Pete Seeger was part of the folk scene from the late forties. By the mid-fifties, he was in trouble for views expressed in early protest songs: he was black-listed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
During the sixties, his pacifism and support of the civil rights movement made him a folk hero. With his banjo, he sang for the underdog: from migrant farm workers and union men. At the beginning of the folk wave, he formed the Weavers in 1948.
Among his most famous songs were Goodnight Irene and his own composition Where have all the Flowers Gone? With Lee Hays, he co-wrote If I had a Hammer; in the sixties, everyone sang that.
Seeger lived to the ripe old age, and died last month aged 94 after a brief stay in a New York hospital. According to CBC, his granddaughter later reported that only ten days earlier, he had been chopping wood. In 2012, when he was 92, his lifetime of work was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him a Distinguished Service Award.
In spite of the government having banned his singing on radio forty years earlier, in 1996, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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