Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger was an American folk singer, songwriter, and political activist whose 70-year career produced one of the foundational bodies of work in 20th-century American folk-music revival — particularly his work with the Almanac Singers (1940–1942), The Weavers (1948–1958), and his 50-year solo career across 1958–2014. He was born Peter Seeger on May 3, 1919, in Patterson, New York. His father Charles Louis Seeger Jr. was an ethnomusicologist at Berkeley and Juilliard, and his mother Constance de Clyver Edson was a classical violinist. His half-brother Mike Seeger and half-sister Peggy Seeger both became prominent folk musicians.

His education at Harvard University (1936–1938; without earning a degree) was followed by his apprenticeship with folk-music archivist Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song in 1939–1940. His 1940 founding of the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell launched his early-career topical-folk-song career. The Almanac Singers' 1941 album Songs for John Doe drew FBI scrutiny for its anti-war content.

His 1948 founding of The Weavers with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman produced his commercial breakthrough — particularly their 1950 cover of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which became the bestselling US single of 1950. His 1955 House Un-American Activities Committee testimony — in which he refused to name fellow Communist Party members under the First Amendment — produced his 1957 contempt-of-Congress conviction (overturned on appeal in 1962) and his 17-year commercial-television blacklist across 1955–1972.

His solo career produced multiple foundational American folk songs — particularly "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (1955), "If I Had a Hammer" (1949, with Lee Hays), "Turn! Turn! Turn!" (1959, his Ecclesiastes-3 adaptation that The Byrds took to number one in 1965), and "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" (1967, his Vietnam War protest song). His 1969 founding of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization produced one of the first major American Hudson River cleanup advocacy efforts. He died on January 27, 2014, at age 94, in New York City.

His name Pete is the English short form of Peter (from the Greek Petros meaning "rock"). Pete was a popular American boys' name through the early-to-mid-20th century.