Mihir S Sharma: Sing along

When a great man dies, look to what his opponents say about him for the truth. And the US right's house journal, National Review, which has called Pete Seeger "America's most successful communist" and a "totalitarian troubadour", had this to say: "Those who might disagree with Seeger on all sorts of issues, owe him, more than anything, grudging admiration. The popular culture that honoured him in life... did so in no small part because Pete Seeger himself did as much as anyone to move it to the left." And how did he do this? "Pete Seeger led the way in devising the formula that pushed popular culture leftward: the music (or the movies) had to work as art and must avoid heavy-handedness."

Perhaps that is too cynical a view of one of the greatest rebels of the past 100 years, but it is worth noting anyway. Seeger was born into a household that stood firmly with the activists of an almost-forgotten past, when the trade union movement Industrial Workers of the World fought and won labour rights in a far more reflexively free-market time through strikes, pickets - and songs with very pointed lyrics. By 1949, however, he had left the Communist Party. He was always outspoken as to why; because he felt that freedom of speech and the right to dissent were the most important of values, and no equality would be possible without those. In the McCarthy era, when Seeger appeared before the US Congress and was questioned about his opinions and associations, he refused to answer or incriminate anyone else - but he did say this: "I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity." It wasn't calculation or cynicism that led to songs like We Will Overcome or Where Have All the Flowers Gone; it was the desire to reach out, and to convert. A half-century later, asked to describe himself in one word, Seeger answered: "compromiser ... I compromised all my life, in one way or another."

His refusal to answer Congress' questions led to Seeger being convicted for contempt; although that was overturned by a higher court, he was kept off TV and radio for the 15 most productive years of his life. When he finally got back on, in 1967, he chose to sing a song about soldiers pressing forward even when waist-deep in mud, because of orders from on high - criticism, very unusual for network TV of the time, of the Vietnam War. Naturally, the network cut it; but the outcry was so huge that, a few months later, they had to invite Seeger on again, to sing it. The US, to the disgust of those people who in 1950 voted for McCarthy and today read National Review, was changing.

When he came to India in 1996, he played sold-out concerts at Siri Fort in Delhi and Nazrul Manch in Calcutta. But, for those in the audience, it was transformative: they were less concerts, more singalongs. That's how he liked them; participation was all. It was how you got people thinking about politics - where, too, participation was all. And Seeger participated in them all: from the unions' movements during the Great Depression, to environmental movements long before it became trendy; from civil rights in the 1960s to protests against two unjust American wars 30 years apart.

There is a story about Pete Seeger, from an old New Yorker profile, that is really all you need to know about the man. It dates to the winter of 2004, a terrible time in the US, when flags were everywhere and good sense was not, when lies had led it into war in Iraq and those who argued restraint were mocked and attacked everywhere. Here it is, in the words of the American academic John Cronin: "I'm driving north, and on the other side of the road I see from the back a tall, slim figure in a hood and coat... Pete's standing there all by himself, and he's holding up a big piece of cardboard that clearly has something written on it. Cars and trucks are going by him. He's getting wet. He's holding the homemade sign above his head - he's very tall, and his chin is raised the way he does when he sings - and he's turning the sign in a semicircle, so that the drivers can see it as they pass, and some people are honking and waving at him, and some people are giving him the finger. He's 84 years old... He doesn't call the newspapers and say, 'I'm Pete Seeger, here's what I'm going to do.' ... He would never make a fuss. He's just standing out there in the cold and the sleet like a scarecrow. I go a little bit down the road, so that I can turn and come back, and when I get him in view again, this solitary and elderly figure, I see that what he's written on the sign is 'Peace'."

Pete Seeger was 94 when he died. But he died too soon.

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