Pete-like a growing number of Americans regarded this war as unnecessary, unjust and immoral. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and this World War II veteran-a member of Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation who served on the Island of Saipan in the US Army during the war-had something to say about this war of choice that Lyndon Johnson and his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had escalated after running a peace campaign for reelection against Barry Goldwater in 1964. However when it came time to rehearse the song he had chosen to sing for his appearance the CBS censors-euphemistically known as their Division of Programs and Practices-did intervene and said Pete could not sing his song- Waist Deep In the Big Muddy. They invited Pete Seeger to appear on their show that September and miraculously the show’s producers did not intervene. So what happened in 1967 that broke the blacklist for Pete Seeger after 17 years? The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS happened. ![]() To their everlasting credit both Bob Dylan and Joan Baez-the two leading figures in the 1960s folk revival with Baez on the cover of Time Magazine and Dylan on the cover of Life Magazine- nonetheless refused to appear on it because they wouldn’t book Pete. Pete-like the gentleman and humanitarian he was-stood above the fray and encouraged fellow performers-every one of whom owed their careers to him-to appear on the show regardless because it was good for folk music. That’s a dozen hit songs-enough for a Greatest Hits album, which Pete eventually had on Columbia Records-the same label that recorded Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.Īnd yet Jack Linkletter’s folk music show Hootenanny on ABC refused to book him despite the fact that the only reason folk music was popular enough to justify a prime time TV show was due to Pete Seeger having created the folk music revival through the Weavers-of whom poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg said, alluding to the Civil War poet Walt Whitman, “When I hear America singing, the Weavers are there.” Jack Linkletter famously said, when asked why Pete Seeger was never on his show, “He can’t hold an audience.” Put that on your short list of the stupidest, most ill-informed comments ever made about a major artist. Pete Seeger, the only one of them capable of pursuing a solo performing career, never appeared on a network television show until 1967 despite hit songs like Turn, Turn, Turn (the Byrds), If I Had a Hammer (Peter, Paul & Mary), Where Have All the Flowers Gone (The Kingston Trio), Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (Jimmie Rodgers), Guantanamera (The Sandpipers), Wimoweh (recorded under the title The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens), Tzena, Tzena, Tzena (the Weavers), Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land and So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You (the Weavers), Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene (the Weavers) and his own hit recording of Malvina Reynolds song Little Boxes. The Weavers were effectively destroyed just as they were really getting started and saw two years of nightclub and concert bookings cancelled overnight. In 1950 The Weavers-the folk quartet he, with Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert, founded in 1949 and shot to the top of the Hit Parade with Leadbelly’s theme song Goodnight Irene-were cited by the entertainment industry’s blacklist Red Channels-which in turn gave rise to a book that specifically targeted folk singers called Marxist Minstrels. ![]() ![]() ![]() It is the song Pete Seeger wrote and sang that fully restored his place in the American pantheon and public media after 17 years of being blacklisted from network television. Waist Deep In the Big Muddy is the Mona Lisa of protest songs, not because it is the greatest antiwar song ever written-though it surely is that-but because it occupies a historical place that will never be duplicated.
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