If I Had a Song: A Conversation With Pete Seeger

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Do you look at TV news?

Hardly ever. In the last few days I’ve been looking at it, but I mainly look at television in winter to see what the weather is going to be to see if I can go skating. And in the summer, I’ll see whether it’s going to rain or not. But I really don’t bother looking at TV for the news or for other things.

Does your town have a local newspaper?

Not anymore. There is a weekly free paper, mainly advertisements, church notices, and a few other things, and I do read it every few weeks or so. They have a rather lovely historical column, and the woman who writes it asked me to read the Declaration of Independence two or three years ago to mark the Fourth of July. Every year for 200 years, someone has read the Declaration of Independence on the main street of nearby Fishkill. Four hundred people turned out. One person elbowed his way up to the front and read a statement: “It is outrageous that this man, who is an enemy of the United States, is being allowed to recite this year.” But he was booed. I wrote him a letter and said, “I’m sorry they booed you; you had a right to speak.”

A friend of mine told me he wrote to you years ago after seeing you perform and was astonished to get a reply. Do you correspond with a lot of people?

I write very short letters that I often put on postcards. I write mostly with a pen. I don’t know how to use a typewriter well anymore, and I don’t have a secretary. But if I read something that I’m enthusiastic about—something good or bad—I try to respond.

Your new album, If I Had a Song, brings together some marvelous talent, from Steve Earle and Joan Baez to Billy Bragg and Dar Williams. It must be gratifying to see younger folks committed to carrying on the work you’ve nurtured over the years.

There are some extraordinary young people writing songs—of course, I say anyone under 50 is young—like John McCutcheon, Greg Brown, Stephan Smith, and Pat Humphries. And there’s Holly Near out on the West Coast. After the murder of Harvey Milk in San Francisco about 20 years ago, she wrote an extraordinary song she sang at the funeral, “We Are a Gentle and Angry People and We Are Singing, Singing for Our Lives.” That song will go down in history.

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