Much will be said and has been said about Pete Seeger, who died Monday at 94, as an activist and musician. Blacklisted, tireless, stubborn, and funny, he wrote a lot of songs that seem to have simply always existed: "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?", "If I Had A Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn."
But he was something else, too: He was a person who believed deeply that people should sing, in groups, with harmony, in public — and not just in church. He was a passionate director of probably thousands of pickup choirs, formed at the beginnings of performances and disbanded when they were over. That became even more true as he got older and his voice weakened, but it was true all along.
Seeger's album Singalong Sanders Theater was recorded in 1980 at Sanders Theater in Cambridge. On it, he plays — and, when necessary, teaches the crowd — "L'Internationale" and "If I Had A Hammer," but also "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" and even "Hole In The Bucket." (He was not kidding about things you would think of as camp songs. Ever.) He explains how "Acres Of Clams," a song about digging for clams in Puget Sound, originated as the 19th-century song "Old Rosin The Beau," a flat-out old-time pun, and how it went through several variations as, among other things, a campaign song. He teaches them a version of "Old Time Religion" that rhymes "Aphrodite" with "see-through nightie" and uses the expression "I'm a Zarathustra booster." He sings "Down-a-Down," a song that spends several verses building up to a punch line about a failed hookup attempt, and he tells them the story of the Homestead Strike.
And always, always, on this record and others, he's yelling for the tenors and trying to give them their note. These shows were attended by a lot of people who liked to sing and liked to sing in harmony, so they had a built-in advantage. And you can get guys to jump in on a low part. And you can usually get women to sing the melody and an improvised alto part. But oh, tenors. You have to encourage tenors.