Winchendon, Massachusetts
The Rev. Jennie Ann Barrington
(Annual Meeting Sunday)
The Morning Reading, Psalm 100:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the
lands!
Serve the Lord with gladness!
Come into his presence with singing!
Know that the Lord is God!
It is he that made us, and we are his;
We are his people, and the sheep of his
pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise!
Give thanks to him, bless his name!
For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
The Morning Sermon:
Welcome and good morning!
The best advice I ever heard about what a
sermon and worship service need to be like is this: There will be some
people whose hearts are breaking, and they have come to church needing
comfort, reassurance, and hope-- And there will be some people whose
hearts are brimming over with joy, and they have come to church to be
within a community of affirmation and celebration-- Your sermon and
worship service need to meet all those needs…
Pete Seeger’s music has met those needs
for many generations, now, and met them so thoroughly that the songs he
has led us in singing together will never die. Pete Seeger has given
us, “Where have all the Flowers Gone?” for times of loss
and change and protest against war; “If I had a Hammer,”
for the prayer of justice, freedom, and brotherly love for all people;
and “This Land is Your Land,” for the vision of a unified
nation. To Pete Seeger, being loud and radical and joyful about peace
and liberty for all people has been the only way to be patriotic-- The
songs he has sung are not superficial; they are all infused with his
core ethical and spiritual beliefs. Pete Seeger is a Unitarian
Universalist-- He was featured at our UU General Assembly last summer,
and is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of New
York. Pete Seeger’s birthday was this week-- On May 3rd,
he turned 87 years old. And the other reason people have been buzzing
about him lately is that Bruce Springsteen has just released a tribute
CD called, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.” A
psalm is a sacred song; a song to be sung collectively as worship in
times of mourning or praise. Psalm 100 urges us to express ourselves in
worship with enthusiasm, ardor, and volume; in short, to make a joyful
noise. Pete Seeger’s songs have ardently expressed his passion
for what he holds sacred: civil rights, free speech, human rights, the
peace and anti-nuclear movements, and environmental protection and
preservation. He has shown us that being engaged in the struggles for
social justice can be inspiring and joyful, and he believes it should
be inspiring and joyful. When asked by an interviewer in spring of 2001
what sort of advice he has for young people today, Seeger said,
“Keep your sense of humor. There is a 50-50 chance that the world
can be saved. You --yes, you-- might be the grain of sand that tips the
scales the right way. It’s a joyful, very exciting time. Live
long!” Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, a musicologist and
classically trained musician once wrote: “Music, as any art, is
not an end in itself but is a means for achieving larger ends…
and music as a group activity is more important than music as an
individual accomplishment… The necessary question to ask is not,
‘Is it good music?’ but “What is the music good
for?’ and if it bids fair to aid in the welding of the people
into more independent, capable and democratic action, it must be
approved.’” [see The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, p. 52] The
music that Pete Seeger fell in love with, uncovered and gifted back to
the American people, and made his own was the old time five-string
banjo music of the Appalachian mountains-- He first heard it in 1935
when he was sixteen and said it was, “rippling out a rhythm to
one fascinating song after another-- These songs seemed frank,
straightforward, and honest.”
Thomas Blair writes, in his article,
“Pete Seeger: Folk Singer and Songwriter:”
“Seeger left college in the middle of
his sophomore year, setting out to absorb American folk music straight
from its roots in communities across the country… Swapping
watercolor paintings for food and shelter, Seeger traveled all around
the United States, learning ‘a little something from
everybody’ as he sought to master the five-string banjo and
internalize the folk traditions he’d come to love. On the road,
Seeger met Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter, who both became strong
influences and collaborators in Seeger’s early career. In
addition to churches, migrant camps, and everything in between, Seeger
made his way to the Library of Congress, where he fortified his
background in folk music as an assistant in the Archive of American
Folk Song. Seeger, Guthrie, and others formed Seeger’s first
group, the Almanac Singers, in 1940. Seeger and Guthrie traveled
throughout the United States and Mexico as singer-activists, bolstering
labor movements with song as they blended activism and folk music. In
1942, Seeger joined the Army, where he continued to play and sing,
performing for his fellow soldiers and picking up ‘soldier
songs’ as he could. Discharged a corporal in 1945, Seeger founded
People’s Songs, Inc., a musicians’ union through which he
hoped to bind labor movements and folk music in a relationship that
would advance both. People’s Songs eventually grew to 3,000
members, and Seeger remained involved in politics, campaigning for 1948
Progressive candidate Henry Wallace and helping to establish the
musical side of labor organizing. In 1948, Seeger co-founded The
Weavers… and also toured extensively on his own, helping to
establish the Newport Folk Festival and selling out such venues as
Carnegie Hall. His position in mainstream music was stifled by
blacklisting, however, as controversy surrounding his ties to the
Communist Party led major television networks to keep him off the air.
The House Committee on Un-American Activities called Seeger to hearings
in 1955; instead of citing the Fifth Amendment as grounds for silence,
Seeger cited the First Amendment, a move for which he was sentenced to
a year in jail for contempt of court. Citing his unconditional
willingness to share his music regardless of supposed political
alliances, Seeger even offered to play a song for the court. Needless
to say, the committee declined. Although his sentence for contempt was
soon overturned, Seeger remained blacklisted by many organizations--
briefly including his alma mater, Harvard, which finally invited him to
Cambridge when students protested this prohibition. Nonetheless, he
remained firm in his love of sharing music. Seeger continued playing in
spite of political controversy. As he wrote to his Harvard classmates
in 1990: ‘Have been a traveling performing singer and songwriter
for fifty years, in every state of the union and thirty-five foreign
countries. Fortunate to have a family that stuck by me, even when I
traveled too much, or got into political hot water. Life has been
easier on me than any lazy person like myself has the right to
expect.’”
I dunno-- I don’t think Pete
Seeger’s life has been all that easy. During that hearing before
the House Un-American Activities Committee, Seeger was asked whether he
had appeared at an event that had been announced in the Daily Worker. He answered:
“I am not going to answer any questions
as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my
political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these
private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any
American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would
be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it.” To
everything that that committee asked him in its effort to get him to
say that he had been a Communist and to give them the names of others
who had been Communists, Seeger replied, “My answer is the same
as before.” About his political beliefs, Seeger has since said,
“I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more
what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of
it.” and I’m still a communist, in the sense that I
don’t believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer
and the poor getting poorer.” and “I like to say I’m
more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back
to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when
people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”
The achievement of which Seeger is the most
proud is his Hudson River clean-up project, near where he and his wife
have lived for decades. He began the Hudson River Sloop Restoration,
Inc. in the late 1960s, and says he has learned more from it than from
anything else in his life. He raised over $60,000 to build a genuine
Hudson River sloop called “Clearwater.” The Clearwater now
promotes festivals at which residents along the Hudson River
collaborate to address pollution.
That was about forty years ago, and Seeger
considers it his greatest accomplishment, but he hasn’t quit his
activism. John Cronin, director of the Pace Academy for the Environment
at Pace University recently said:
“About two winters ago, on Route 9
outside Beacon, New York, one winter day, it was freezing --rainy and
slushy, a miserable winter day-- the war in Iraq is just heating up and
the country’s in a poor mood. I’m driving north, and on the
other side of the road I see from the back a tall, slim figure in a
hood and coat. I’m looking, and I can tell its Pete. He’s
standing there all by himself, and he’s holding up a big piece of
cardboard that clearly has something written on it. Cars and trucks are
going by him. He’s getting wet. He’s holding the homemade
sign above his head --he’s very tall, and his chin is raised the
way he does when he sings-- and he’s turning the sign in a
semi-circle, so that the drivers can see it as they pass, and some
people are honking and waving at him, and some people are giving him
the finger. He’s eighty-four years old. I know he’s got
some purpose, of course, but I don’t know what it is. What struck
me is that, whatever his intentions are, and obviously he wants people
to notice what he’s doing, he wants to make an impression--
anyway, whatever they are, he doesn’t call the newspapers and
say, ‘I’m Pete Seeger, here’s what I’m going to
do.’ He doesn’t cultivate publicity. That isn’t what
he does. He’s far more modest than that. He would never make a
fuss. He’s just standing out there in the cold and the sleet like
a scarecrow. I go a little bit down the road, so that I can turn and
come back, and when I get him in view again, this solitary and elderly
figure, I see that what he’s written on the sign is
‘Peace.’”
In Seeger’s own words, he says,
“I look upon myself as a link in a long chain, and let’s
hope there are many more links to come.” As I said earlier, Bruce
Springsteen is now a newly-added link in the chain of American folk
music. Springsteen recently said:
“I really immersed myself in Pete
Seeger’s songs, and it was very transformative. I heard a hundred
voices in those old folk songs, and stories from across the span of
American history --parlor music, church music, tavern music, street and
gutter music. I felt the connection almost intuitively, and that
certain things needed to be carried on; I wanted to continue doing
things that Pete had passed down and put his hand on. He had a real
sense of the musician as historical entity --of being a link in the
thread of people who sing in others’ voices and carry the
tradition forward-- and of the songwriter, in the daily history of the
place he lived, that songs were tools and, without sounding too
pretentious, righteous implements when connected to historical
consciousness. At the same time, Pete always maintained a tremendous
sense of fun and lightness, which is where his grace manifested itself.
It was cross-generational. He played for a lot of kids. And when I set
the musicians up in my house to make this record, and we started
playing Pete’s songs, [Springsteen said] my daughter said,
‘That sounds like fun-- what is that?’”
Between our Annual Meeting today, and our
Annual Meeting next year, let us be sensitive to all who come here with
hearts nearly breaking, and respond with soothing tenderness-- Between
our Annual Meeting today next year, let us stand for equity for all
people, for sustainable ecology, and for peace in every small village,
as Pete Seeger has stood for 87 years; between now and next year, let
the children receive from us optimism and tenacity; and between today
and next year, let there be music of richer depth, broader diversity,
and multiple voices; let there be a sense of humor, fun and lightness;
let us protest senseless violence, and let us make a joyful noise.
Let it be and, Amen.