American icon Pete Seeger died Monday, January 27, 2014.
Author and filmmaker Silver Donald Cameron wrote this newspaper column about Pete Seeger in the dark days of 2001, and F&O re-publishes it here, free of charge, with Silver Donald’s kind permission. An excerpt:
In June, 1969, I was rattling away at my old Remington manual typewriter when my five-year-old daughter Leslie wandered into my workroom.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing a letter to Pete Seeger,” I said. I was hoping that Seeger would consider a benefit concert for The Mysterious East, a dissident magazine in Canada’s Maritimes that I helped to edit. At five, Leslie already knew and loved Seeger’s music, especially his children’s album Strangers and Cousins.
“Pete Seeger? Really?”
“Really.”
“You tell Pete Seeger,” she said gravely, “that I’m having my birthday — and he can come!”
Click here to read Pete Seeger: Farewell to a Giant, in F&O’s Loose Leaf salon.