Pete Seeger: How Can I Keep from Singing? (review)

Pete Seeger’s belief in the transformational power of music led him to explore the depth of American folk culture, write songs that would define generations, and unite millions of people worldwide. In Pete Seeger: How Can I Keep From Singing?, David K. Dunaway gives us insight into the life of an American legend and causes us to reflect on the capacity of a simple song to change the most complicated of worlds.

Dunaway asserts that Seeger has done more to popularize American folk music than any other musician. It is possible that Dunaway has done more to canonize Seeger than any other historian. Dunaway literally wrote the book on Seeger, also titled How Can I Keep From Singing, based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. Since appearing in 1981, the book has been translated into Spanish and Japanese, updated and revised, and re-printed six times. Dunaway, with forty years of radio experience, repurposed his research into a syndicated radio documentary distributed by Public Radio International. It is now available in a three-disc CD set.

Dunaway carefully weaves together his documentary using strands of oral history interviews, popular and rare recordings, and delicate narration. Interviews conducted by Dunaway with Seeger, his family, Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, and more—as well as interviews with legends such as Woody Guthrie conducted by Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress—illuminate the back story behind a career that came unexpectedly to its own protagonist. As Seeger says, “It’s very possible that I would not have been a musician. I could have been very happy as a forest ranger or a newspaper reporter.” Dunaway convinces us of our good fortune that Seeger became captivated by the raw emotion and humanity embedded in the American folk tradition. We come to understand why folk music means so much to the artist who means so much to the American psyche.

The thin, large Adam’s-appled Seeger was born an unlikely candidate to land on a Federal Bureau of Investigation’s watch list, testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and change the way we understand our musical heritage. Born May 3, 1919, to bourgeois musicians Charles and Constance Seeger, in interviews Seeger admits that he knew little of the world outside of his “woodland tower.” He lived a comfortable life, with little-to-no interaction with African Americans or exposure to the bigotry rampant in his day. Dunaway’s interviews reveal an inquisitive yet sheltered boy that, as he grew older, gravitated toward songs that chronicled hardships he never knew.

Seeger’s musical education would flourish when his father, Charles Seeger, moved the family to Washington, DC, to work for the New Deal. Folk music embodied the ethos of the Depression era, and the elder Seeger’s second wife transcribed folk songs for the Library of Congress. There the younger Seeger was introduced to Alan Lomax, then collecting American folk music for the Library’s Archive of American Folk Song. Lomax would amass one of the most important collections of ethnographic material in the world—now accessible in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center—and in that time the Seegers and Lomaxes became inspired by the music of the people. One of the most delightful of the archival recordings Dunaway presents to us is a 20-year-old Pete Seeger singing “Down in the Valley” with Bess Lomax.

Seeger’s immersion in the American songbook coincided with the rise of his career as a musician. Traveling across the country, running in circles with the likes of Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Lead Belly, Seeger developed his banjo picking and expanded his repertoire of songs to include spirituals, blues, and gospel. By the 1940s, he was back in New York and co-founding The Almanacs. The group would rise to prominence writing a new, pro-union canon of American folk songs...