Pete Seeger ~ The Nobel Cause

Which side are you on?

Pete Seeger~ a folk music icon, is being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Why a Nobel Peace Prize for Pete?
Pete Seeger is an ambassador for Peace and Social Justice and has been over the course of his 89-year lifetime. Using his prowess as a musician he worked to engage other people, from all walks of life and across generations, in causes to build a better and more civilized world: His work shows up wherever you look in the history of labor solidarity, growth of mass effort to end the Vietnam war, ban of nuclear weapons, work for international diplomacy, support of the Civil Rights Movement, for cleaning up the Hudson River and for environmental responsibility in general. Seeger popularized many of the IWW songs that helped in CIO organizing, and spread the Civil Rights Movement through promoting the SNCC Freedom Singers and making songs such as “We Shall Overcome,” known all over the world.

When subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for being a Communist, in August of 1955, at the height of the McCarthy period, Pete defended himself on the basis of the First Amendment, the right of an American citizen to free association, not the Fifth Amendment, protection against self incrimination. When he was boycotted from earning a living and practicing his craft on a national scale Pete appeared at union meetings, summer camps, Jr. High Schools, High Schools, and Colleges. His pay at times was as little as $5, but his value was priceless.

Seeger wrote “Where have all the Flowers gone”, “If I had a Hammer” (Hammer song), “Turn Turn Turn”, and “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” – a song written by Pete Seeger in 1967 during the Vietnam War.

Pete Seeger always held to the principals that people’s music is not only “good art” but is representational art through music. That reality often refers to the conditions of exploitation and oppression that were apparent to formally uneducated folk. Thus “folk music” was not cute or quaint or obsolete, but through Pete, a living, vibrant form of culture.

Turn Turn Turn ~ Pete Seeger ~ Sung by the Byrds

It is time that cultural work receives the recognition that the arts have great influence and global reach, that it is not only a medium of entertainment but of education, compassion and action. It is the desire of the committee that Pete Seeger be recognized as a beacon of integrity and principle in a time, and in a country, more defined by the
absence of those qualities than by their honor. ~ Eleanor Walden,

You can find the petition here:

Online Petition

Read more about the life & work of Pete Seeger here:

Seeger write up

“Little Boxes” is a song written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 that lampoons the development of suburbia and what many consider its bourgeois conformist values. It is best known through Pete Seeger’s performance of the song.

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