Pete Seeger's New York Roots – The New York Times

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Footsteps
By Emily Brennan
The poet Carl Sandburg called him America’s tuning fork, and for good reason.
Pete Seeger drew upon many traditions of American folk music, from spirituals to mountain music, throughout the almost eight decades he sang, wrote and collected songs. By the time he died at 94 last year, nearly every region of the United States could lay claim to him.
It was in North Carolina, for example, where in 1936 he first heard the five-string banjo, which would become his instrument of choice, at a square dance festival.
There he was at Bowdoin College in Maine in 1960, performing his protest song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” after he had been blacklisted from national venues and indicted on a charge of contempt of Congress because of his political affiliations, including membership in the Communist Party in the 1940s.
In Hattiesburg, Miss., hand-in-hand with churchgoers in 1964, he led rounds of “We Shall Overcome,” which he adapted from old spirituals.
And in 2009 in Washington, D.C., Mr. Seeger gave Americans what was likely their last memory of him: The beanpole-thin 89-year-old implored thousands to join him in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at the Lincoln Memorial at President Obama’s Inaugural concert.
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