was one of the 922 witnesses who gave evidence to inquiry which sat for 367 days over a five year period, is survived by his wife Mona and by his sons Gerald, Michael and Chris.
During his evidence, Mr Bradley said he wanted to meet the paratrooper who shot him to ask him why he had gunned down an unarmed man.
Among those who carried his coffin into St Eugene’s Cathedral for Requiem Mass this morning were Michael Bridge, Damian Donaghy and Joe Friel, all of whom were also wounded on Bloody Sunday.
Bishop Edward Daly, the retired Bishop of Derry, attended the funeral as did the Mayor of Derry, Councillor Gerard Diver, Northern Ireland’s Deputy-First Minister Martin McGuinness and relatives of the Bloody Sunday victims.
Fr Michael Canny, the Administrator of St. Eugene’s Cathedral who officiated at the Requeim Mass, said Mr Bradley was a Bloody Sunday victim and campaigner.
“Unknown to him and the many others present, that day in 1972 was to change his life and the lives of a significant number of others for ever. As a result of the injuries he received he was to live the rest of his life in pain and was never able to work again”, he said.
“He like many others campaigned long and hard and over the past year or more he had been waiting in hope for the Saville Inquiry findings to be published and it is regrettable that he is now among the many who have not lived to see justice.
“He made every attempt, despite the enduring scars of Bloody Sunday, to live life to the full. Michael was a big hearted and self-giving person. He was always available and going out of his way to help people. The generosity with which he gave of his time to many people knew no bounds”, said Fr Canny.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/stormont-working-together-but-still-split-14290129.html
Monday, 4 May 2009
Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government will reach a major milestone this week when it marks its second anniversary.
And despite early fears that the coalition that includes hardline unionists and former IRA members might not have survived, it will pass the halfway point of the Assembly’s four-year-term on Friday.
Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, who in 2007 brokered the devolution deal with former DUP leader Ian Paisley, said the Assembly is now the region’s longest-running legislature since the old Stormont regime collapsed in 1972 at the height of the Troubles.
Today, leading DUP Assembly member Nelson McCausland and Sinn Fein MLA Raymond McCartney signalled that while they are committed to the political process, they have very different hopes for its future.
Stormont’s grandiose Parliament Buildings, with statues of unionism’s heroes, can be a challenging arena for 54-year-old Raymond McCartney, a former IRA prisoner and hunger striker.
“I often say to people that I spent nearly 20 years in other British institutions, but when I go to Stormont I can go home at night,” he said.
“There is no doubt that the building — its providence, its whole sense — is a symbol of an old regime. It is up to me and other republicans to ensure that it is, in time, part of a new regime.”
He joined the IRA after his cousin was shot dead by British troops on Bloody Sunday in 1972 in his native Derry.
And he later served lengthy jail terms in the high-security Maze prison where he was IRA Officer Commanding for three years, but where he also famously survived 53 days on hunger strike in 1980 as part of republican prisoners’ demands for political status.
The leading republican now serves on two of the same Stormont committees as Nelson McCausland. And while he made no reference to his opposite number, the Sinn Fein member said he believed politicians at the Assembly are slowly getting to know each other.
“When you work with people, then the conversation can go in to the ordinary things of life, football, things in general,” he said.
But for Mr McCausland, twice ejected from Stormont for accusing Gerry Adams of being a former IRA leader, sharing power with republicans is an unavoidable political reality.
Devolution, he said, has nevertheless delivered better government than direct rule, though he claimed it has left republicans in a parliament that remains in the UK.
“I was quite amused recently when it was pointed out to Sinn Fein that when (its Education Minister) Caitriona Ruane brings forward her legislation for an Education and Skills Authority, she will have to seek Royal Assent for it,” he said.
The 57-year-old and his wife Mary have both lost friends to IRA violence and while he had already sat opposite republicans on Belfast City Council, he said it is still challenging to work with Sinn Fein today.
“I don’t think you can ever forget the fact that there are Sinn Fein members who were involved in terrorist violence,” he said.
He welcomed Sinn Fein’s condemnation of the recent dissident republican murders of two soldiers and a policeman. But he credited DUP pressure with having delivered the development. “That remains one of our responsibilities — to keep the pressure on Sinn Fein.”
Republicans note the DUP spent decades trying to smash Sinn Fein, but now sit in government with it.
But the unionist party has sought to block Sinn Fein policies, including hopes for an Irish language Act. The DUP also sought to delay the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Assembly, though a five-month stand-off with Sinn Fein last year ended in compromise.
Mr McCausland said: “Sinn Fein have achieved virtually nothing at the Assembly. Their objectives are being frustrated at every turn. There is a lot of rhetoric and grandiose talk from Sinn Fein, but it is just about keeping the backwoodsmen happy.”
His republican counterpart, who balances politics with a home-life with his wife Rose and son Conchur, rejected such taunts.
“Sometimes it’s about how you measure these things,” said the Sinn Fein politician.
“Over the last two years we have seen a situation that people thought would never happen — the DUP have joined a power-sharing Executive.
“After the hiatus of last year, they now know it must be run on the basis of equality.
“That is not seen as a physical gain, but in terms of the future, it is the foundations on which gains can be built.”
He added: “I was in the hunger-strike to bring about change and to protect the integrity of republicanism.
“The work that I do now is also about promoting the republican struggle.”
Despite dissident threats to kill Sinn Fein leaders he said the party’s strategy is supported by the vast majority of republicans.
“Sometimes the work is not in the headlines,” he said, “And struggle is not always moving in a straight line. It is hard graft.”
Challenges facing Executive Ministers
DEVOLUTION OF POLICING AND JUSTICE
While no date has been confirmed, the transfer of security powers from Westminster is expected to take place before the end of the year. This will see the creation of a new Justice Ministry, with the Alliance party favourite to take on the role after the DUP and Sinn Fein agreed to step out of the running in favour of a cross-community candidate.
EDUCATION
The political wrangling over post primary transfer is set to continue. The failure to gain agreement on the issue at Stormont has seen the emergence of a unregulated system, with both Protestant and Catholic grammar schools intent to ignore minister Caitriona Ruane’s recommendations and set entrance tests this autumn. With seemingly no common ground existing between the DUP and Sinn Fein, a political solution looks a world away.
IRISH LANGUAGE
The decision of former DUP Culture Minister Edwin Poots to ditch plans for an Irish Language Act has not dented the determination of nationalist and republican members for legal recognition. While current minister Gregory Campbell believes a minority languages strategy will strengthen the position of both Irish and Ulster-Scots, Sinn Fein and the SDLP are likely to press for a full legislative protections for gaelic.
NATIONAL STADIUM FUNDING
The long running debate on a national stadium at the Maze effectively ended with minister Gregory Campbell’s decision to axe the proposed 42,000 seater venue for Gaelic games, football and rugby.
However what will happen with stadium provision in its stead remains a live issue for Stormont.
THE REVIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
The last two years of the Assembly term will coincide with the most fundamental restructuring of public administration.
The four health boards have already merged into one and similar plans to replace the five education boards will come into effect next year. The rationalisation process will culminate with the redrawing of local government structures. The current 26 councils will be amalgamated to form 11 new authorities by the local elections of May 2011.
PARADES
While tensions around the parading season have reduced significantly many issues are far from resolved. An independent body, chaired by former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown, had been due to publish its final recommendations on the future of parade management last year, but has still to report back.
How have they fared?
Four experts examine how devolution has tackled four issues: the recession, community relations, poverty and reaching the next generation
CBI Northern Ireland Director Nigel Smyth
We are very supportive in terms of the Programme for Government.
There have been some positive responses in certain departments but there are other areas where there should be a higher degree of efficiency required.
Areas like free prescriptions, not moving on water, freezing rates — those are big issues. We are saying we need to look at this more strategically.
We could spend that money much more wisely rather than giving the middle classes free prescriptions.
There is strong support for the direction they set out on economically, but we do need to tweak a few things.
We also have big potential for tourism with the exchange rate.
We should be marketing Northern Ireland more in the UK. They should be spending £2-3m more this summer in marketing the province, trying to bring people in on the back of the exchange rate.
We also have to provide more carrots to get people investing in energy efficiency and renewables.
Community Relations Council Chief Duncan Morrow
The arrival of devolution represented an enormous step in community relations.
For the first time, there was a stable inter-community administration in Northern Ireland committed to agreed procedures and signed up through the ministerial oath to a shared future for all.
The pictures of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley together were remarkable against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s history.
The symbolism of unity has been maintained internationally.
However, while the Programme for Government made a shared and better future a cross-cutting theme, there has been no agreement on a replacement for “A Shared Future”, which had emphasised the importance of all departments of government contributing to peace.
The appearance of gridlock on policy, including the temporary suspension of the Executive for four months, continue to create uncertainties.
While much has been achieved in this time there is still as much to do.
Director of the NI Anti-Poverty Network Frances Dowds
There have been moves toward the establishing of a commissioner for Older People.
There has been a willingness to explore Child Poverty through a Child Poverty Review and the establishment of a Ministerial Subgroup on Children and Young People which we hope will agree a key focus on those young people who are most disadvantaged. We want to see priorities finalised and actioned.
The delays in processing of benefits for those moving in and out of work act as a significant barrier. This is an area where the Executive could do something concrete to help give people hope for the future. It would also help deliver joined-up government.
It’s not a blank cheque approach that we need but defined priorities with resources attached.
Director of Youth Action Northern Ireland June Trimble MBE
Conversations with young people reveal mixed responses to the impact of an active Assembly.
Many have a greater interest in and awareness of global politics. The recent US election of Barack Obama caught their imagination much more than the local scene.
But many young people also express a great interest in visiting Stormont and are excited by the buzz of a working government around them.
This year, the debate which seems to be most heartfelt by young people is the 11 plus. They openly share strongly held beliefs and mixed feelings which have been determined by their personal experiences.
I would challenge Assembly members to use more contemporary ways of engaging them. Young people here want to contribute.
Stormont quotes
March 26, 2007
“We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past to become a barrier to creating a better and more stable future.”
Ian Paisley Snr after agreeing to enter government with Sinn Fein
May 8, 2007
“I think what today proves is that dialogue and perseverance and tenacity and persistence can bring about results.”
Gerry Adams on |devolution day.
August 2007
“It is clear that many of these communities are suffering from the yoke of loyalist paramilitarism...”
Margaret Ritchie cuts funding for a UDA-linked scheme, but later falls foul of the courts.
September 2007
“I know of him.”
Ian Paisley Jnr on Co Antrim property developer Seymour Sweeney.
July 2008
“Northern Ireland needs to be properly represented in the corridors of power — and Westminster needs to benefit from the undoubted skills of its people.”
Sir Reg Empey on linking-up with the Conservative Party.
March 9, 2009
“This is a battle of wills between the political class and the evil gunmen — the political class will win.”
Peter Robinson after two soldiers are shot dead by dissident republicans.
March 10, 2009
“They are traitors to the island of Ireland.
“They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island and they don’t deserve to be supported.”
Martin McGuinness on the dissidents after the shooting dead of Police Constable Stephen Carroll in Craigavon.
http://www.workers.org/2009/world/irish_auto_workers_0507/
By Martha Grevatt
Published May 3, 2009 8:15 PM
For a worker, losing a job is a devastating blow under any circumstances. All too often, the pain is compounded when a company gives short notice. Workers may be told only a few days or even a few hours beforehand that their jobs are gone.
Visteon, the auto parts maker spun off by Ford in 2000, may have set a record last month. On March 31 in Belfast, 210 workers were given six minutes’ notice that they were being terminated.
Yet the workers, who were members of the union Unite, refused to leave. “We have been left with no choice but to occupy the factory to save our jobs and to defend jobs for the people of Belfast,” stated Unite representative John Maguire.
Visteon workers in Enfield and Basildon, England, followed suit a day later after learning that their jobs were also on the chopping block. They occupied the plants for over a week. They left only after a court ordered them evicted, but they are still protesting outside their plants.
The Irish auto workers have been occupying the plant in the Occupied North now for almost a month. They are demanding the full severance—“redundancy”—payments that they were entitled to under the Ford contract.
At the time of the spinoff the workers were told that their contracts would mirror those at Ford, but the cash payments offered by KMPB, the current plant administrator, fall short of what they feel they are entitled to. Three weeks into the sit-down, KMPG offered a bigger settlement but the workers rejected it as inadequate.
The sit-down—the second in Ireland this year after the Waterford Crystal takeover—has united Irish nationalist and British loyalist workers in common cause. Gerry Adams, president of the nationalist Sinn Fein party and member of Parliament, personally visited the sit-downers.
“Ford controlled the purse strings and everything that was happening here,” Adams told the workers. He called Ford’s conduct “disgraceful.” Even an MP from the Democratic Unionist Party, whose constituents support continued British rule, came out against Visteon/Ford management.
Supporters have held rallies and picketed Ford dealerships to protest the rotten treatment of the Visteon workers. KMPG has sought a court order to have the occupiers evicted from the Belfast plant. The union vows that it will contest any eviction order.
Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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http://www.herald.ie/world-news/new-tribute-to-michael-hogan-21-die-as-bus-falls-into-river-web-snoop-on-the-neighbours-1728180.html
Monday May 04 2009
A footballer shot dead in Croke Park in 1920 is being honoured in his home village.
Michael Hogan was one of 14 civilians killed on Bloody Sunday when British forces opened fire on the crowd during a challenge game in the Dublin stadium.
The events were fictionalised in the 1996 film Michael Collins and the Hogan Stand in Croke Park was later named after the 24-year-old player.
A commemorative plaque is being unveiled by new GAA president Christy Cooney later this month in Hogan's home village of Grangemockler, near Clonmel in Co Tipperary to mark the 125th anniversary of the GAA.
A memorial mass and wreath-laying service at the player's graveside will also take place.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/magazine/2009/0502/1224245448019.html
Sat, May 02, 2009
LIVING LEGEND: PETE SEEGER Tomorrow evening in New York, an all-star cast of more than 40 performers will convene at a sold-out Madison Square Garden to honour the American legend Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday. GEORGE KIMBALL , who is related to Seeger, remembers standing with the once-blacklisted singer at a massive anti-Vietnam War rally 40 years ago
THERE IS NO accounting for Americans’ taste in popular music, which can be as baffling today as it was 60 years ago when the Weavers’ recording of Irene Goodnight shot to the top of the Hit Parade, displacing Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa as the Number One song.
Written by Leadbelly (Huddle Ledbetter), who had died the previous year, Irene sold more than two million copies and topped the Billboard charts, which tabulated over-the-counter record sales and radio airplay. In an unprecedented development, the flip side of the folk group’s first single, an Israeli hora called Tzena! Tzena!, reached Number Two.
The Weavers – Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman – had formed in 1948, and when within a year, they were dividing up $100 a week to play New York’s Village Vanguard, they had been regarded as successful by folk standards. Now they were the rage. Their 1951 rendition of On Top of Old Smokey resulted in a second trip to the Billboard top spot. They were booked into the Strand Theatre on Broadway at $2,260 (€1,744) a week. At the conclusion of the six-month engagement at the Strand, manager Harold Leventhal had arranged a 30-city tour where they would play to packed houses.
Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight), the Weavers’ adaptation of a South African hunting song, had just begun to climb the charts when J Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, provided newspapers with the information that Seeger and Hays had been members of the Communist Party and were under investigation for “sedition”. In the midst of the McCarthy-era witch-hunts the revelation was nothing short of devastating. A pamphlet naming both was circulated throughout the entertainment industry. The Weavers were banished from the public eye.
Officially blacklisted, their music was banned from television and radio airwaves. Literally overnight, Seeger and his bandmates were rendered personae non gratae at every theatre and music venue in the country.
MORE THAN HALF a century later, his banjo draped around his neck, Seeger was the featured performer at a January 18th outdoor concert on the Washington Mall celebrating the impending inauguration of Barack Obama. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and with an audience that extended as far as the eye could see, Pete, accompanied by his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, led the throng in a joyful rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land.
A smiling Obama, who two days later would be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, at first clapped his hands in time, and then enthusiastically joined in. It occurred to me that at a massive rally against the Vietnam War some 40 years earlier Pete and I had stood together in virtually the same spot. As he and 100,000 protesting demonstrators sang John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance that day, just across Pennsylvania Avenue one of Obama’s predecessors had barricaded himself in the White House behind a cordon of heavily-armed police and National Guardsmen. At one point Pete stopped singing long enough to shout, “Are you listening, Nixon?”
Tomorrow evening in New York, an all-star cast of more than 40 performers, ranging from Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie and Tommy Sands to Springsteen, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Kris Kristofferson and Ladysmith Black Mambazo will convene at a sold-out Madison Square Garden to honour the American legend on his 90th birthday.
Tickets for the gala event (which will benefit Seeger’s Clearwater Foundation) were snapped up the day they went on sale.
And a grassroots initiative proposing that Seeger be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize has collected nearly 30,000 signatures and seems to acquire additional momentum with each passing day.
“There aren’t too many genuine heroes in this world,” says folk-singer Tom Chapin. “But Pete is one of them.”
Beyond his influence as a performer and leftist icon, Seeger’s musical legacy is so pervasive that many of his compositions are widely assumed to be traditional material in the public domain. His anti-war classic Where Have all the Flowers Gone , inspired by a passage in Mikhail Sholokhov’s 1934 novel And Quiet Flows the Don , has been recorded more than 100 times and translated into at least two dozen languages. If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), a Weavers-vintage song he wrote with Hays, became an anthem of the American civil rights and labour movements. Turn, Turn, Turn, biblical in origin (Seeger set to music lyrics the Book of Ecclesiastes attributes to King Solomon), reached Number One on the US pop charts in 1965 when it was recorded by The Byrds, and has since been covered by everyone from Joe Cocker and Dolly Parton to Springsteen and Chris de Burgh. With the passage of time, Guantanamera, Seeger’s musical interpretation of a Jose Marti poem, became the de facto anthem of Cuba.
SEEGER WAS BORN in Manhattan in 1919, the son of the noted musicologist Charles Seeger and violinist Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger. Both parents were on the faculty at the Julliard School of Music at the time. Pete attended private schools, and had joined the Young Communist League while enrolled at Harvard as a member of the Class of 1940 (John F Kennedy was a classmate). During his Harvard tenure he earned his keep by serving as the “houseboy” for several bachelor faculty members who shared a Back Bay townhouse – among them the poet Charles Olson, whom he would later introduce to Woody Guthrie.
By 1938 Seeger had abandoned his academic studies and gone to work at the Library of Congress, helping to assemble the Archive of American Folk Song. It was there that he met Guthrie, and immediately recognised a kindred spirit. Within months Woody had inducted the erstwhile Harvard student into the life of the itinerant hobo-musician – riding the rails, performing odd jobs, and singing for his supper as the pair worked their way across America.
In 1941, Seeger and Guthrie materialised in New York, where they founded the Almanac Singers, who performed topical and folk songs in support of unions, human rights, and religious organisations. The personnel were in constant flux and the line-up for a given concert might be whomever turned up that night (Woody, hardly a stickler for protocol, groused that “the Almanacs are the only group I know of that rehearses on stage”), but Seeger, Guthrie, and Lee Hays were the most constant members.
It was an era in which American leftists found themselves walking an uncomfortably delicate tightrope. Although the US had yet to enter the second World War, the essential evils of Naziism had become evident, but since the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the stance adopted by the American Communist Party had favoured pacifism and demanded American neutrality.
During this period Seeger and Hays were YCL members. Guthrie, although he wrote a column for The Daily Worker, was never a party member; the hierarchy considered him too unreliable and undisciplined to merit card-carrying membership. The FBI charged that the Almanac singers were hindering America’s war build-up by “subverting recruitment”.
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 brought an almost comically abrupt about-face. A pacifist one week, Guthrie’s guitar was decorated with a “This machine kills Fascists” label; the next – and when Seeger was drafted into the army – he enthusiastically donned a uniform.
Private Seeger was trained as an aircraft mechanic and dispatched to the Pacific Theatre, but once he got there the army decided he could be put to better use entertaining his fellow soldiers and he was assigned to Special Services. His later response to “What did you do in the war?” was “I strummed my banjo”.
AFTER HE WAS blacklisted, Seeger’s exile would ultimately endure for 17 years. (The Weavers, said Hays, “went on a Sabbatical that turned into a Mondical and a Tuesdical”.) The four went their separate ways, each attempting to eke out a living on his own. For Seeger the interlude quite literally became his “wilderness years”. He occupied much of his time during this exile at the log cabin he had built, by hand, on property he owned in Beacon, New York, in the Hudson Valley.
Like almost everything else Seeger does, the house-raising was a communal effort, with friends travelling up from the city to pitch in. (The labour was voluntary, but his wife Toshi, in addition to helping build the cabin, was kept busy feeding the visitors, some of whom would stay for weeks at a time.) The plans for the cabin, ironically, came from the US Government; Pete had unearthed them at the Library of Congress. The chimney of the fireplace still incorporates some significant souvenirs – large rocks that had crashed through the windows of the Seeger family station wagon when a mob attacked them at a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill 60 years ago.
Although Seeger was banned from American television and radio airwaves until the late 1960s, the first crack in the logjam had come in 1956. Determined to reunite the Weavers for a once-off concert, Leventhal attempted to book New York’s Town Hall, where the group might reach their more natural constituency, but the management there skittishly declined. Taking a shot in the dark, he contacted Carnegie Hall.
“To Harold’s surprise the, response was, ‘Sure. Just show us the money’,” says Tom Paxton, to whom Leventhal had related the adventure.
Leventhal booked Carnegie Hall, and before the posters were even up the Weavers reunion had sold out (“they could have sold it out twice,” says Paxton), but it nearly imploded when the group’s members learned they would be expected to perform in formal dress. Ronnie Gilbert agreed to wear a gown, but the three men were adamant.
“At first they were all against it, but one by one the others grudgingly agreed – except Pete,” says Paxton. “Absolutely no way he was going to wear a tuxedo. Harold was afraid he was going to have to refund the ticket money, but then in a stroke of inspiration he found a picture of Paul Robeson wearing white tie and tails for a concert in Moscow. When Pete saw that he agreed to wear a tux. What the picture on the album cover taken that night doesn’t show is that he wore bright red socks.”(Garrison Keillor later recalled that “to see Pete Seeger step out of a limousine wearing a tuxedo was to see a man on his way to his own hanging.”)
The live recording of The Weavers at Carnegie Hall became a best-selling album, and remains in print to this day.
“For me it was an epiphany,” says Paxton (who will be in Dublin as a guest performer at Liam Clancy’s Wheels of Life concert at the National Concert Hall May 26th and 27th). “I was still in college at Oklahoma, where I played in this little faux Kingston Trio group. I came by to visit a friend one day and he said, ‘You’ve got to listen to this’, and he dropped the phonograph needle on the first cut, the banjo introduction to Darlin’ Corey . I was spellbound. I sat there and listened to the entire album, and by the time it ended I’d made up my mind that this was something I had to do.
“I’ve told Pete many times over the years that he’s to blame for everything that’s happened to me since,” says Paxton. “But for my entire career he’s been an example of how it should be done. He lives his life through his music, and through his humanity. Would that we all could live our lives the way he’s lived his.”
ALREADY BLACKLISTED, Seeger’s troubles multiplied in 1955 when he himself was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had long since repudiated his party allegiance, but unlike many other former communists who sought refuge in the US Constitution by invoking the Fifth Amendment (which protects against self-incrimination), Seeger defiantly based his stance on the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech.
The committee was unmoved. He was indicted and ultimately convicted of contempt of Congress charges, and in 1961 was sentenced to a year in prison. (A year later the charges were dismissed by an appellate court.)
Seeger’s public appearances were for many years limited to small coffee houses and pass-the-hat “house concerts” hosted by friends. Over time he was welcomed to play before more and more college audiences, spreading his gospel to an entirely new generation.
“I was back singing before kids in schools,” he once recalled. “In that respect the blacklist may have been a blessing in disguise.”
WHAT HAD BEGUN as a groundswell in the late 1950s had, half a dozen years later, become a full-fledged epidemic, one Dave Van Ronk would recall as the “Great Folk Scare”. Even Madison Avenue had to sit up and take notice. In 1963, ABC introduced a weekly television programme called Hootenanny , devoted entirely to folk music. The blacklisted Seeger, although he had been largely responsible for the Great Folk Scare (and, ironically, for the term “hootenanny” itself) was not invited.
A half-dozen young Greenwich Village folk singers – Paxton, Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Patrick Sky, Eric Anderson, and John Phillips (later of the Mamas and Papas) – formed an ad hoc committee to plot a response. A meeting convened at the Village Gate to discuss a boycott of Hootenanny attracted upwards of 50 performers. To their surprise, Seeger himself showed up – and argued against the boycott, noting that despite the blacklist, the prospect of spreading the folk music gospel to a far greater audience outweighed any personal injustice.After an impassioned discussion, the group decided that they would boycott anyway.
None of the aforementioned save Phillips ever appeared on Hootenanny, nor did Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the New Lost City Ramblers, or Peter, Paul and Mary. In the face of their rejection, ABC programmers offered to circumvent the blacklist if Seeger would sign a loyalty oath. He declined. Whether it was the result of the folksingers’ boycott or the arrival of the Beatles, Hootenanny lasted less than two full seasons before it was cancelled by the network.
Paxton, fresh out of the army and playing McDougal Street “basket houses”, had never met Seeger until the 1963 boycott session at the Gate. As the meeting began to break up, he summoned his courage and approached Seeger, asking if he might sing him a song he’d just written.
“Pete never says no to a request like that,” recalls Paxton. “I sang Ramblin’ Boy for him, and to my great joy, he not only liked it, but a few months later recorded it live at Carnegie Hall. But because he’d just learned the song he got the chorus slightly wrong, singing ‘Fare thee well, my ramblin’ boy’, instead of ‘Here’s to you’.
“That,” says Paxton, “was no big deal to someone as thrilled as I was. Then Pete and his family took off on a year’s trip around the world, and when the album came out, complete with Pete’s mistake, I received a postcard from India, containing Pete’s signature drawing of a banjo and a message that said: ‘Dear Tom, Oops! Pete’.”
FOR A TIME in the early 1940s Seeger and Guthrie had shared communal living quarters with several other like-minded artists, including the actors Will Geer and Burl Ives. Ives, who had made his early reputation as a popular interpreter of folk songs, would shortly repudiate his leftist origins, and went on to name names – including Seeger’s – at the 1952 HUAC hearings, thus preserving an acting career that would see him win an Academy Award (for The Big Country ) and play Big Daddy (a role Tennessee Williams had specifically written for him) in both the Broadway and Hollywood versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. While his co-operation with HUAC brought him personal fortune, Ives was widely despised by his old circle of friends.
(Oscar Brand invited Ives to be a guest on his radio programme, and ran into Dave Van Ronk a few days later. When the crusty Van Ronk, a committed Trotskyite, complained angrily about the exposure for “that informer”, Brand replied, “Dave, on the left, we don’t have a blacklist”.)
Paxton was among the performers at a 1993 concert when the 92nd Street YMHA in New York commemorated its 40th anniversary as a showcase of folk music. “They’d invited everyone who’d ever performed there, and some of the descendants, like Josh White Jr and Paul Robeson Jr, of those who had died,” recalls Paxton. “They had me and the Chad Mitchell Trio, and they had a bunch of the old guys like Oscar and Theo Bikel and Pete – and Burl Ives. That seemed to be a recipe for disaster. Pete and Burl hadn’t been in the same room for almost 50 years. The capacity was 900, and the audience was made up of 900 old lefties who adored Pete Seeger and to whom Burl Ives’ name was mud. There was tension in the air throughout the evening, and the organisers deliberately kept Pete and Burl apart backstage.”
Ives would die within two years, and at 83 he was clearly on his last legs. Late in the programme he came onstage in a motorised wheelchair, and had a young lady accompanying him on guitar. The first few songs were met by a stony silence from the unforgiving audience. Then, out of the wings strolled Seeger.
“He walked out, his banjo around his neck, and without saying a word, bent over and planted a gentle kiss on the top of Burl Ives’s head,” recalls Paxton. “You could hear 900 people simultaneously gasp, and then collectively exhale as Pete picked up the chords to Blue Tail Fly and joined in. It may have been as dramatic a statement as I’ve ever seen, because at that moment what everyone realised was, ‘Hey, if Pete Seeger can let this go, so can we. It was over’.”
SEEGER WAS AT the forefront of both the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and performed, usually free of charge, at causes benefiting everything from summer camps for inner-city kids to Noraid. In the late 1960s he would also embrace another cause, an environmental crusade that would become his passion for the next 40 years.
Two centuries of industrial pollution and human neglect had turned the once-pristine Hudson River into a 300-mile-long sewer. Along with a few other activists, Pete enthusiastically involved himself in a campaign to clean up the river, with a hand-built replica of the Dutch sloops that sailed the Hudson in the 18th century as its centrepiece. Within a year they had raised the $150,000 (€115,742) required to build the Clearwater.
“At the time, it seemed a frivolous idea,” Seeger recalled in a 1984 account of the venture. “The world was full of agony, Vietnam was heating up. Money was needed for all sorts of life-and-death matters, and there we were, building a sailboat.” The Clearwater was launched in Maine in June of 1969. A month later on its maiden voyage it had reached the mouth of the Hudson at New York harbour, and tied up at the South Street Seaport.
“A lot of people said, ‘Oh, those hippies will have some fun, and a year from now that boat will either be sunk or sold’,” Seeger told an interviewer years later. Forty years on nearly half a million people have sailed on the vessel, and the project has raised millions for the river clean-up, the beneficiary of tomorrow’s birthday party at the Garden.You still wouldn’t want to drink from the Hudson, but conditions have improved dramatically, and even his long-time detractors and political enemies will tell you that Pete Seeger has done more than any other single person to effect that change.
By Seeger’s own estimate, “I’ve got about 10 per cent of my voice left”, and while he probably overstates the case, in recent years he has increasingly relied on his grandson for vocal support. (Watch a tape of the Obama inauguration concert and you’ll notice that Tao does more of the singing than either Seeger or Springsteen.)
The eldest of Pete and Toshi’s six grandchildren, Tao (the name is an acronym of his grandmother’s birth name, Toshi-Aline Ohta) is the son of their daughter Mika and Puerto Rican filmmaker Emilio Rodriguez-Garcia and spent his boyhood in Nicaragua, where his parents had moved after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution. He now performs regularly with Seeger, on his own as a solo artist, as well as with his own group, The Mammals, and is producing tomorrow’s mammoth Madison Square Garden concert.
As Pete’s touring partner, Tao inherits a role performed for several years by Guthrie’s son, Arlo. Immersed in the folk world from an early age, Arlo tells of an early joint tour with Seeger, when at the end of his set at the Tonder Festival in Denmark he was brought back on stage for an encore and decided to throw a change of pace at the audience by singing his version of Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.
“Then I remembered Pete was there, and I started to worry,” says Arlo. “I mean whole wars have been fought” over what is and is not proper to sing before a folk audience.
A few moments later his fears were put to rest when Seeger, much as he had the night he buried the hatchet with Burl Ives, strolled onstage with his banjo and joined in singing the Elvis Presley song. “And,” says Arlo, “the damnedest part of it was, he even knew the words!”
See also www.nobelprize4pete.org/
© 2009 The Irish Times
Updated: 10/4/2009
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