The Matinee Idol in Woody Guthrie’s Shadow—Cisco Houston

Cisco Houston in a professional head shot glossy from the 1950's/

He should have been way more famous.  Instead Cisco Houston is known only among the hardest core of older folk music devotees and as an historical footnote—Woody Guthrie’s closest friend and running buddy.  But Houston not only had a phenomenally wide and varied repertoire of folk songs that documented the American experience and working life and a rich baritone that some folks thought was too good for folk music, but he was movie star handsome.  Maybe his early death at age 42 in 1961 just as the second folk revival was gathering steam deprived him of the opportunity to shine for the legions of younger fans.

Gilbert Vandine Houston was born on August 18, 1918 in Wilmington, Delaware where his father was a tin knocker—a sheet metal worker.  He was the second of four children.  He was still in school when the family moved across country and took up residence in Eagle Rock, a Los Angeles suburb.

Young Gil was recognized as a very bright student despite a serious disability—nystagmus or dancing eyes, a condition of rapid involuntary movement of the eyes which reduced his vision and made him rely mostly on his peripheral vision which greatly affected his ability to read.  He still got top grades by keenly paying attention to class room discussion and absorbing it.  It made him an audial learner, a perfect skill set for a man who became noted for being able to absorb songs like a sponge.

His supportive family may have read to him, because he gained a school reputation for being exceptionally well read.  Eventually he trained himself to use his limited vision to the best of his ability and did become a devoted reader.

Gil also picked up the guitar and a love of singing from his family from whom he also learned many folk songs.

The Great Depression hit the family hard.  After extended unemployment, his father left the family in pursuit of a job and virtually disappeared.  Young Gil was forced to quit school and find what work he could to support the family.  From 1932 at the age of 14 he took whatever he could find. 

A couple of years later he and his brother Slim hit the road themselves becoming part of a generation of young men forced into the Hobo jungles and the constant chase after the mere rumor of work.  They roamed the Western states hopping freights or hitch hiking until they got separated.  He worked in migrant farm camps, on construction projects, as a pearl diver—dishwasher, day laborer, and even despite his vision problems as a cowboy.

Gil traveled with a battered guitar strapped to his back and entertained his fellow wanderers around camp fires and picked up spare change busking or by plopping down in a corner of a saloon or café and starting to sing.  He also picked up scores, maybe hundreds, of songs on his travels, especially cowboy and hobo tunes. 

It was during these years that he picked up the nickname Cisco.  It came not, as would later be reported, from San Francisco or because of his supposed resemblance to the Cisco Kid with his dark brown hair and the pencil moustache that he grew.  He acquired it from some adventure or misadventure in the small town of Cisco, California near the Nevada border in the old Placer County mining district.

By the late 30’s Houston’s music began to become a more reliable source of income that casual labor.  He began to pick up bookings for pay at saloons and clubs riding the popularity of cowboy music.  In 1938 at age 20 with years of hard traveling already behind him, Houston returned to Los Angeles to seriously pursue a career as a performer.

Not only did Houston pick up fairly steady work in area clubs, but he was encouraged to use his good looks to explore acting.  He picked up extra work and uncredited walk-ons and non-speaking parts, mostly at the poverty row studios that specialized in two-reel oaters.  He was befriended by an older actor and folk singer named Will Geer.  Geer was also a committed radical and drew Houston into his circle of union organizers, rabble rousers, and Communists.  Given Houston’s working class background and life experiences, he became an eager recruit.

One day Geer brought Houston with him to visit another friend, Woody Guthrie, at the KFVD studio of his cowboy music radio show Woody and Lefty Lou.  The connection was almost immediate.  Guthrie took to the younger man.  Their personalities were different, but complimentary.  Guthrie was often effusive and animated nearly to the point mania, always eager to sing for anyone, anywhere at the drop of a hat, but also sometimes moody and subject to black depressions.  Cisco was quiet and reserved, more than a little shy.  Always more of a listener than a talker.  But he had a natural cheerfulness and open good nature that no amount of the many curve balls life had thrown at him could discourage.

Soon the three of them, Geer, Guthrie, and Houston were playing shows at migrant camps, rallies, and at union hall benefits.  They performed a mix of cowboy and hillbilly music, Guthrie’s Dust Bowl songs, and pointed, topical ballads including rousing union songs.  When Guthrie lost his radio show, he and Houston went even farther afield.  They parted ways for a while when Guthrie briefly returned to Texas to be re-united with his wife and children.

Then Geer famously invited both of them to join him in New York.  Both men dropped what they were doing—which wasn’t much—and made a bee line east.  Guthrie held up in Geer’s apartment and Houston found accommodations, eventually with Huddie Leadbetter—Leadbelly—and his wife.  From there things would start percolating.

Singing with the Almanacs--Bess Lomax Hawes, Cisco, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Sis Cunningham. 

Once again Geer introduced his friends to his wide circle of activist and performing friends.  After informal living-room gatherings some of them began to perform together as the Almanac Singers mostly at union halls and at events and benefits for various left organizations.  The Almanac were less a well defined group than a loose collective of singers which presented themselves in various combinations depending on who was available.  Core members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Bess Lomax, and Sis Cunningham.  In addition to Houston others who occasionally performed with the Almanacs included Burl Ives, Sonny Terry, and Josh White among others.

The Almanac repertoire included a number of union songs and pacifist songs by Guthrie and Seeger which reflected the Communist line after the Hitler-Stalin Pact.  They were just getting established when Houston signed on with the Merchant Marine in 1940, disguising his visions problems that should have disqualified him.  That meant he missed the recording sessions for the Almanac’s 78 rpm album Meet John Doe which featured anti-war and anti-draft songs. 

But just as the album came out in June of 1941 Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and there was a mad scramble to recall the records and destroy the undistributed copies.  Seeger and Guthrie went into overtime writing new songs urging entry into the fight against fascism including Guthrie’s The Good Ruben James, a ballad about the sinking of an American merchant ship by a German U-boat which also spurred enlistment in the Merchant Marine.

Shipmates Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, and Jim Longhi sing for their fellow seamen at the National Maritime Union Hall in New York.

Meanwhile Houston was already at sea daring the horrific losses of the Battle of the Atlantic.  He had already survived the sinking of one ship when he came ashore in New York and resumed singing with the Almanacs between voyages.  When the Almanacs broke up in 1943, Houston and his friend Jim Longhi convinced Guthrie to join the Merchant marine with them while Seeger was drafted and entered the Army.  The three shipped out together three times in convoys on the SS William B. Travis, SS William Floyd, and SS Sea Porpoise.  The Travis struck a mine in the Mediterranean Sea and managed to limp to port at Bizerte, Tunisia. 

On all three of their voyages together Houston and Guthrie regularly entertained their shipmates and played for other crews in port.  On their final voyage in 1944 the Sea Porpoise was carrying 3,000 Troops for the invasion of Normandy.  The pair frequently played more formal deck concerts for the men on the long and dangerous voyage.  The ship was torpedoed by a U-Boat off of Normandy on June 5.  She managed to make it back to England to be repaired at Newcastle-upon-Tyne before sailing back to the States.

It turned out to be Guthrie’s last voyage—his seaman’s papers were suddenly yanked for his Communist connections.  Houston stayed in the Merchant Marine but used this time ashore with Guthrie to do his first recordings.  At the same famous 1944 recording sessions by Moses “Moe” Asch with Guthrie and Sonny Terry where Woody laid down many of his most famous songs, including many of the Dust Bowl ballads, Houston sat in as an accompanist and was also recorded on his own. 

Cisco and Woody recording for Moe Asch in 1944--classic sessions that would be repackaged many times by Folkways and other labels.

In the post-war period Houston worked steadily as a musician, studied acting, and began to get stage parts.  Most notably he appeared in the 1948 revival of Mark Blitzstein’s ground breaking radical musical The Cradle Will Rock in a cast that included Will Geer, Alfred Drake, Vivian Vance, and Jack Albertson directed by Howard Da Silva.  Despite the stellar company the revival only ran 34 performances amid revived charges that it was Communist propaganda.

Asch went on to found Folkways records and in 1948 material from the sessions began to be released, helping to spur the post-war or first folk revival.  Houston was featured on two of the first releases, including one as Guthrie’s side man and a collection of children’s song on Folkway’s Cub Records label, Nursery Rhymes Sung and Played by Cisco Houston.  Folkways would go on to release several more records over the next decade or so often re-using the same recordings in different packages.  In addition to frequently appearing on Guthrie recordings and with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and others some of his solo recordings included. Cowboy Ballads (1952), 500 Miles and other Railroad Songs (1953), Traditional Songs of the Old West (Stintson, 1954), Hard Travelin’ (1954), and Cisco Sings (1958.)

Houston's 1954 Folkways album.

These recording introduced or popularized many songs that became staples of folk music including the children’s ditty The Cat Came Back and the bluesy, haunting ballad Five Hundred Miles.  These recordings were for a specialized, limited market of hard core folk music fans and never made Houston much money.  But they did raise his visibility as a performer and helped him get work. 

Through most of the late ‘40’s and ‘50’s Houston toured as a journeyman musician, making a living but not much more.  He never rose to the fame of old pals Guthrie, Seeger, Hayes, Josh White, Burl Ives, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee although he often shared the stage with all of them at clubs or concert bookings.  He crisscrossed the country dozens of times on improvised, self-organized tours.  He also made occasional radio appearances.

In some ways the lack of recognition insulated Houston from the Red Scare era black balling that nearly destroyed the careers of Seeger, Hayes and the members of The Weavers.  Also, he had never taken a CP party card.  That is, he thought he had escaped the worst until just when it looked like his career might take off.

In 1954 Houston was hired to host a radio folk music program based in Denver, Colorado which was syndicated to more than 50 stations by the Mutual Broadcasting System.  It was billed as the Gil Houston Show under his original name.  This was likely a ploy by the station to obscure his identity as Cisco and his known associations.  If so, the ruse might not have worked.  Despite good ratings the show was abruptly cancelled after less than a year on the air.  Houston and his friends suspected the Black List might have caught up to him.

Houston was briefly married twice.  Virtually nothing is known about either spouse and he had no known children.  But his good looks and quiet charm appealed to many women and he was known to have had many, usually brief, affairs.

After the failure of the radio show, Houston shifted his base of operations back to California, from which he had been mostly absent for almost 20 years.  He continued to record for Folkways and for other small labels and appeared where he could in clubs, on college campuses, and even church basement coffee houses. 

Then, starting in 1958 his long years of struggle seemed to be turning around with the rise of the second Folk Revival.  He was signed to a new, commercial label Vanguard which released his successful LP The Cisco Special and a follow-up, Songs of Woody Guthrie.  He rapidly gained the reputation as the leading interpreter of his old friend’s songs just as the ailing Guthrie, no longer able to perform, was becoming an icon of the new folk scene. 

Although he was getting better bookings at larger venues, Houston was beginning to rub up against the reverse snobbery of the folk music community.  Some critics charged that his rich baritone voice was too polished to be authentic—a holy term often used to denote raw and off-key screeching.  Houston complained to an interviewer:

There’s always a form of theater that things take; even back in the Ozarks, as far as you want to go. People gravitate to the best singer...We have people today who go just the other way, and I don't agree with them. Some of our folksong exponents seem to think you have to go way back in the hills and drag out the worst singer in the world before it’s authentic. Now, this is nonsense...Just because he’s old and got three arthritic fingers and two strings left on the banjo doesn’t prove anything.

A new crop of younger performers, however, were taking note of Houston and he became, at barely 40 years old himself, a mentor and inspiration to several of them. 

The Black List was fading rapidly.  So fast that in 1959 the State Department asked Houston along with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee to do a tour of India.  On the way back Houston stopped to play, and even to record some sides, in Paris, and sing in England.

Cisco Houston with Molly Scott on the CBS TV special Folk Song, USA  before his terminal cancer had been diagnosed. 

On his return in 1960 CBS TV made him the host of a special, Folk Song, USA which featured Joan Baez, John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, and others.  He got great reviews as a warm and authoritative host.  The early summer special was a pilot of sorts for a folk music series.  That same summer Houston headlined, at the invitation of co-founder Pete Seeger, at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Folk music, and it seemed Houston himself, were poised to take off and become the next big thing in American culture.  But shortly after the Newport appearance Houston was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  It had already metastasized and he was told that it was fatal.

Knowing that he had only a few months to live, Houston chose to keep doing what he loved and what gave meaning to his life—performing despite, toward the end, being in constant pain.  The illness took a toll on the once strapping and robust body of a man who had spent much of his life doing hard physical labor.

Houston also returned to the studio to record one last album for Vanguard.  He completed the final sessions of Ain’t Got No Home weeks before he died. 

In a letter quoted in a memorial article in the folk music magazine Come For to Sing by Lee Hays, Houston wrote:

If you know my situation, which is a matter of weeks, of months at the outside, before the wheel runs off... well, nobody likes to run out of time. But it’s not nearly the tragedy of Hiroshima or the millions of people blown to hell in the war, that could have been avoided. These are real tragedies.....

Houston died in San Bernardino, California on April 28, 1961 at the age of only 42.

He was widely mourned in the tight knit community of fold performers even if still not widely known to the public.  Tributes poured in.  Tom Paxton, Peter LaFarge, and Tom McGrath all wrote songs in tribute.  Bob Dylan could not fail to mention him in his Song to Woody just as Peter Yarrow did in his salute to Josh White, Goodbye Josh. 

Smithsonian/Folkways has re-packaged much of Houston’s work on Folkways and also issued a complete multi-CD edition of the Ache Sessions with Woody Guthrie.  There is also a compilation of his Vanguard recordings but Cisco Houston Sings the Songs of Woody Guthrie is the only one of his several LP’s now available on CD.  He also crops up on recordings with Leadbelly and with Sonny Terry as well as several folk anthologies. 

No known film footage has ever been found of Houston performing and even still photos are somewhat scarce.  But mostly he lives on as a semi-legendary character in a semi-mythical version of Woody Guthrie’s life.  Woody himself made Cisco Houston one of the few characters identified by his real name in his highly fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory.  Their Merchant Marine pal Jim Longhi wrote about their experiences in his memoirs Woody, Cisco and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine.  And Houston shows up in several plays and musical reviews about Woody.  In the mind’s eye, they are always singing together in some seedy saloon, killing time before catching a fast freight together for some distant job.

Four Years Gone—Remembering Pete

A couple of days ago the anniversary of the passing of Pete Seeger slipped by.  I was reminded when Marina Jason posted the cartoon above in her fine Folk Music—1960’s Through the Present Facebook group.  Given the tumultuous and dangerous times we are living in, the sentiment was never truer. When he died Pete was probably the most beloved American—unless you were among those who were the targets of his loving outrage.

Pete Seeger was born in New York City on May 3, 1919.  His father, Charles Seeger, was a noted musicologist.  His mother, Constance de Clyver (née Edson), was raised in Tunisia, trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, and was a concert violinist. Both taught at Julliard School of Music.  The whole family was musical.  His younger half siblings Peggy and Mike, born to his father’s second marriage, also became noted folk musicians inspired by travels with their father on music collecting trips to the rural South.  

With his father Charles at the wheel and Pete in mother Constances arms, the Seeger family set off on a folk song collecting trip from New York City in 1922.

On one of those trips young Pete first heard and was enthralled with the sound of the five string banjo. By the time he was 16 and a student at Avon Old Farms, private prep school in Connecticut he was playing the instrument in jazz combos. 

Seeger began studies at Harvard, where he founded a radical newspaper and joined the Young Communist League.   But in 1938 at the age of 19 he took a job as an assistant to Library of Congress folk archivist Alan Lomax, a close friend of the family, on one of his song collecting forays through the South.  The recordings made on that trip included some of the most influential ever made.  Seeger helped record Huddy Ledbetter—Leadbelly.

He moved to New York City in 1939 and was introduced by Lomax to a circle of folk musicians and activists clustered around Greenwich Village.  He adopted the claw-hammer banjo style he heard at mountain barn dances.  He dropped out of school and was soon performing many of the songs he had learned with Lomax as he bummed around the country.

In 1940 he met Woody Guthrie, the singing Oklahoma exile who had become a popular California radio performer, when they sang together at a benefit for migrant farm workers. The experience electrified Seeger.  He now knew with certainty what he wanted to do with his life.  The two became close friends and sometime performing partners.    He sang and played in saloons, churches, and, most of all, in union halls.  

Young Pete jams with Woody Gusthrie, left, and other members of the informal Almanac Singers circle on Macdougal Street in Greenwhich Village in 1943.

Back in 1940 he formed the highly political Almanac Singers, who became troubadours of the labor movement and of radical causes.  The group was more like a large collective of singers who performed together in various settings and combinations.  The core included Millard Lampell, Lee Hays and Sis Cunningham In 1941 his old friend Woody Guthrie joined the group.  Others who participated in the group at one time or another included Lomax’s sister Bess Lomax Hawes, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Cisco Huston, and Burl Ives among others.

Following Pete’s natural inclination toward pacifism and the Communist Party’s opposition to American entry into World War II prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the group released a three disc, six song 78 rpm album called Songs for John Doe.  Singing on the record were Seeger, Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary. 

Less than a month after the record was released, the invasion of Russia changed everything, rendering the songs obsolete and an embarrassment as the Party and singers rapidly changed gears.

A second album, Talking Union was released in the summer of 1941 and featured the labor songs that members of the group had been singing in union halls and on picket lines for the previous two years.  The album included now classic union songs—Talking Union Blues, Get Thee Behind Me, Satan, Guthrie’s Union Maid, and Florence Reece’s coal mine strike song Which Side Are You On?  This time out Hays joined Seeger and Lampell in the lineup. 

A third and final album, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Ballads came out later that year, this time with Guthrie also singing.

Pete in his Army uniform entertaining service men and First Lady Elanore Roosevelt

Despite an already developed pacifist streak, Seeger shared Guthrie’s fierce anti-fascism—Guthrie’s guitar case had a sign on it, “This machine kills fascists.”  When the U.S. joined the war, the Almanac Singers broke up and Seeger, who had protested the Selective Service Act, was drafted and willingly entered the Army.  He spent his war in G.I. entertainment shows. 

While in the Army in 1943 Seeger wed Toshi-Aline Ohta, the daughter of an exiled Japanese Marxist and American mother who he knew from his days in Greenwich Village.  The couple’s legendarily close and supportive marriage lasted nearly 70 years until her death in 2013.

Toshi and Pete at their 1943 wedding.

Seeger quit his membership in the Communist Party in the late ‘40’s and after the revelations of the worst of Stalin’s crimes later said he regretted not having done it earlier.  But he refused to apologize for it and said that he remained a “communist with a small c."

Back home after the war Seeger resumed his career as an itinerant folk musician and activist.  In 1948 he joined with his former Almanac Singer partner Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman to form a new group, The Weavers.  In between performing for 1948 third party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the Weavers quickly became a popular touring and recording group.  They popularized songs like On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter than Wine, and Seeger’s version of a South African song, Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).  By 1950 they were radio regulars and were called “America’s favorite singing group.”  No less a folk music aficionado than Carl Sandburg said, “When I hear America singing, the Weavers are there.”  In 1950 they made a number one hit record with their version of Ledbelly’s Goodnight Irene. 

The same year Seeger made his first solo record, a 10 inch album called Darling Corey, one of the first releases on the seminal Folkways label.  The Weavers’s popularity continued to grow with television appearances.  A Christmas Eve 1955 Carnegie Hall concert featuring the Weavers was regarded by many as the beginning of the folk music revival of the late Fifties and early Sixties.  

When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) instead of invoking the 5th Amendment, Pete stood on First Amendment rights  to free speech, assembly, and association and simply flatly refused to answer any qustions about others leaving him open to Contempt of Congress charges.

But trouble lay ahead.  Called before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee Seeger asserted his First Amendment rights to free speech and free association and scolded the committee for trying to outlaw political thought and speech.  The defiance made national headlines.  Seeger was a hero to many, but the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and television, lost their Decca recording contract, and saw concert dates cancelled across the country. 

Worse, in 1957, Seeger was indicted on ten counts of contempt of Congress.  The case dragged on for years.  He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to ten concurrent one-year prison sentences.  The convictions were overturned on appeal in 1961.  

The Weavers with Ronnie Gilbert, Pete, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman

In the meantime the stress caused the Weavers to break up and Seeger struggled to make a living as a solo.  But times and attitudes were changing. The Kingston Trio picked up Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? In 1961, even before his conviction was overturned his old friend, the legendary producer John Hammond, signed Seeger to a Columbia Records contract and released his first record on the label, Story Songs. 

Seeger was still banned from commercial television however.  Hootenanny refused to book him causing the show to be boycotted by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez,  Peter Paul & Mary, and other top acts.

 But in 1965 and ‘66 Seeger made the series Rainbow Quest at WNJU-T, a New York UHF station broadcasting mostly Spanish language programing.  Few people saw the first run, which was virtually directed by Toshi.  Pete and a guest would sit on straight back chairs by a simple table and swap songs and stories without a studio audience.  Guests included many old friends like Baez and the likes of Johnny Cash, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotton, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Donovan, Richard and Mimi Fariña, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.  Some years later PBS picked up the 39 shows for syndication on their affiliates.

The Smother’s Brothers famously broke the network TV ban when they booked Seeger.  His first song was broadcast, but the second, his searing indictment of the Vietnam War Waist Deep in the Big Muddy was cut by censors.  After a confrontation with the series stars, CBS relented and let Seeger perform the song on a subsequent program.  But the controversy helped doom the popular TV show.

At the Highlander Folk Center where he adapted We Shall Overcome as the anthem of the Civil Rights  movement.  Pete with Martin Luther King and Raph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC

The folk music revival was in full swing and so was the Civil Rights Movement.  Seeger was often on the picket lines throughout the South.  In June of 1963, Seeger returned to Carnegie Hall.  An album recorded live at the event was released under the title We Shall Overcome. It reached number 41 on the album charts and remained on the charts for 36 weeks.  The title song was a re-working of a picket line song We Will Overcome by Lucille Simmons by Seeger and friends at the Highlander Center, the training ground of Civil Rights leaders and workers. A month later Seeger appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs.  The era of protest music was officially launched. 

Seeger introduced his own songs, including Where Have All the Flowers Gone which became a hit for the Kingston Trio in 1962 and If I Had a Hammer, co-written by Lee Hayes, and recorded by Peter Paul & Mary, to appreciative audiences in these years.  His recording of Malvina Reynolds’s Little Boxes even climbed into the pop music charts. Baez, Peter Paul & Mary, and The Byrds all had hits with Seeger songs. 

Through the late ‘60’s and into the ‘70’s, Seeger threw himself into opposition to the Vietnam War.  He sung to innumerably rallies and at countless benefits and collected legions of new young fans.  The highlight came in 1968 when Seeger sang to 500,000 people at the anti-war March on Washington where his fellow performers included Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie, John Denver and Peter Paul & Mary.  

Pete on the sloop Clearwater sailing the Hudon River to promote the clean up of the heavily poluted river.

After seemingly rootless decades, Seeger decided to settle down on the banks of Hudson River where he and Toshi had bought land and built a log cabin in 1949. But the pollution that had turned that beautiful and historic river into an open sewer stirred Seeger to action again.  In 1968 he launched the restored sloop Clearwater from which he campaigned for environmental causes for the rest of his long life. 

His merciless attack on General Electric for dumping PCBs in the river led to a historic law suit and a clean-up that is still going on today.  About the same time he joined the U.U. Community Church of New York City and has sung at many U.U. churches since.

In 1994 the nation that had tried to put him in prison awarded Seeger the Presidential Medal of the Arts in a Kennedy Center ceremony.  In 1996 Arlo Guthrie and Harry Belafonte were the presenters when Seeger was inducted as a roots influence into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Acclaim continued with an honorary degree from his alma mater, Harvard, which had once enforced the blacklist against him and a two Grammy Awards for Best Traditional Folk Album and one for his children’s album,  Tomorrow’s Children.  All told, Seeger recorded over 100 albums.

In his later years Seeger’s singing voice was ravaged and his fingers sometimes painful on the banjo.  But a good cause could still call him out.  He would scratch out a few bars of a song then, encourage the audiences to join in the familiar songs, and let younger musicians perform.  He remained clear eyed and clear headed with the same sense of selfless dedication and love of music that propelled him for over his long life.

With grandson and frequent singing partner in his later years Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen Seeger led a huge crowd to an emotional singing of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land at Barack Obama’s first Inaugural.

In 2012, at age 92, Pete  led an impromptu march from his Carnagie Hall concrt join with with Occupy Wall Street at Columbus Circle in New York City.

In 2012 he performed at Carnegie Hall again for his annual Clearwater benefit.  At the end of the show he invited the audience to walk with him down to the Occupy Wall Street encampment.  Hundreds followed him out of the hall and to the park where he stood on a park bench and sang for the protestors.  Vintage, irrepressible Pete.