Pete Seeger

You wanna know how influential Pete Seeger is in the world of folk music? Not only was there no real folk scene when he started recording, but the long-playing record had yet to be invented. It's only fitting that our survey of the granddaddy of all folkies opens up with the granddaddy of all folk sings, "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement and freedom throughout the world. Seeger's adaptation from the Book of Ecclesiastes, "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)," gave the Byrds their biggest hit, but you gotta hear the original. And Seeger was singing green before most people even knew the word ecology, as you'll discover in "My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)."

In Next Steps, we hear Pete sing in a legendary band, sing for kids, and sing with one of his band members' kids.

Long before the days of the Kingston Trio and Rooftop Singers, Pete Seeger played with some of folk's biggest stars . . . and never stopped. In the '40s, the Almanac Singers boasted among membership the likes of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and — you guessed it — Pete. "Which Side Are You On?" blasts out of the speakers with pile-driver power, as the Almanac Singers make it clear that you don't have to look hard to find the union label on their sleeves. It wasn't all knuckles and picket signs, though, as the Weavers prove in the eternal campfire favorite "On Top of Old Smoky." And Pete teams up with a second-generation folk legend — Woody Guthrie's son Arlo — for a backporch jam on Arlo's biggest hit, "City of New Orleans."

In Deep Cuts, Pete plays some songs you know from others, and one that's indelibly his.

Some of Pete's biggest songs are ones that influenced somebody else to record them. Take the "Wreck of the John B," which you probably first heard as "Sloop John B." The Weavers' version, complete with calypso-style horns, inspired the Kingston Trio's cover, and that's the one Al Jardine took to Brian Wilson for a rock 'n' roll rewrite. The Kingston Trio themselves had a hit with the Seeger-penned lament "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?," and even though it's been covered literally dozens of times, from Dolly Parton to Marlene Dietrich, Pete and his fingerpicked banjo bring an unadorned simplicity to it that underscores the lyric without veering into melodrama. And we go back to the Weavers one last time, for their roof-raising-hootenanny-as-history-lesson, "Wasn't That a Time," a song the group not only recorded several times throughout their career, but which also provided the title for the award-winning 1982 documentary that's a must-watch for any folkie with an interest in the music's heritage.

It might be stretching the truth — but only a little bit — to say that if there were no Pete Seeger, there'd be no folk scene at all in America. After all, he's been making music for seven decades now, and his first band (arguably folk's first-ever supergroup) even boasted Woody Guthrie as a member. When he cofounded his next band, the Weavers, he made national headlines and got blacklisted for being, um, a little too radical for '50s-era tastes. In the '60s, his anti-Vietnam protest song, "Waist Deep In the Big Muddy," was so controversial that his performance of it on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour even got the show canceled! But what goes around comes around, and while the blacklisters have been disgraced, Pete, at the age of 89, was invited to perform at the Presidential inauguration, still rail-thin, still whip-smart, still fighting the good fight.