{"id":494,"date":"2020-05-09T18:06:13","date_gmt":"2020-05-09T18:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theworldprovider.net\/site\/?p=494"},"modified":"2020-05-09T18:10:05","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T18:10:05","slug":"pete-seegers-animal-folk-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theworldprovider.net\/site\/memories\/pete-seegers-animal-folk-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Pete Seeger’s Animal Folk Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By request of my kid, I\u2019ve been listening a lot to Pete Seeger\u2019s children\u2019s record, Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Fishes: Animal Folk Songs<\/em>. Originally released in 1955, it\u2019s a collection of traditional folk songs for kids, many of which his stepmother Ruth Crawford Seeger had transcribed from Library of Congress field recordings. The songs get me thinking…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I think of listening to it with my parents when I was a kid.
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I think of how hard it is to pull off kid-friendly songs without being corny, condescending, or cloying, and how effortlessly he does it.
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I think of how, considering that he was singing already-old songs in the fifties, it\u2019s amazing how the songs don\u2019t have any racial stereotypes or other objectionable content (other than a certain comfort level with talking about death, which it seems was part of the culture back then, as it may come to be again today).
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I think of how the songs\u2019 strange magical-realist rural imagery evoke the Anthology of American Folk Music<\/em>, the early folk anthology that permanently blew my mind when my friend Taylor Savvy introduced it to me in the late 90s. (In fact, the Seeger record and the AAFM<\/em> share one song, \u201cI Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,\u201d one of my Anthology favourites). 
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I think of how Pete Seeger was a dedicated socialist his whole life, and was indicted for contempt of Congress for having refused to answer questions at the McCarthy hearings.
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I think of him singing \u201cThis Land is Your Land\u201d with Bruce Springsteen at the Obama inauguration (and I want to cry when I think about that moment vs. this one).
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I think of how much I regret not going to see Seeger when he played in Montreal sometime in the late 2000s. What the hell was I thinking\u2014that I would see him next time he came?! He was in his 90s, and died not too long after.
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All these thoughts have a thread\u2014the times that are gone, that will never return.

But my five-year-old son doesn\u2019t know any of this\u2014he just listens, sings along, and asks us to play it again and again. There must be something to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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