Society

Seeger turns on Uncle Joe

Published 27 September 2007

Observations on Folk Music

After more than 50 years of obstinate ambiguity, Pete Seeger, one-time member of the Weavers, banjo-playing sidekick of the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, and the man who almost single-handedly invented the protest song and inspired the young Bob Dylan, has finally admitted he was wrong to keep quiet for so long about the horrors of Stalin's Russia.

Now aged 88 and living a frugal life in Dutchess Junction in Fishkill, upstate New York, the man once dubbed "Stalin's Songbird" has penned an extraordinary, if belated, recantation of his days as an apologist for Soviet communism and Castro's Cuba.

"The Big Joe Blues" is a touching act of candour. The words may not have the haunting lyricism of his "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", made famous by Peter, Paul and Mary, nor the strident call to arms of his "If I Had a Hammer". They may not have the eternal appeal of his adaptation of the Old Testament mantra "Turn, Turn, Turn", best remembered in its jingle-jangle version by the California folk rock band the Byrds, nor the powerful simplicity of his civil rights movement anthem "We Shall Overcome".

But "The Big Joe Blues" remains a painful landmark for a defiant member of the American Communist Party, who preferred to spend a year in jail rather than betray his red friends to the witchfinder-general Senator Joe McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.

There is no ambiguity about the words of Seeger's final judgement on Stalin's murderous reign. "I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe./ He ruled with an iron hand./He put an end to the dreams/Of so many in every land./He had a chance to make/A brand new start for the human race./Instead he set it back/Right in the same nasty place./I got the Big Joe Blues./ (Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.)/I got the Big Joe Blues./ (Do this job, no questions asked.)/I got the Big Joe Blues."

Seeger admitted to an old banjo pupil of his, Ron Radosh, who had criticised his long silence on the horrors of Marxism-Leninism, that when writing the song he had been "thinking what Woody might have written had he been around" to see the end of the Soviet Union. In a letter responding to Radosh's complaint that he had repeatedly sung about the Nazi Holocaust but failed to acknowledge the millions killed in Stalin's death camps, he wrote: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR."

Old age appears to have mellowed the once stern songsmith, who threatened to cut through Dylan's microphone cables with an axe when the younger man shocked audiences by playing electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Seeger now acknowledges that "if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail".

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6 comments from readers

Tarantula
28 September 2007 at 04:32

Although Big Joe Blues is indeed a landmark in Seeger's career as a songwriter, it is disingenuous to suggest that he hasn't been critical of Stalin in the past. What's more, barring the likes of Radosh, hardly anyone has viewed him as an apologist for Soviet communism for something like half a century. Meanwhile, the reference to Castro's Cuba in this context seems gratuitous at best. And although Seeger did, to his enduring credit, defy the McCarthyist inquisition, he certainly did not spend a year in jail. His critique of Soviet-style communism is welcome, but it's worth noting that a lot more folks on the left would have broken their silence on the Soviet Union a lot earlier had it not been for the risk of appeasing the virulent anti-communists - who, incidentally, proved a great deal more adept than the communists at taking over the world.

karldallas
28 September 2007 at 11:23

I am saddened by Seege's song. Not because the horrors it documents are not true, but because by personalising them in the shape of Stalin, he actually absolves from guilt the apparatchiki who sent people to the gulags. It should be remembered that Khrushchev, whose speech to the 20th CPSU Congress began the process of the demonisation of Stalin (a denunciation, we should always remember, was circulated by the United States Information Service who saw it as a weapon in the Cold War), that same Khrushchev presided over the famine in the Ukraine. When Stalin died, he crowed: The mice have got rid of the cat. What do we think he meant by that?

The way in which Stalin attempted to protect the victims of the Politburo bureaucrats like Bulgakov, Mandelstam and Pasternak is well documented.

After the fall of Nazism, attempts to blame the Holocaust solely upon Hitler were recognised as attempts to evade responsibility for their part in it; those who try to suggest the gulags were the sole responsibility of Stalin are playing the same role.

When Stalin's death was announced, many of his "victims" in the gulags wept. They did not blame him for their incarceration. Do we, and my old friend Pete, presume to be wiser than they?

Stephen
30 September 2007 at 16:10

Well never too late. More joy in heaven over one sinner who repents etc. Stalin Hitler etc put not thy trust in princes.

clicktoenter
08 October 2007 at 21:10

why is it guys like this have to be in their late eighties before they get it?

joshua12
24 October 2007 at 14:57

Joe McCarthy also had NOTHING to do with HUAC. Does this guy not understand the difference between the Senate and the House in American government?

BigKoala
07 April 2008 at 08:04

While Seeger was a man of principle, he was often wrong. His support of brutal, authoritarian regimes, and his almost automatic criticisms of capitalism and the US represent an epitome of the self-brainwashing that many on the Left engaged in, those supporters of the Soviet system that Stalin referred to as "useful idiots."

Politically, Seeger was certainly one of these. But his contribution to American culture and the preservation of folk music can't be questioned.

This should remind us that great artists, who are very gifted in their own field, can be totally ignorant when it comes to politics or economics.

big koala

bigkoala@verizon.net

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