We met at the home he built himself on a ridge overlooking his beloved Hudson River. More recently, Pete Seeger has been sending post cards to YES! with ideas for stories we might cover, and he made a donation that he said should be used to send a copy of YES! to each of the foreign embassies located in the United States.įinally, in December, I had a chance to talk to him in person. Later, I heard him sing at rallies against the Vietnam War, and I knew then that there were adults who shared my passion for peace and justice. “If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.” His songs of his love for a polluted, neglected water-way rekindled in people a yearning for connection to the great river. My family was among the scores who went to see him perform at a run-down little park on the Hudson with his sloop, the Clearwater, docked nearby. Pete Seeger has been a presence in my life since the time I was growing up in the Hudson Valley of New York.

When Sarah van Gelder interviewed him at his home in 2007, he said: “If there’s a world here in a hundred years, it’s going to be saved by tens of millions of little things.” Pete believed that change would come, not through big, grand pronouncements, but through the many small choices we each make. In New York state’s Hudson Valley, where he lived for most of his life, he was known for showing up unannounced at community events, banjo in hand. In his life and in his music he showed a passion for the concerns of ordinary people, especially labor struggles, the fight against war, civil rights, and cleaning up the Hudson River. He was known around the world for providing the musical soundtrack for peoples movements.

Folk icon Pete Seeger passed away in 2014 at the age of 94.

Pete seeger songs