Pete Seeger

Cunningly disguised in a yellow tie and three steel finger-picks, Pete Seeger '40 wowed 'em last night at M.I.T. Mr. Seeger sang and played various primitive instruments (including the banjo) all with equal, if not astounding, facility. Between the lines of the songs he inserted fragments of a compelling ideology:

"Some people say let the boss decide, I say let the people decide;

Some say the time isn't right, I say the time's just right...." but fortunately the message slipped unnoticed through the stampede of pedant feet finally come to Earth.

Besides keeping time by the foot, Seeger's audience was encouraged to snap a none-too-collective finger and sing a rich array of lyrics invoking unknown gods. The spectacle is reminiscent of a certain type of musical therapy now in vogue at various institutions across the country.

Not only does Mr. Seeger perform travesties on religious music, accompanying delicate oriental melodies with his down-home two-four banjo rhythm, but he also complements a tender African melody with his own lyrics, composed, he tells us, while pouring concrete for his house on the Hudson River. And they sound like it. They tell, in a strange meter, how loneLEE it is TO watch the lights BLINK off A-cross the riVER in bosTON when you have to GO back to YOUR room aLONE. Poetic "license" is one thing, even for a poet, but wanton distortion of the hillbilly mind is not justified even by money.

Mr. Seeger played us a ditty on an instrument which he called the "thumb-piano." "I can't really play this; I'm just faking," he allowed. He certainly was. But then, honesty and musical integrity are not precisely the same thing.

And it is musical integrity which is most conspicuously absent from Pete Seeger's repertoire. One may call it naivete when he does an imitation of a "Japanese orchestra" by moaning painfully into the microphone for a few seconds--then stamping his foot, explaining "that's when they drop a brick on the floor; I just don't dig that rhythm."

One may call it insensitivity when he attaches to a simple melody all the florid decorations of a style five hundred miles and years away. One may call it lack of imagination when he treats a powerful song of death as casually as if it were a nursery rhyme. But one becomes aware with increasing discomfort that unerringly to perform such malalignment of styles with such flashy banjo technique Mr. Seeger must be a much more calculating man than one wants to hear simple music from.

Even the man with the blue guitar couldn't play things as they are, but that was due to a subtlety of the things. Pete Seeger apparently just refuses to play his things the way he heard them.