Pete Seeger

Peter Seeger (born May 3, 1919 in New York City), almost universally known as "Pete Seeger", is a folk singer and political activist. He was a major contributor to folk and protest music in the 1950s and the 1960s. He is perhaps best known as the author or co-author of the songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", "If I Had a Hammer", and "Turn, Turn, Turn", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and which are still sung all over the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962) and Johnny Rivers (1965), as "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn," in the mid-1960's.

Quotes

• "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."
• "My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologize for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader."
• "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. But if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I would have been one of the first people thrown in jail."
• "Plagiarism is the basis of all culture." Seeger quoting his father.
• "Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple."