WHEN PETE WAS " KING"

This review is being used to describe several of Pete Seeger's recordings. Although I have listened to most of his songs and recordings these represent those that best represent his life's work.

An Essential Recording

This is not just an essential recording for any Pete Seeger fan - this is a recording that should be required listening in every school in America. The songs Pete performed that night in 1963 touched on what's right with America, what needed changing and how we could begin to understand that we're all interdependent on one small planet. When I first listened to this recording I was reminded how this concert and the original LP were the first opportunity for most of the world to hear songs like "We Shall Overcome" In essence, it captured the seeds of the major events that would occur later in the 60's and beyond to this day. The songs on this recording are as relevant today as they were in 1963.

There's room for this in everyone's CD case

Pete Seeger is a mirror: you see yourself in him. If you're a child, you latch onto his easygoing voice and the humor evident in tunes like "A Little Brand New Baby" and "Little Boxes." If you're a teenager, you cling to the drama in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Who Killed Norma Jean?" If you're an adult--younger or elderly--you can appreciate the joy in life evinced by Seeger on every song on the album. It brings tears to my eyes nearly every time I listen to "Tshotsholosa," a Rhodesian road worker's song. Seeger's gift is to make every song a proclamation of the beauty of life and the wonder of other people. He is endlessly curious and polymathic--songs on this album include the traditional and the new, the English and the Portuguese, the German and the Spanish, the despairing and the overjoyed. Think of this album as a wistfully lovely time capsule in the few months before the 1960s finally exploded. It was recorded just five months before the assassination of JFK (one of Seeger's Harvard classmates) and just five years before the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. It simultaneously bears the innocent stamp of the 1950s without that decade's plastic falsity--and the righteous indignation of the 1960s without the tang of defeat that accompanied so many other things from that era.