Brad DeLong confesses to a guilty pleasure: Pete Seeger (link). But Brad seems discomfited: He learns that Dave Boaz recalls Seeger’s Stalinist past (link).
Boaz is right, but it’s worse than he realizes. I will play the old guy card here: I don’t remember the Hitler-Stalin pact, but I remember the Seeger with the Weavers from the 40s and Seeger solo from the 50s. I attended Seeger performances in little tiny halls where his long-necked banjo seemed to extend half way over the audience. I was enchanted by his banjo playing, thrilled by his energy and drive.. His “Wimaway” (back before Disney kidnapped it) was enough to knock me flat..
And as much as I loved the music, I always felt a creepy uneasiness at the Seeger schtick: it was sheer manipulation—no, worse, it was tacky down-market manipulation, vulgar Stalinism, proletarian art.
I grant there’s a complicated relationship between an artist and his art. At the same time that I was enchanted by Seeger’s “Tzena, Tzena,” I was dazzled by what Walter Gieseking could do with a Beethoven Sonata. It bothered me that Gieseking seemed to be a bit of a Nazi; but at least he didn’t get in my face about it. I could listen to the music and pretend that the politics wasn’t there.
I grant in general that the 50s were a treacherous time in American politics, a time when it was almost impossible to get everything right. Who would have guessed that I would live long enough to think that accused wife-killer Dr. Sam Sheppard was probably innocent and Alger Hiss, almost certainly guilty? Seeger is no more than a bit player in that story and the sensible path might be just to remember the good stuff, and forget about the vulgar Stalinism. But I really wish he had stuck to what he was good at; Id’ rather not have to remember him as part of a mean, dishonest, thuggish lot. Paraphrasing a great man, it was worse than a crime, it was kitsch.
Fn.: Yglesias doesn’t even like the music (link).
