In Memoriam | Pete Seeger 1919 – 2014

In the nearly 100 years he was on this earth singer-songwriter Pete Seeger had seen and accomplished so much. The folk legend passed away yesterday of natural causes at New York Presbyterian Hospital according to CNN. Seeger never let a little controversy get in the way of what he believed in.

[Photo by Tamara Grayson]

“He lived at a time when so many things hadn’t been done yet, the idea of making music about something hadn’t really been done,” Seeger’s nephew Kitama Cahill Jackson told CNN. “And now people do it all the time.” Pete wrote so many protest songs on a wide range of topics from the Vietnam War to racial equality to environmental causes. Just four months ago Seeger made a surprise appearance at Farm Aid, where he performed “This Land Is Your Land” with the event’s principals -Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Dave Matthews and John Mellencamp.

Pete quickly picked up the banjo in 1936 after attending the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville and spent years attempting to master the instrument. He went on to work for folk music archivist Alan Lomax and rose to fame thanks to his performances on Lomax’s radio show in the ’40s. Seeger went on to pen a number of now legendary tunes including “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song)” and the Vietnam protest song “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy.” The singer-songwriter is also known for his distaste of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, though he later came around on Bob’s decision to play loud.

Pete Seeger was 94.

Watch Seeger perform “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy” on CBS in 1967: