Peter Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. He was a fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, and had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, notably their recording of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene," which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers' rights, and environmental causes.
Agnes "Sis" Cunningham was an American musician, best known for her involvement as a performer and publicist of folk music and protest songs. She was the founding editor of Broadside magazine, which she published with her husband Gordon Friesen and their daughters.
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who mainly played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings. He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him. He was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
Hootenanny was an American musical variety television show broadcast on ABC from April 1963 to September 1964. The program was hosted by Jack Linkletter. It primarily featured pop-oriented folk music acts, including The Journeymen, The Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, The Brothers Four, Ian & Sylvia, The Big 3, Hoyt Axton, Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, The Carter Family, Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, The Tarriers, Bud & Travis, Josh White, Josh White Jr., Leon Bibb, and the Smothers Brothers. Although both popular and influential, the program is primarily remembered today for the controversy created when the producers blacklisted certain folk music acts, which then led to a boycott by others.
Dust Bowl Ballads is an album by American folk singer Woody Guthrie. It was released by Victor Records, in 1940. All the songs on the album deal with the Dust Bowl and its effects on the country and its people. It is considered to be one of the first concept albums. It was Guthrie's first commercial recording and the most successful album of his career.
Happy Traum is an American folk musician who started playing music in the 1950s and became a stalwart of the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s and the Woodstock music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. For several years, he studied blues guitar with Brownie McGhee, who was a big influence on his guitar style. Happy is most famously known as one half of Happy and Artie Traum, a duo he began with his brother. They released several albums, including Happy and Artie Traum, Double Back, and Hard Times In The Country. He has continued as a solo artist and as founder of Homespun Music Instruction.
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" is a folk song written by American singer-songwriter Pete Seeger in 1955. Inspired lyrically by the traditional Cossack folk song "Koloda-Duda", Seeger borrowed an Irish melody for the music, and published the first three verses in Sing Out! magazine. Additional verses were added in May 1960 by Joe Hickerson, who turned it into a circular song. Its rhetorical "where?" and meditation on death place the song in the ubi sunt tradition. In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the "Top 20 Political Songs".
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music.
Jerry Silverman is an American folksinger, guitar teacher and author of music books. He has had over 200 books published, which have sold in the millions, including folk song collections, anthologies and method books for the guitar, banjo and fiddle. He has taught guitar to hundreds of students. He has presented concerts and lectures at schools, universities and concert halls in the U.S. and abroad.
"Farewell", also known as "Fare Thee Well", is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. Dylan wrote the song in January 1963. He considered it for his third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', but only attempted a few takes during the album's first studio session. Dylan's earlier recordings of "Farewell" found their way onto various bootlegs, and a collection of demos that included the song was released in October 2010 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 9 – The Witmark Demos: 1962–1964.
Gil Turner was an American folk singer-songwriter, magazine editor, Shakespearean actor, political activist, and for a time, a lay Baptist preacher. Turner was a prominent figure in the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1960s, where he was master of ceremonies at New York City's leading folk music venue, Gerde's Folk City, as well as co-editor of the protest song magazine Broadside. He also wrote for Sing Out!, the quarterly folk music journal.
"Pittsburgh Town", sometimes titled as "Pittsburgh" or "Pittsburgh is a Great Old Town", is a folk song written by Woody Guthrie and originally recorded by Pete Seeger. The song was written during a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania stop on an Almanac Singers' tour; both Seeger and Guthrie were members of the band at this time. The song speaks of the labor and environmental problems that the city was facing in 1941, when the song was written. In the time since, environmental legislation has reduced the pollution problem that plagued Pittsburgh; because of this, the song's mentions of pollution in Pittsburgh have been sometimes been replaced with verses extolling the city.
Anthony D. Saletan, known professionally as Tony Saletan, is an American folk singer, children's instructional television pioneer, and music educator. Saletan is responsible for the modern rediscovery, in the mid-1950s, of two of the genre's best-known songs, "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" and "Kumbaya". In 1955, he was the first performer to appear on Boston's educational television station, WGBH. In 1969, Saletan was the first musical guest to appear on Sesame Street.
Jeff Place is the American writer and producer, and a curator and senior archivist with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. He has won three Grammy Awards and six Indie Awards.
Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Fishes is a 1998 compilation album by Pete Seeger and was released on Smithsonian Folkways as SFW45039.
American Industrial Ballads is a studio album by American folk singer Pete Seeger. It was released in 1956 by Folkways Records. It was reissued in 1992 by Smithsonian Folkways.
Gazette, Vol. 1 is the fourth studio album by American folk singer Pete Seeger. It was released in 1958 by Folkways Records, and later re-released by Smithsonian Folkways. The album artwork, credited on the album cover to Antonio Frasconi, is by Frasconi's wife Leona Pierce, and the design is by Ronald Clyne.
"Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" is a song written by American folk singer-songwriter Ed McCurdy in 1950. Due to McCurdy's connection with fellow musicians, it was common in repertoires within the folk music community. The song had its first album release when Pete Seeger recorded it as "Strangest Dream" for his 1956 album Love Songs For Friends & Foes. Seeger would later re-visit the song for his 1967 album Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and other Love Songs. The strong anti-war theme of the song led it to be recorded by multiple other artists, including The Weavers (1960), Joan Baez (1962), The Kingston Trio (1963), Simon & Garfunkel (1964), and Johnny Cash who released two versions of the song during the 2000s.
