You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘music’ category.
Even in the 1770s, rich people went slumming. So says Aaron Burr, and why should we doubt it? Major General Philip Schuyler’s daughters are rich, but they want to be “downtown . . . at the common,” where things are hopping.
We’ve met Hamilton and Burr and each has his musical signature; now we meet the two other main characters with signatures, Eliza and Angelica Schuyler. (Eliza’s signature gets on my nerves, one of the reasons it took me a long time to warm to this song, which I have since come to love.) Their sister, Peggy, is hardly heard of after this song, but the actor will return in Act II as the third important woman in the story, Maria Reynolds–one of the ways doubling of roles enhances themes and characters. When Eliza, Angelica, and Maria declare “I loved him” in “Alexander Hamilton,” the opening song, we’re hearing from the three actors who play the Schuyler sisters.
The star here is Angelica. Peggy is nervous, Eliza is curious, but Angelica is “looking for a mind at work” (a shout-out to The West Wing? Friends who are fans of the show say Hamilton alludes to it frequently). She’s got a pretty sharp mind herself, and like intellectual women of many times and places, she has to push back against men who want to reduce her to an object of their desire.
Eliza: Angelica, remind me what we’re looking for . . .
All of the men on stage: She’s looking for me!
Burr tries some lines:
Burr: Excuse me, miss, I know it’s not funny
But your perfume smells like your daddy’s got money
Why you slummin’ in the city in your fancy heels
You searchin’ for an urchin who can give you ideals?
Angelica: Burr, you disgust me
Burr: Ah, so you’ve discussed me
I’m a trust fund, baby, you can trust me!
His finesse at turning rejection into potential is impressive (“So you’ve discussed me”), but she’s more than a match for him, and brings the topic back to what matters to her. She’s been reading “Common Sense,” as a revolutionary should, with the result that this is the way men regard her: “I’m intense or I’m insane.” She doesn’t care. Nothing intimidates Angelica, including the most prominent men of the day. As I said, it took awhile for this song to grow on me, but these were lines I loved the first time I heard them:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!
Was she or any influential woman of the time really that outspoken about full equality? Before this is all through I may be reduced to reading the letters of Angelica Schuyler Church, and other women of the revolutionary era, just to find out. Abigail Adams famously wrote to her husband,
remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation,
but when, a few months later, the Declaration of Independence was signed without including a word about women, and then the constitution was ratified without guaranteeing women “voice or Representation,” she did not make good on her threat.
On the Sunday after Inauguration Day, when many folks in my congregation (and I) were acutely afraid of the ways our democracy was already under siege, I began my sermon with Eliza’s frequently-repeated words, “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!” For me, one of the greatest sources of hope at a grim time is to look at the people from further back in our history and realize that they, too, were afraid. They didn’t know how it would all end. We still don’t; the American experiment could end here, now, after only 240 years; but it gives me some hope to remember that to the colonists, things looked very uncertain in the 1770s, and they prevailed. And what Miranda imagines here is that they also found joy and purpose in being alive at such a crossroads. Maybe it is how he feels himself, despite–or because of?–the racial turmoil of the 21st century United States. The play opened on Off-Broadway in 2015, six months after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and the rise of Black Lives Matter; when, in “My Shot,” Hamilton says, “This is not a moment, it’s the movement / Where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went,” he’s explicitly quoting a BLM slogan.
I think that like the Schuyler sisters, we are lucky to be alive right now, when our country teeters between disaster and possibility, and so what we do matters intensely.
How will our lives appear to the people of future generations? How will our story be told? Hamilton repeatedly raises these questions. It’s a historical drama about history itself.
Of course Miranda fictionalizes when he has Hamilton meet all three of these friends at once. Maybe they didn’t ever all gather together, in a tavern or anywhere else. But when they sing,
Raise a glass to the four of us
Tomorrow there’ll be more of us,
the details of who and when are not the point. The song is about the seeds of change, the people who were on board the train when it began rolling so fast there was no stopping it. So they are confident that
when our children tell our story
They’ll tell the story of tonight.
The lines I ponder most are:
Raise a glass to freedom
Something they can never take away
No matter what they tell you.
Do you think it’s true? There are political prisoners all over the world, even here in the republic Laurens (the principal singer in this short song) and friends are hoping to found; people are locked away for life, sometimes in solitary confinement, for trying to use their freedom. But in the sense of “Gedanken sind frei,” thoughts are free, I guess it’s true. In which case, maybe that is the freedom Laurens and the others are toasting: the freedom of the mind, which can be surrendered but never taken.
The challenge of writing about a historical event is to make the audience feel what people felt before the event had reached the conclusion we all know about. During the American Revolution, no one knew how it would come out–though there were long periods in which the only outcome that seemed possible was for the revolution to fail. Hamilton will take us into those moments, too, with its scenes from the front a little later on. In this song, the whole project still seems like a wild, necessary dream, the kind of thing that young, idealistic people talk about in bars, getting louder and louder, building on each other’s commitment, working themselves up to a daring and dangerous act, which is what revolution was in New York City in 1776. “My Shot” is their anthem, filtered through one character. Hamilton knows this could get him killed, but he’s willing, he knows he’s ready despite having none of the prerequisites that a class-conscious society demands, and he’s giddy with the determination to make his life count for something.
I love the multiple meanings of “take a shot”: with Lafayette’s verse, it means fire a gun, with Mulligan’s it means make an effort, and with Laurens’s it means have a drink. All three intertwine throughout the song–maybe even more in the staging, which offers the option of people downing a drink when the word is said (I’ll have to watch for that). And of course, the defiant refrain foreshadows Hamilton’s decision, in the final duel, to do exactly that–throw away his shot–or would firing straight at Burr been throwing away his shot? The unambiguous dictionary definition is complexified* by the metaphorical definition. We’ll hear more on that when we get to each of the three duels: Laurens and Charles Lee’s, Philip Hamilton and George Eacker’s, and Alexander Hamilton and Burr’s.
In any case, it is Hamilton’s theme: literally his musical motif (along with the sung signature of his name), rat-a-tatted each time Burr repeats “How does a bastard, orphan . . . ” and its variants; the core of his personality; the summation of his drive and the root of his phenomenal success. Miranda could have blamed Hamilton’s most foolish decisions on it, as well, but he doesn’t. It’s plausible to conclude that Hamilton’s determination to get the most out of life might have been self-destructive as well as creative, but Miranda implicitly argues against drawing this conclusion by omitting the oft-repeated “not throwing away my shot” from the moment Hamilton plunges into his disastrous affair (“Say No To This”) or the moment he disastrously reveals it (“Hurricane”).
Not that his declaration here is entirely positive. It’s a mix of ego (“Don’t be shocked when your history book mentions me . . . . eventually you’ll see my ascendancy”) and purer motives (“Meanwhile, Britain keeps shittin’ on us endlessly. . . . I will lay down my life if it sets us free”). But what strikes me most is the way his bravado is shot through with intelligence and forethought. He’s “thinkin’ past tomorrow”:
And? If we win our independence?
Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants?
Or will the blood we shed begin an endless
Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?
I know the action in the street is excitin’
But Jesus, between all the bleedin’ ‘n fightin’
I’ve been readin’ ‘n writin’
We need to handle our financial situation
Are we a nation of states? What’s the state of our nation?
The lyrics and the drive of the music argue that it’s the combination of passion and careful thought that made the revolution a success, made it more than a brawl that a bunch of hotheads started and unexpectedly won. The “great man theory of history” is all over the play, but despite the limitations of that worldview, it’s true that Hamilton and a few other disciplined leaders were essential in getting us through the war and establishing a lasting government. And at least Miranda has broadened “great man” to include a tailor’s apprentice who would survive his work as a spy and go back to a quiet postwar life as a tailor, proudly telling his war stories to the people gathered in his shop.
The part of the song where I choke up with unexpected patriotism is when Laurens leads the people in singing, “Rise up.”
Rise up!
When you’re living on your knees, you rise up
Tell your brother that he’s gotta rise up
Tell your sister that she’s gotta rise up
Just try to join the ensemble without feeling a rush of emotion as you sing:
When are these colonies gonna rise up?
When are these colonies gonna rise up?
When are these colonies gonna rise up?
When are these colonies gonna rise up, rise up?
Has there ever been a time in our history when these words were not appropriate?
I don’t know how to say all that I want to say about this song, so I’ll just stop here. All I know is, every time “My Shot” reaches its end, every time, I say out loud, to the empty car or whoever’s around, “That is such a great song.”
*Spellcheck says this isn’t a word. I like it anyway.
I’m sorry to add to the sorrows of anyone who didn’t wangle a ticket, but I’m very excited: we are going to see Hamilton in July! Around the time we got tickets, my mom asked what she should give us for Hanukah, so I said the cast recording, and I’ve been listening to it virtually non-stop since then. And when I listen and think about something a lot, I want to write about it. Ergo, this song-by-song analysis.
It’s tempting to start with my favorite song (if I could choose!), or the first one I heard, but I’m determined to take them in order. “Alexander Hamilton” is an opening song that does what an opening song should: sets the stage, the scope, and the tone; tells you, “This is what to expect,” even if some of those expectations are being set up deliberately to be tumbled down later. It leaps onto the stage with the fanfare-like seven-note motif that will be repeated whenever it’s time to set the scene. (Elizabeth Ayme points out that this motif’s rhythm is that of the key words, “Not throwing away my shot.” I’m getting ahead of myself; that’s song 3. But isn’t that brilliant?) All of the main characters are onstage, except as made impossible by the doubling of roles (much more on that later).
The rest of the play is going to cover almost 30 years of Hamilton’s life, from age 19 to his death at 47, so this song tells his life story up until that point, establishing several expectations right away. First, Aaron Burr is the narrator of this biography, and we’re going to get a sympathetic portrait of him as well as of Hamilton: “Me? I’m the damn fool that shot him.” Spoiler alert? Which brings us to the second point: false suspense about commonly-known facts will be cleared away from the start. In case you walked into the theater not knowing even the few things I knew about Alexander Hamilton—one of the founding fathers of the country, the guy on the ten-dollar bill, from somewhere in the Caribbean, died in a duel with Aaron Burr—you know them now. This lets us get right into the story that will unfold, of how two fine men came to point pistols at one another, an act of folly that would doom one to death and the other to ruin. (That’s my editorializing. Lin-Manuel Miranda himself is never so heavy-handed, telling the story with attention to the psychology of the duel, and letting us draw our own conclusions about the ethics.) The bullet sound that will be repeated frequently is introduced right here.
Third, we’re introduced to the mix of musical genres we should expect: in “Alexander Hamilton,” mostly rap and musical theater; British pop circa the 1960s, R&B, and jazz will be added further along the way. The rapping (which morphs into singing) is slow and steady here, easing us in, but we can already see that Miranda and the medium he’s chosen have a great capacity for condensing a lot of information into a few lines, artfully. Four years of Hamilton’s life are encapsulated in ten lines that move so effortlessly between casual lingo of our time (“woulda,” “scammin'”) and vocabulary befitting an 18th century genius (“astute,” “restitution”) that we can already tell this whole rap-about-the-first-Treasury-Secretary idea is actually, improbably, going to work:
There would have been nothin’ left to do
For someone less astute
He woulda been dead or destitute
Without a cent of restitution
Started workin’, clerkin’ for his late mother’s landlord
Tradin’ sugar cane and rum and all the things he can’t afford
Scammin’ for every book he can get his hands on
Plannin’ for the future, see him now as he stands on
The bow of a ship headed for a new land
In New York you can be a new man
Other commenters have noted more resonances with musical theater and rap than I can do; I enjoy both, but don’t have enough breadth of knowledge to pick up on all the allusions. I hear similarities to some of my favorite songwriters, like the rhyme-by-enjambment of Tom Lehrer or Roy Zimmerman, the reveling in cleverness of wordplay of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter, and the richness of rhyme of Bob Dylan, but I don’t know which of these Miranda would name as influences (except for Dylan, whose albums he buys the day they’re released). I just know this: if I want to hear wordcraft like “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s delectable, it’s delirious, it’s dilemma, it’s de limit, it’s deluxe, it’s de-lovely,” or “I love all the many charms about you, / Above all, I want my arms about you,” Hamilton will oblige.
Although, again, the tempo has not yet ramped up to the rapid-fire pace it will reach in later songs, their richness of rhyme and internal rhyme are already here. Never mind ABCB or even ABAB rhymes; Miranda writes AAAAAAAA, and even then he doesn’t stop:
This ten-dollar Founding Father without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter
By being a self-starter
By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a trading charter.
He’s not done!
And every day, while slaves were being slaughtered and carted
Away across the waves, he struggled and kept his guard up
Inside he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg, steal, borrow or barter.
Twelve, count ’em, twelve rhymes. A lot of popular music composers use ABCB because it’s so much easier; they also try to “rhyme” a word with itself, a cringe-inducing dodge Miranda never employs except, for emphasis, once (tell you about it when we get to Act II). Even in a long string like this, each rhyming word is a new one; when he uses a word twice, it’s for a purpose, such as the irony expressed by “Founding Father without a father.”
And fourth, since rhyme, assonance, meter, and other technical brilliance are all hollow unless pressed into the service of a grand vision, “Alexander Hamilton” gives us the grand vision: the themes of time, of who tells the stories of our lives, of the way history is written and re-written and forgotten, of the immigrant making good and making the country to which they’ve come, of the turning point that one life and one moment in history can be: “The world will never be the same,” the company sings. We’ll hear that again. And we’ll know it, gut-deep, by the end of the play.
As Hamilton himself might say, “One more thing.” The play informs us from the very first sentence that it is going to celebrate his being “a hero and a scholar.” American history celebrates military heroes, athletic heroes, heroes of love, and occasionally scientific heroes whether born here (Edison) or immigrants (Einstein), but “scholar” is not a word that is usually uttered with patriotic pride. But Hamilton was a thinker and political theorist who, as a mere child, orphaned and broke, started “readin’ every treatise on the shelf” in his cousin’s house. He was a writer, who “put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain / And . . . wrote his first refrain” of a voluminous, erudite and influential oeuvre. He was a self-educated finance wonk. In short, Alexander Hamilton was a highly pragmatic and creative intellectual. And his intellect, even more than his considerable military accomplishments or his way with women, is what this story celebrates.
Yesterday a very brief announcement came out of Stockholm: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” The Nobel is given for a body of work, which in Dylan’s case spans 54 years and counting. From the response of both detractors and enthusiasts, however, one would think that this particular prize rewards a few songs written over a few turbulent years–or worse, that it is no more than a recognition of a symbol of a particular period in U.S. history. One can debate whether song lyrics are literature, a debate which is not my topic here. But to peg Bob Dylan immovably to a few years known as “the sixties” is an insult to him and a disservice to all who might be transformed by his work.
The detractors say “Will the Baby Boomers just get over themselves already?” and “He wrote one good song.” (I don’t know which song it is, nor whether the Swedish Academy is dominated by Boomers.) The supporters, such as the authors of an approving article in the New York Times, cite the same old few songs: “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), “The Times They Are A-Changing” (1964), and “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965), as if nothing he has produced in the past 50 years is worthy of notice. Even the Swedish Academy used the dread word “icon,” though it went on to note, more relevantly, “His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature.”
One can prefer someone’s early work without injustice. Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my favorite writers; I have read almost all of her fiction and a lot of her poetry, and await each new publication with excitement, but it is true that my favorites remain two books she wrote in the 1970s. But she has continued to create marvelous literature, and I would dispute any attempt to label her a 1970s writer. Bob Dylan has written great songs right into the current decade (I listed some of my favorites from 1962 to 1997 here on the occasion of his 70th birthday). As Dylan fan Barack Obama said upon hearing the news, “All these years later, he’s still chasing that sound, still searching for a little bit of truth.”
I’m not denying that he is seen as an icon–who could? He is widely regarded as “the voice of a generation” (another phrase repeated frequently since the announcement), and unfortunately, that means that many people’s opinion of him is shaped by their opinion of that generation. So what if he was the voice of a generation? So was Wilfred Owen, I imagine. And yet I encountered Owen’s poetry 60 years after he died, and it spoke to me and for me. I didn’t have to be a young British man born around the turn of the 20th century, I didn’t have to have been to war, to be transformed by his piercing vision. If we consign Dylan to a basket of sixties memorabilia, we are cheating ourselves of that kind of transformation.
And we are dismissing art when we decide out of hand that it has no value beyond its historical moment. Icon though he might have been, Dylan kicked over the pedestal that that term placed him on, and resisted being pigeonholed from the get-go. Hailed by the folk music scene, with its attachment to acoustic instruments, he deliberately embraced electric music in 1965, knowing full well that it would rile the establishment that had made him famous. (One former fan famously yelled “Judas!” at the Albert Hall, to which Dylan responded by telling the band, “Play f—ing loud!” They did.) Called a political prophet, he stepped away from political themes with the album Another Side of Bob Dylan, and he declared with Bringing it All Back Home that his roots included surrealist poetry, rock, and the blues (which the white folkies of the time often did not consider folk music). For that matter, he has always been a blues singer, and guess what? His high school yearbook predicted he would be, not the next Woody Guthrie, but the next Little Richard. Once he had established that poetry belonged on rock albums, he went on to challenge himself and fans by converting to evangelical Christianity and preaching the gospel from three albums and the stage in the late 70s and early 80s. Then he challenged Christian fans by rediscovering his Jewish roots. All along, he has written great lines and immediately crossed them out because they were too much like something Bob Dylan would write. Anyone who goes to his concerts hoping to hear their old favorites reports bitterly that they are unrecognizable; he keeps finding new ways to perform songs he’s played literally hundreds or thousands of times, fearful, it seems, of falling into a rut. He has defied categorization, whether imposed by others or himself, and made and remade himself. In short, he is a truly independent spirit: an artist.
The Nobel pick is generally judged by whether the honored artist’s work can be said to transcend their place and time. By that measure, the Academy chose a good one.
It was 1984, and it felt like it. I was in high school, trying to be a radical. Out in the world, the Soviet leader du jour and Ronnie (the other one) were playing at who could bring us closer to the nuclear brink. As a hostage situated midway between New York City and Electric Boat in New London, I figured it was likely that the means of my death would be nuclear war and the time would be within the following 20 or 30 years, probably even sooner. The United States seemed to be on the wrong side of every struggle for freedom: backing apartheid in South Africa, funding rape, torture, and murder in Central America just like the bumper stickers said. I carefully lettered “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength” below a photo of Reagan looking jubilant, and glued it to the front of my notebook. I split my school days between my suburban high school, in Hamden, and ECA, the New Haven arts magnet that served surrounding towns as well as the much grittier, much cooler city. I was a member of my high school’s only left-wing political group, Students for Nuclear Disarmament, and making a list of colleges known for activist students.
Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near were coming to New Haven to play at majestic Woolsey Hall, but in between the booking and the performance date, the clerical and technical workers of Yale had gone on strike. Woolsey Hall was part of Yale University. And there was no way these two were going to cross a picket line to sing. So they found an alternate venue a few miles north: the gymnasium of Hamden High School.
When the night arrived, there I was, in a room redolent of the unhappiness, if not the actual sneaker stench, of gym classes, gazing up at these two icons of subversive activity. An entire lineage was there: Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers, who’d sung with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); Holly Near of the next generation, her protegee and spiritual heir; and, another generation along, us.
I did not grow up on this music the way some of my friends did. I barely knew who the Weavers were (my friend Seth had been appalled to learn that I didn’t know “Goodnight, Irene”). I don’t know how I even came to have tickets to this event, and I didn’t anticipate how gloriously incongruous it would be to hear this concert at my high school until they started singing. “Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida,” “Two Good Arms,” “Harriet Tubman,” “Mary Got a New Job,” “Perfect Night.” Heroes and martyrs, rabblerousers and activists, lesbians, even, were being sung and celebrated right there in our gym!
Holly and Ronnie led us in “Singing for Our Lives,” the first time I heard that song, and the tears rolled down my cheeks. We were, we were singing for our lives–they understood! They set our struggles to music! Right under the noses of the assistant principals and all the other petty tyrants of Hamden High, who–if they did not actually endorse the dictators and juntas whom we’d recently discovered and vowed to oppose, and if they didn’t even vote for Ronald Reagan (that HUAC toady)–seemed to be arrayed on the side of repression. Most of the authorities in our world wanted us to be good little students, sit tight, date straight, not stir up trouble, not have any opinions. In the midst of political repression and standard adolescent turmoil, imperfectly and self-righteously, but with earnest hope, we were trying to sing our own song. And here were our convictions, my convictions, being given harmonious voice by these two tough, joyous women.
We sang “Goodnight, Irene” and went home. The concert was over. But the music played on. It’s never stopped, and it never will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqGOZm9qJOo
RIP, Ronnie Gilbert.
Before “world music” experimenters like Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Paul Simon incorporated explicitly African sounds into western popular music, there was Miriam Makeba, a South African singer who had her biggest hit in the US in 1967 with “Pata Pata.” It reached #12 on the Billboard Top 100.
Makeba wrote the song with another South African singer-songwriter, Rhodesia-born Dorothy Masuka. Both were civil rights activists and were exiled for it for decades. Makeba suffered a second exile: having come to the United States (helped by Harry Belafonte), appeared on the Steve Allen Show, signed a recording contract here, and made hit records, she became too controversial for American record companies upon her marriage to Stokely Carmichael. They canceled her contracts and the couple moved to the Republic of Guinea.
She was born on this day in 1932 and died in 2008.
It’s said that Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations to help a nobleman with insomnia get to sleep. I can’t imagine a more counterproductive sleep aid. This music makes the heart flutter, the toes flex, the mind fly, the diaphragm speed up until one is breathless, the eyes well with tears of ecstasy, the whole soul come alive and wide awake. If I could bring only ten recordings to the fabled desert island, one would be the Goldberg Variations, and I wouldn’t dare listen to it right before bed.
(Sorry for the misfire. An earlier version meant to be saved as a draft got published instead.)
The San Francisco Chronicle poses a fun question: given that some bands took a while to hit their stride, which are the bands that didn’t? What are some great debut albums?
I don’t know their answers, but I’d love to know yours: whose debut albums blew your mind?
For me:
Suzanne Vega. Every song is so good.
The Roches. Ditto.
GP, Gram Parsons. He’d done a lot of recording already, but this album is more exciting than anything he did with the Byrds or Flying Burrito Brothers, in my opinion.
Talking Heads: 77. It’s not even my favorite Talking Heads album–Remain in Light and Little Creatures are particular favorites of mine, probably because I listened to them constantly during high school–but it’s a hell of a debut.
Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, Bruce Springsteen. Again, immediately topped by The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle . . . but “Blinded by the Light”! “For You”! First album!
Horses, Patti Smith. Her utter confidence as a singer is even more amazing when you realize this was her first album and “Gloria” was her way of introducing herself to listeners. She just gets right out there and in your face.
Over to you. Remind me of the 20 great debut albums I’ve forgotten.
I’d been braced for Pete Seeger’s passing for years, but I was still very sad several weeks ago when the news came that he had died, at age 94. I was a little stunned when, within 24 hours, a stern warning came over social media from a colleague: if we sang too many Pete Seeger songs in church that Sunday, we’d be alienating Generation X and Millennial congregation members.
The author, who is just about my age, has since stepped back from that rigid recommendation, acknowledging that the 140-character limit of the format she’d chosen had cost her message some nuance. We all know how that is. (A warning to the Twitter generation?) But I was no longer concerned only with that one statement. The chorus of agreement that met it—mixed, to be sure, with many younger-than-Boomer voices protesting that they know and love Pete Seeger’s music—showed how badly these generational concerns can deepen the ruts we get into. We UUs clearly aren’t ready to move beyond our brother UU, Pete Seeger. On the contrary, we’d better run if we’re ever going to catch up with him.
I understand the exasperation with Baby Boomer domination of our culture, especially UU culture. I think the phenomenon is real, and I appreciate people’s reminding us that there are other generations, and not to get stuck in nostalgia for the boomers’ heyday, that is to say, the 1960s. And there are other people who have died in the last month who deserve our honor but don’t get much attention, such as Amiri Baraka and Chokwe Lumumba.
Still, not to lift up Pete Seeger’s work and life would be to cut off our nose to spite our face.
First of all, it’s important to remember that Seeger was not a boomer. He wasn’t even just a bit older than the boomers, like boomer icon Bob Dylan (born 1941). Seeger was born in 1919 and served in World War II. My colleague Dan Harper pointed out exactly why Seeger began playing the college circuit in middle age: because his thriving career as a performer and recording artist was throttled by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when it blacklisted him for insisting on his, and his associates’, First Amendment right to the freedom of assembly.
Which brings us to another reason we need to memorialize Seeger. No U. S. citizen can understand their country without knowing about the Red Scare. If you don’t know much about HUAC, reading the transcript of Pete Seeger’s testimony is a good introduction.
Seeger was a die-hard union supporter, and we don’t pay much respect to the labor movement in Unitarian Universalism. My congregation has its old lefties of Seeger’s generation, bless their rabble-rousing souls, but on the whole, we UUs have settled into a comfortable liberalism. The demands of the labor movement—now as in the 40s and 50s when his Almanac Singers and (to a lesser extent) Weavers were singing its songs—aren’t liberal, but radical, and they’re not comfortable. They shake up the system. It needs shaking up. Remember working 9 to 5? Weren’t those the good old days? In this and so many other ways, working people are going backwards, and Pete Seeger was one who kept pushing against that tide.
Another trend Seeger’s example helps us buck is that of receiving (consuming), rather than making, music. His concerts were always participatory and he never missed a chance to remind us that we are born to be music makers. He once said,
Once upon a time, wasn’t singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.
I mostly listen to music; my guitar languishes in a closet and my fingers have lost their calluses, and I rarely gather with friends to make music, except in church. I want to change that. He’s a gentle prophet nudging us to make that change.
The most chilling comments in the wake of Seeger’s death were the ones dismissing music of 25, 50, and 75 years ago as ancient history. One way that Unitarian Universalists are totally mainstream, completely in the sway of U. S. American culture, is in our disdain for the past. We revel in our refusal to look back, as if focusing on the future is the secret to being progressive. I don’t buy it. I still think that those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. We’re repeating it now, as those who have been thrown into poverty by others’ mismanagement of the economy are reviled as lazy spongers, as were those of Seeger’s childhood, the Bonus Army. We’re fighting battles that labor organizers of two generations ago thought they had won for us (workplace fatalities, for example, have plateaued after years of welcome decline). We’re struggling to keep our rivers clean—Seeger worked with the Clearwater efforts on the Hudson for almost 50 years—and maybe if we want to prevent poisonous spills such as we’ve seen in West Virginia and North Carolina in the past couple of months, we should look to the environmental strategies of 50 years ago, instead of trying to start from scratch every time. Maybe we give up so easily because we don’t know that we stand in a long heritage of struggle for true progress. As another UU singer, Utah Phillips, said, “The long memory is the most radical idea in this country” (Thanks, Dan Schatz, for that timely quote.)
Pete Seeger never stopped raising his voice, even decades after he insisted that he couldn’t sing anymore. It was never about the quality of his voice anyway—it was about heart and commitment. We still need them, and when I find someone who devoted himself to making a better world long after most people retire or give into cynicism, I’m really happy for his example. So as soon as the news of his death came, I scheduled a Pete Seeger Memorial Singalong Celebration, and we’ll be raising our voices tomorrow, March 8, at 6 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto.
Sermons in Stones 
Recent comments