Pete Seeger: he surrounded hate and forced it to surrender

Excellent blog post by Gerry Cordon on the life of Pete Seeger

That's How The Light Gets In

‘He’s gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass.’

Four years ago, Pete Seeger celebrated his 90th birthday party with a sell-out concert at Madison Square Garden.  Characteristically, it was a fundraiser for a campaign to which he’d dedicated years of his life: cleaning up New York’s Hudson River.  That night, Bruce Springsteen introduced Seeger with these words:

He’s gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He’s gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country’s illusions about itself.

And that’s the truth.  Pete Seeger, who died yesterday aged 94, opposed McCarthyism, and worked tirelessly on behalf of civil rights movement, making his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1956. One of the seminal political events in…

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Jazz Appreciation MOOC1

January 2014

How did I get into Jazz? Well as Pete Waterman says lots of us post-war kids who got into music owe it to our Mums, who were perhaps rock n’roll fans before marrying but bought records and turn their kids onto them. In my case my Mum took me to the NAAFI in Herford during 1959 and bought, brrmm, brrmm – The Everly Brothers Til I Kissed You!;  

Yeah, not Jazz… But the UK had no music radio, and wouldn’t have until 1967 (check the movie The Boat that Rocked for more on this). What little music that gained ‘needle time’ on the radio was very mainstream, which, in the 50s, meant Mrs Mills, Russ Conway, Broadway musicals and operatic show tunes. My Dad liked Frank Sinatra since Songs for Swinging Lovers (?) and then, joy of joys, Frank Sinatra starred with Louis Armstrong and the family went off to see High Society – Well Did you Evah! 

High Society created a number of family catch-phrases such as “have you heard its in the stars, next July we collide with Mars.” Fortunately Louis Armstrong & Bing Crosby also took the opportunity to introduce us to Jazz as well