Hammering out justice.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Book review

Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words

Selected and edited by Rob and Sam Rosenthal

Paradigm Publishers. 376 pages. $29.95.

I first heard of this book at my daughter's graduation in May from Clark University. We were at a party afterward at a friend of my daughter's, and the friend's father and brother were there--Rob and Sam Rosenthal. They told me about this book they were doing on Pete Seeger.

Seeger, the iconic folksinger who wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and other classics and who was instrumental in popularizing "We Shall Overcome" and myriad more, gave the Rosenthals total access to his voluminous files of private correspondence, as well as his archive of published articles. The Rosenthals deftly selected and arranged the material to tell Seeger's life story so that it reads like a full-fledged autobiography. The words are Seeger's, and the bountiful wisdom is Seeger's, but the handiwork is the Rosenthals'.

It's fun to come upon a letter that Seeger wrote to his mom when he was thirteen and away at boarding school. "I would like to buy a banjo," he writes. "It's not half so hard to play one as I've thought, and I've already learned about ten chords the last week.... I could use my allowance money to get it if it wasn't over $9 or so. Will you let me get one? Please.

Your loving son, Peter."

We read about him dropping out of Harvard to play the banjo in New York and to run puppet shows for the

Young Communist League. We see him go work for Alan Lomax, the folk musicologist, at the Library of Congress. And when he writes about meeting Woody Guthrie at an event in New York, the book jumps an octave.

"There was Woody," he writes in one letter. "A little fellow with a Western hat and boots, in blue jeans and needing a shave, spinning out stories and singing songs that he had made up himself. His manner was laconic, offhand, as though he didn't much care if the audience was listening or not. I just naturally wanted to learn more about him."

Their bromance lasted a lifetime and spawned the Almanac Singers, who first popularized folk music in 1940 and 1941, especially via Communist Party bookstores and events. In one letter reminiscing on those days, Seeger writes that the poet Archibald MacLeish, who was then Librarian of Congress, brought the group's first record to FDR and played it for him. It was mostly peace songs at a time when Roosevelt was trying to prepare the country for war. Here's how Seeger recounts the story: "And...