While it’s generally acknowledged that Pete Seeger is the foremost still-living legend of the folk revival, it may surprise some folks just how popular he still is. It certainly surprised the folks at Merlefest in April 2006, when he was booked for sets at a variety of side-stages and auditoriums that invariably proved about three times too small for the crowds which flocked to see Seeger perform anywhere and everywhere throughout the weekend.
Perhaps this had something to do with the release that very week of Bruce Springsteen’s celebrated Seeger Sessions disc but then again, perhaps it’s simply the respect and reverence due to someone who has accomplished what Pete Seeger has in his nine decades on the planet. As Appleseed Recordings owner Jim Musselman observes in this disc’s liner notes, “He marched with Martin Luther King, traveled the highways with Woody Guthrie, and never stopped singing on his own, with Leadbelly, Dylan, Springsteen, his audiences, anyone who sings the truth.”
Seeger does a lot of that here singing with others, that is though isn’t a star-studded affair, but rather a community gathering. More than two dozen friends and fellow musicians primarily from his Hudson Valley home region join Seeger, frequently singing in one great big chorus. With 32 tracks of both music and spoken-word interludes, At 89 is much less like a standard musical album and almost more akin to a photo album, in the manner that it documents and illuminates both the past and the present of Seeger’s storied life.
Some of it goes well beyond Seeger’s own days, in fact.”The First Settlers”, a spoken-word piece that at 5 minutes is the longest cut on the disc (and one of only three that go beyond 4 minutes; most of these 32 tracks are of the 1-to-2-minute variety), envisions the arrival of Europeans on the new continent through the eyes of the Native Americans who were seeing them for the first time. And on “Visions Of Children”, Seeger applies his own lyrics to a 200-year-old melody from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (as sung here by a chorus of female voices).
More often, though, Seeger sticks to historical events of his own days. Seeger prefaces “When I Was Most Beautiful”, the haunting recollection of a Japanese woman in the wake of World War II written by Noriko Ibaragi (and sung here by Sonya Cohen, Seeger’s niece), with his own memories of serving in the U.S. Army in the Pacific during the war. “Throw Away That Shad Net (How Are We Gonna Save Tomorrow?)”, written in the mid-1970s, laments the loss of Hudson River fishing to pollution. “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy”, a highlight of Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions which the songwriter himself revisits here, was initially a Vietnam War song, but, as the liner notes observe, “is now, shamefully, relevant again.”
Not all of the present observations are gloomy, though; Seeger is at heart an eternal optimist, one who remains vigilant about it and continually creative, too. He explains in his intro to “If It Can’t Be Reduced” that the song’s lyrics were adapted verbatim from a zero-waste resolution passed by the Berkeley, California, city council a couple years ago. An environmental activist suggested to Seeger that he turn the resolution’s 24 words into a song, and thus was born a bright little ditty which bounces along to the following recitation: “If it can’t be reduced/Reused, repaired/Rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled, or composted/Then it should be/Restricted, redesigned/Or removed, from production!”
The album’s closing tryptich the narrative adieu “Pete’s Extroduction”, followed by a chorus rendition of “If This World Survives” (a Malvina Reynolds poem from 1972 that Seeger set to music last year) and finally the original instrumental “How Soon?”, played on recorder leaves those questions of survival and alacrity hanging, but hopeful. For Seeger, at 89, it’s just a matter of time, as he lays plain in the title lyric to one of the disc’s catchiest tunes: “One of these days or else!”
