Pete Seeger: The Power of Song. Dir. by Jim Brown. Prod. by Norman Lear and Toshi Seeger. Concert Productions International/Grand Entertainment, 2007. 93 mins. (Jim Brown Productions, http://www.jimbrownfilms.com/)

Abstract

The cover of the dvdPete Seeger: The Power of Song presents the complicated legacy of the singer's music and politics: “musician, patriot, activist, environmentalist, blacklisted, legend.” The director, Jim Brown, uses a combination of interviews with the singer and his extended family and limited bits of archival footage to tell the story of Seeger and the mid-twentieth-century folk music revival. Seeger's father, himself an accomplished pianist and musicologist, introduced his teenaged son to the five-string banjo at a folk music festival in Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1930s. Seeger honed his talents and sense of social justice while working for the American Folk Music Archive in Washington, D.C. Never shy about adopting an unpopular cause, the self-described “old lefty” embraced the Popular Front in the 1930s, championed Henry Wallace's campaign in 1948, and participated in the riotous Paul Robeson concerts in Peekskill, New York, in 1949. Seeger struck commercial...