"Pete Seeger was a great American because he dared to be thought otherwise"

The quote is from Charlie Pierce's eloquent obit.

... Seeger spent his life in the most honorable way possible -- he tried to teach America about itself. First, he helped teach it about itself through all the music it had forgotten, a darker and more fascinating place than the America that was selling itself Brylcreem on the TV...
...

Then he tried to teach it by his example, by being a gentle presence in the issues of the day, from Civil Rights to Vietnam to nuclear power to environmentalism, to adventurism in Central America, to the Occupy movement... And he did it with a smile...

Good comments; a reminder of Seeger's involvement with the GI coffeehouse movement was followed by another commenter noting a revival since W. Bush's wars. Which got Pierce looking into it, and finding this.

Roy Edroso on Seeger the musician.

He was a lefty Brahmin who took up hill country music, and that mix could have and maybe should have been ridiculous, like a Puritan trying to swing. But it isn't, in him; Seeger felt the music... His singing was like John Carradine playing Casy in The Grapes of Wrath -- a performance, a bit stagey, but absolutely shot through with the true feeling of a time and a people. And with something timeless, too, that can still speak to us.

Digby, remembering some Seeger testimony before HUAC. And here: "How the private sphere coalesced with the public sector to destroy lives with the anti-communist blacklist." The latter links to Corey Robin, on the First Amendment stance Seeger took with HUAC—

While invoking the Fifth was not without its perils—most important, it could put someone on the blacklist... it had the advantage of keeping one out of jail. But the cost of the 5th was clear: though you could refuse to testify about yourself, you could not refuse to testify about others.

So Seeger invoked the First Amendment instead. A far riskier legal position—the Court had already held, in the case of the Hollywood Ten, that the First Amendment did not protect men and women who refused to testify before HUAC—it was the more principled stance. As Seeger explained later, "The Fifth means they can't ask me, the First means they can't ask anybody." And he paid for it. Cited for contempt of Congress, he was indicted, convicted, and sentenced to a year in prison. Eventually the sentence got overturned.

At Seeger's 90th birthday, Springsteen's words were perfect.

And Woody's "That side was made for you and me": as moving as ever.