Music Arcades: Pete Seeger: Pioneer of Folk

My copy of The Times They are a-Changin' only has 4 Outlined Epitaphs on the back, but the full 11 Outlined Epitaphs include these lines:

through the quiet fire of Miles Davis
above the bells of William Blake
an' beat visions of Johnny Cash
an' the saintliness of Pete Seeger

Ever since I read that 26 years ago, I've had a special feeling about Seeger, and you don't have to google very hard to find more tributes to the man:

Along his cheerful and indomitable way Seeger has taught two generations of young Americans to sing and to make their own music. The result has been a renascence [sic] of folk music in the course of which the number of amateur guitarists has shot up from 2,000,000 to 7,000,000 in a decade. And of the professional minstrels who have come along to entertain us, there is scarcely one who does not acknowledge his debt to Seeger. "Most of us," Joan Baez has said, "owe our careers to Pete." And Bob Dylan has spoken of "the saintliness of Pete Seeger."

Curiously, this celebrity as a kind of elder statesman of American folk music has obscured and even diminished Seeger’s stature. He is more than a singer, more than a source of inspiration for other singers. He is a virtuoso instrumentalist, a folklorist, a film maker, an archivist, a teacher, a promoter, a generous patron of folk singers from abroad, an anthologizer of folk songs and a gifted composer. [source]

It may seem a more earnest career than Woody Guthrie's. And you get a different kind of reputation if you die young, compared with lasting forever, as Seeger has: Wikipedia notes, "Years active: 1939-present". Phew. Woody might have been the better to spend an evening with, but Pete almost certainly easier to live with. This video gives me the same involuntary-lump-in-throat as Land of Hope and Glory.

All that background and the £3 sticker in Fopp made this CD pretty much irresistible, given that I had nothing else by Seeger. On the labour-of-love versus rip-off scale for compilations, this tends towards the latter, however. One of the musical interests for me is Pete Seeger's version of The Golden Vanity, also done by Duncan Williamson and (inspired by Williamson) Alasdair Roberts. Researching another traditional song that Alasdair performed, I came across this comment by Dick Gaughan, which includes further praise for Seeger's performances of traditional Scots songs:

There are two fatal mistakes non-Scots often make in singing Scots songs. The first is to try to fake a Scots accent and the second is to try to rewrite the words in English. Neither is necessary. The second is aesthetically disastrous. The first is impossible — there is no such thing as "a Scots accent", any more than there is such a thing as "an English accent"; there are several hundred "Scots accents" and trying to imitate what you might imagine to be a generic one is going to end up with you sounding like Scotty from Star Trek, guaranteed to have any Scot who hears you wetting their legs laughing.

Just sing the Scots words in your own accent. Two of the very best performances of [Freedom Come Aa Ye] I have ever heard were by non-Scots, the first by Luke Kelly who sang it in his broad Dublin accent, and the second by Pete Seeger who sang it with his own accent, quite identifiably from North America. Both were totally convincing — because they made no attempt to pretend to being Scots and they had both made the effort to understand the nuances of the meanings of the words.