Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Many of his songs became standards noted for their witty, urbane lyrics, and many of his scores found success on Broadway and in film.

Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, Porter defied his grandfather’s wishes and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn to musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike many successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the music for his songs. After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 1930s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate. It won the first Tony Award for Best Musical.

Porter’s other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes, Can-Can and Silk Stockings. His numerous hit songs include “Night and Day”, “Begin the Beguine”, “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “Well, Did You Evah!”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “You’re the Top”. He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Born to Dance (1936), which featured the song “You’d Be So Easy to Love”; Rosalie (1937), which featured “In the Still of the Night”; High Society (1956), which included “True Love”; and Les Girls (1957).

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Life and career

Early years

Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, the only surviving child of a wealthy family. His father, Samuel Fenwick Porter, was a druggist by trade. His mother, Kate, was the indulged daughter of James Omar “J. O.” Cole, “the richest man in Indiana”, a coal and timber speculator who dominated the family.   J. O. Cole built the couple a house on his Peru-area property, known as Westleigh Farms. After high school, Porter returned to his childhood home only for occasional visits.

Porter’s strong-willed mother doted on him and began his musical training at an early age. He learned the violin at age six, the piano at eight, and wrote his first operetta (with help from his mother) at ten. She falsified his recorded birth year, changing it from 1891 to 1893 to make him appear more precocious. His father, a shy and unassertive man, played a lesser role in Porter’s upbringing, although as an amateur poet, he may have influenced his son’s gifts for rhyme and meter. Porter’s father was also a talented singer and pianist, but the father-son relationship was not close.

J. O. Cole wanted his grandson to become a lawyer, and with that in mind, sent him to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts in 1905. Porter brought an upright piano with him to school and found that music, and his ability to entertain, made it easy for him to make friends. Porter did well in school and rarely came home to visit. He became class valedictorian and was rewarded by his grandfather with a tour of France, Switzerland and Germany. Entering Yale College in 1909, Porter majored in English, minored in music, and also studied French. He was a member of Scroll and Key and Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and contributed to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He was an early member of the Whiffenpoofs a cappella singing group and participated in several other music clubs; in his senior year, he was elected president of the Yale Glee Club and was its principal soloist.

Porter wrote 300 songs while at Yale,[ including student songs such as the football fight songs “Bulldog”  and “Bingo Eli Yale” (aka “Bingo, That’s The Lingo!”) that are still played at Yale. During college, Porter became acquainted with New York City’s vibrant nightlife, taking the train there for dinner, theater, and nights on the town with his classmates, before returning to New Haven, Connecticut, early in the morning. He also wrote musical comedy scores for his fraternity, the Yale Dramatic Association, and as a student at Harvard – Cora (1911), And the Villain Still Pursued Her (1912), The Pot of Gold (1912), The Kaleidoscope (1913) and Paranoia (1914) – which helped prepare him for a career as a Broadway and Hollywood composer and lyricist. After graduating from Yale, Porter enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1913. He soon felt that he was not destined to be a lawyer, and, at the suggestion of the dean of the law school, switched to Harvard’s music department, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Pietro Yon. His mother did not object to this move, but it was kept secret from J. O. Cole.

In 1915, Porter’s first song on Broadway, “Esmeralda”, appeared in the revue Hands Up. The quick success was immediately followed by failure: his first Broadway production, in 1916, See America First, a “patriotic comic opera” modeled on Gilbert and Sullivan, with a book by T. Lawrason Riggs, was a flop, closing after two weeks. Porter spent the next year in New York City before going overseas during World War I.

Paris and marriage

In 1917, when the United States entered World War I, Porter moved to Paris to work with the Duryea Relief organization. Some writers have been skeptical about Porter’s claim to have served in the French Foreign Legion, but the Legion lists Porter as one of its soldiers and displays his portrait at its museum in Aubagne. By some accounts, he served in North Africa and was transferred to the French Officers School at Fontainebleau, teaching gunnery to American soldiers. An obituary notice in The New York Times stated that, while in the Legion, “he had a specially constructed portable piano made for him so that he could carry it on his back and entertain the troops in their bivouacs.” Another account, given by Porter, is that he joined the recruiting department of the American Aviation Headquarters, but, according to his biographer Stephen Citron, there is no record of his joining this or any other branch of the forces.

Porter maintained a luxury apartment in Paris, where he entertained lavishly. His parties were extravagant and scandalous, with “much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians and a large surplus of recreational drugs”. In 1918, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a rich, Louisville, Kentucky-born divorcée eight years his senior. She was beautiful and well-connected socially; the couple shared mutual interests, including a love of travel, and she became Porter’s confidante and companion. The couple married the following year. She was in no doubt about Porter’s homosexuality, but it was mutually advantageous for them to marry. For Linda, it offered continued social status and a partner who was the antithesis of her abusive first husband. For Porter, it brought a respectable heterosexual front in an era when homosexuality was not publicly acknowledged. They were, moreover, genuinely devoted to each other and remained married from December 19, 1919, until her death in 1954. Linda remained protective of her social position and, believing that classical music might be a more prestigious outlet than Broadway for her husband’s talents, tried to use her connections to find him suitable teachers, including Igor Stravinsky, but was unsuccessful. Finally, Porter enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he studied orchestration and counterpoint with Vincent d’Indy. Meanwhile, Porter’s first big hit was the song “Old-Fashioned Garden” from the revue Hitchy-Koo in 1919. In 1920, he contributed the music of several songs to the musical A Night Out.

Marriage did not diminish Porter’s taste for extravagant luxury. The Porter home on the rue Monsieur near Les Invalides was a palatial house with platinum wallpaper and chairs upholstered in zebra skin. In 1923, Porter came into an inheritance from his grandfather, and the Porters began living in rented palaces in Venice. He once hired the entire Ballets Russes to entertain his guests, and for a party at Ca’ Rezzonico, which he rented for $4,000 a month ($60,000 in current value), he hired 50 gondoliers to act as footmen and had a troupe of tightrope walkers perform in a blaze of lights. In the midst of this extravagant lifestyle, Porter continued to write songs with his wife’s encouragement.

Porter received few commissions for songs in the years immediately after his marriage. He had the occasional number interpolated into other writers’ revues in Britain and the U.S. For a C. B. Cochran show in 1921, he had two successes with the comedy numbers “The Blue Boy Blues” and “Olga, Come Back to the Volga”. In 1923, in collaboration with Gerald Murphy, he composed a short ballet, originally titled Landed and then Within the Quota, satirically depicting the adventures of an immigrant to America who becomes a film star. The work, written for the Ballets suédois, lasts about 16 minutes. It was orchestrated by Charles Koechlin and shared the same opening night as Milhaud’s La création du monde. Porter’s work was one of the earliest symphonic jazz-based compositions, predating George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue by four months, and was well received by both French and American reviewers after its premiere at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October 1923.

After a successful New York performance the following month, the Ballets suédois toured the work in the U.S., performing it 69 times. A year later the company disbanded, and the score was lost until it was reconstructed from Porter’s and Koechlin’s manuscripts between 1966 and 1990, with help from Milhaud and others. Porter had less success with his work on The Greenwich Village Follies (1924). He wrote most of the original score, but his songs were gradually dropped during the Broadway run, and by the time of the post-Broadway tour in 1925, all his numbers had been deleted. Frustrated by the public response to most of his work, Porter nearly gave up songwriting as a career, although he continued to compose songs for friends and perform at private parties.

Broadway and West End success

At the age of 36, Porter reintroduced himself to Broadway in 1928 with the musical Paris, his first hit. It was commissioned by E. Ray Goetz at the instigation of Goetz’s wife and the show’s star, Irène Bordoni. She had wanted Rodgers and Hart to write the songs, but they were unavailable, and Porter’s agent persuaded Goetz to hire Porter instead. In August 1928, Porter’s work on the show was interrupted by the death of his father. He hurried back to Indiana to comfort his mother before returning to work. The songs for the show included “Let’s Misbehave” and one of his best-known list songs, “Let’s Do It”, which was introduced by Bordoni and Arthur Margetson. The show opened on Broadway on October 8, 1928. The Porters did not attend the first night because Porter was in Paris supervising another show for which he had been commissioned, La Revue, at a nightclub. This was also a success, and, in Citron’s phrase, Porter was finally “accepted into the upper echelon of Broadway songwriters”. Cochran now wanted more from Porter than isolated extra songs; he planned a West End extravaganza similar to Ziegfeld’s shows, with a Porter score and a large international cast led by Jessie Matthews, Sonnie Hale and Tilly Losch. The revue, Wake Up and Dream, ran for 263 performances in London, after which Cochran transferred it to New York in 1929. On Broadway, business was badly affected by the 1929 Wall Street crash, and the production ran for only 136 performances. From Porter’s point of view, it was nonetheless a success, as his song “What Is This Thing Called Love?” became immensely popular.

Porter’s new fame brought him offers from Hollywood, but because his score for Paramount’s The Battle of Paris was undistinguished, and its star, Gertrude Lawrence, was miscast, the film was not a success. Citron expresses the view that Porter was not interested in cinema and “noticeably wrote down for the movies.” Still on a Gallic theme, Porter’s last Broadway show of the 1920s was Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), for which he wrote 28 numbers, including “You Do Something to Me”, “You’ve Got That Thing” and “The Tale of the Oyster”. The show received mixed notices. One critic wrote, “the lyrics alone are enough to drive anyone but P. G. Wodehouse into retirement”, but others dismissed the songs as “pleasant” and “not an outstanding hit song in the show”. As it was a lavish and expensive production, nothing less than full houses would suffice, and after only three weeks, the producers announced that they would close it. Irving Berlin, who admired and championed Porter, took out a paid press advertisement calling the show “The best musical comedy I’ve heard in years. … One of the best collections of song numbers I have ever listened to”. This saved the show, which ran for 254 performances, considered a successful run at the time.

1930s

Ray Goetz, producer of Paris and Fifty Million Frenchmen, the success of which had kept him solvent when other producers were bankrupted by the post-crash slump in Broadway business, invited Porter to write a musical show about the other city that he knew and loved: New York. Goetz offered the team with whom Porter had last worked: Herbert Fields writing the book and Porter’s old friend Monty Woolley directing. The New Yorkers (1930) acquired instant notoriety for including a song about a streetwalker, “Love for Sale”. Originally performed by Kathryn Crawford in a street setting, critical disapproval led Goetz to reassign the number to Elisabeth Welch in a nightclub scene. The lyric was considered too explicit for radio at the time, though it was recorded and aired as an instrumental and rapidly became a standard. Porter often referred to it as his favorite of his songs. The New Yorkers also included the hit “I Happen to Like New York”.

Next came Fred Astaire’s last stage show, Gay Divorce (1932). It featured a hit that became Porter’s best-known song, “Night and Day”. Despite mixed press (some critics were reluctant to accept Astaire without his previous partner, his sister Adele), the show ran for a profitable 248 performances, and the rights to the film, retitled The Gay Divorcee, were sold to RKO Pictures.[n 10] Porter followed this with a West End show for Gertrude Lawrence, Nymph Errant (1933), presented by Cochran at the Adelphi Theatre, where it ran for 154 performances. Among the hit songs Porter composed for the show were “Experiment” and “The Physician” for Lawrence, and “Solomon” for Elisabeth Welch.

In 1934, producer Vinton Freedley came up with a new approach to producing musicals. Instead of commissioning book, music and lyrics and then casting the show, Freedley sought to create an ideal musical with stars and writers all engaged from the outset. The stars he wanted were Ethel Merman, William Gaxton and comedian Victor Moore. He planned a story about a shipwreck and a desert island, and for the book he turned to P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. For the songs, he decided on Porter. By telling each of these that he had already signed the others, Freedley gathered his ideal team together.[n 11] A drastic last-minute rewrite was necessitated by a major shipping accident that dominated the news and made Bolton and Wodehouse’s book seem tasteless. Nevertheless, the show, Anything Goes, was an immediate hit. Porter wrote what many consider his greatest score of this period. The New Yorker magazine’s review said, “Mr. Porter is in class by himself”, and Porter subsequently called it one of his two perfect shows, along with the later Kiss Me, Kate. Its songs include “I Get a Kick Out of You”, “All Through the Night”, “You’re the Top” (one of his best-known list songs), and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”, as well as the title number. The show ran for 420 performances in New York (a particularly long run in the 1930s) and 261 in London. Porter, despite his lessons in orchestration from d’Indy, did not orchestrate his musicals. Anything Goes was orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett and Hans Spialek. Now at the height of his success, Porter was able to enjoy the opening night of his musicals; he made grand entrances and sat in front, apparently relishing the show as much as any audience member. Russel Crouse commented “Cole’s opening-night behaviour is as indecent as that of a bridegroom who has a good time at his own wedding.”

Anything Goes was the first of five Porter shows featuring Merman. He loved her loud, brassy voice and wrote many numbers that displayed her strengths. Jubilee (1935), written with Moss Hart while on a cruise around the world, was not a major hit, running for only 169 performances, but it featured two songs that have since become standards, “Begin the Beguine” and “Just One of Those Things”. Red, Hot and Blue (1936), featuring Merman, Jimmy Durante and Bob Hope, ran for 183 performances and introduced “It’s De-Lovely”, “Down in the Depths (on the Ninetieth Floor)”, and “Ridin’ High”. The relative failure of these shows convinced Porter that his songs did not appeal to a broad enough audience. In an interview, he said “Sophisticated allusions are good for about six weeks … more fun, but only for myself and about eighteen other people, all of whom are first-nighters anyway. Polished, urbane and adult playwriting in the musical field is strictly a creative luxury.”

Porter also wrote for Hollywood in the mid-1930s. His scores include those for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films Born to Dance (1936), with James Stewart, featuring “You’d Be So Easy to Love” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, and Rosalie (1937), featuring “In the Still of the Night”. He wrote the score of the short film Paree, Paree, in 1935, using some of the songs from Fifty Million Frenchmen. Porter also composed the cowboy song “Don’t Fence Me In” for Adios, Argentina, an unproduced movie, in 1934, but it did not become a hit until Roy Rogers sang it in the 1944 film Hollywood Canteen. Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, and other artists also popularized it in the 1940s. The Porters moved to Hollywood in December 1935, but Porter’s wife did not like the movie environment, and Porter’s homosexual peccadillos, formerly very discreet, became less so; she retreated to their Paris house. When his film a*signment on Rosalie was finished in 1937, Porter hastened to Paris to make peace with Linda, but she remained cool. After a walking tour of Europe with his friends, Porter returned to New York in October 1937 without her. They were soon reunited by an accident Porter suffered.

On October 24, 1937, Porter was riding with Countess Edith di Zoppola and Duke Fulco di Verdura at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, when his horse rolled on him and crushed his legs, leaving him substantially crippled and in constant pain for the rest of his life. Though doctors told Porter’s wife and mother that his right leg would have to be amputated, and possibly the left one as well, he refused to have the procedure. Linda rushed from Paris to be with him, and supported him in his refusal of amputation. He remained in the hospital for seven months before being allowed to go home to his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He resumed work as soon as he could, finding it took his mind off his perpetual pain.

Porter’s first show after his accident was not a success. You Never Know (1938), starring Clifton Webb, Lupe Vélez and Libby Holman, ran for only 78 performances. The score included the songs “From Alpha to Omega” and “At Long Last Love”.[78] He returned to success with Leave It to Me! (1938); the show introduced Mary Martin, singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and other numbers included “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love” and “From Now On”. Porter’s last show of the 1930s was DuBarry Was a Lady (1939), a particularly risqué show starring Merman and Bert Lahr. After a pre-Broadway tour, during which it ran into trouble with Boston censors, it achieved 408 performances, beginning at the 46th Street Theatre. The score included “But in the Morning, No” (which was banned from the airwaves), “Do I Love You?”, “Well, Did You Evah!”, “Katie Went to Haiti” and another of Porter’s up-tempo list songs, “Friendship”. At the end of 1939, Porter contributed six songs to the film Broadway Melody of 1940 for Fred Astaire, George Murphy and Eleanor Powell.

Meanwhile, as political unrest increased in Europe, Porter’s wife closed their Paris house in 1939, and the next year bought a country home in the Berkshire mountains, near Williamstown, Massachusetts, which she decorated with elegant furnishings from their Paris home. Porter spent time in Hollywood, New York and Williamstown.

1940s and postwar

Panama Hattie (1940) was Porter’s longest-running hit so far, running in New York for 501 performances despite the absence of any enduring Porter songs. It starred Merman, Arthur Treacher and Betty Hutton. Let’s Face It! (1941), starring Danny Kaye, had an even better run, with 547 performances in New York.[87] This, too, lacked any numbers that became standards, and Porter always counted it among his lesser efforts.[88] Something for the Boys (1943), starring Merman, ran for 422 performances, and Mexican Hayride (1944), starring Bobby Clark, with June Havoc, ran for 481 performances. These shows, too, are short of Porter standards. The critics did not pull their punches, complaining about the lack of hit tunes and the generally low standard of the scores. After two flops, Seven Lively Arts (1944) (which featured the standard “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”) and Around the World (1946), many thought that Porter’s best period was over.

Between Broadway musicals, Porter continued to write for Hollywood. His film scores of this period were You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) with Astaire and Rita Hayworth, Something to Shout About (1943) with Don Ameche, Janet Blair and William Gaxton, and Mississippi Belle (1943–44), which was abandoned before filming began. He also cooperated in the making of the film Night and Day (1946), a largely fictional biography of Porter, with Cary Grant implausibly cast in the lead. The critics scoffed, but the film was a huge success, chiefly because of the wealth of vintage Porter numbers in it. The biopic’s success contrasted starkly with the failure of Vincente Minnelli’s film The Pirate (1948), with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, in which five new Porter songs received little attention.

From this low spot, Porter made a conspicuous comeback in 1948 with Kiss Me, Kate. It was by far his most successful show, running for 1,077 performances in New York and 400 in London. The production won the Tony Award for Best Musical (the first Tony awarded in that category), and Porter won for best composer and lyricist. The score includes “Another Op’nin’, Another Show”, “Wunderbar”, “So In Love”, “We Open in Venice”, “Tom, Dick or Harry”, “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua”, “Too Darn Hot”, “Always True to You (in My Fashion)”, and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”.

Porter began the 1950s with Out of This World (1950), which had some good numbers but too much camp and vulgarity, and was not greatly successful. His next show, Can-Can (1952), featuring “C’est Magnifique” and “It’s All Right with Me”, was another hit, running for 892 performances. Porter’s last original Broadway production, Silk Stockings (1955), featuring “All of You”, was also successful, with a run of 477 performances. Porter wrote two more film scores and music for a television special before ending his Hollywood career. The film High Society (1956), starring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly, included Porter’s last major hit song “True Love”. It was adapted as a stage musical of the same name. Porter also wrote numbers for the film Les Girls (1957), which starred Gene Kelly. His final score was for the CBS television special Aladdin (1958).

Last years

Porter’s mother died in 1952, and his wife died of emphysema in 1954. By 1958, Porter’s injuries caused a series of ulcers on his right leg. After 34 operations, it had to be amputated and replaced with an artificial limb. His friend Noël Coward visited him in the hospital and wrote in his diary, “The lines of ceaseless pain have been wiped from his face…I am convinced that his whole life will cheer up and that his work will profit accordingly.” In fact, Porter never wrote another song after the amputation and spent the remaining six years of his life in relative seclusion, seeing only intimate friends. He continued to live in the Waldorf Towers in New York in his memorabilia-filled apartment. On weekends, he often visited an estate in the Berkshires, and he stayed in California during the summers.

Porter died of kidney failure on October 15, 1964, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 73. He is interred in Mount Hope Cemetery in his native Peru, Indiana, between his wife and father.

Tributes and legacy

Many artists have recorded Porter songs, and dozens have released entire albums of his songs. In 1956, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald released Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook. In 1972, she released another collection, Ella Loves Cole. Among the many album collections of Porter songs are the following: Oscar Peterson Plays the Cole Porter Songbook (1959); Anita O’Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May (1959); All Through the Night: Julie London Sings the Choicest of Cole Porter (1965); Rosemary Clooney Sings the Music of Cole Porter (1982); and Anything Goes: Stephane Grappelli & Yo-Yo Ma Play (Mostly) Cole Porter (1989). In 1990 Dionne Warwick released Dionne Sings Cole Porter. In that same year, Red Hot + Blue was released as a benefit CD for AIDS research and featured 20 Cole Porter songs recorded by artists such as U2 and Annie Lennox.

Additional recording collections include Frank Sinatra Sings the Select Cole Porter (1996) and John Barrowman Swings Cole Porter (2004); Barrowman played “Jack” in the 2004 film De-Lovely. Other singers who have paid tribute to Porter include the Swedish pop music group Gyllene Tider, which recorded a song called “Flickan i en Cole Porter-sång” (“That Girl from the Cole Porter Song”) in 1982. He is referenced in the merengue song “The Call of the Wild” by David Byrne on his 1989 album Rei Momo. He also is mentioned in the song “Tonite It Shows” by Mercury Rev on their 1998 album Deserter’s Songs.

In 1965, Judy Garland performed a medley of Porter’s songs at the 37th Academy Awards shortly after Porter’s death. In 1980, Porter’s music was used for the score of Happy New Year, based on the Philip Barry play Holiday. The cast of The Carol Burnett Show paid a tribute to Porter in a humorous sketch in their CBS television series. You’re the Top: The Cole Porter Story, a video of archival material and interviews, and Red, Hot and Blue, a video of artists performing Porter’s music, were released in 1990 to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Porter’s birth. In contrast to the highly embellished 1946 screen biography Night and Day, Porter’s life was chronicled more realistically in De-Lovely, a 2004 Irwin Winkler film starring Kevin Kline as Porter and Ashley Judd as Linda. The soundtrack to De-Lovely includes Porter songs sung by Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Natalie Cole, among others. Porter also appears as a character in Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris.

Many events commemorated the centenary of Porter’s birth, including the halftime show of the 1991 Orange Bowl. Joel Grey and a large cast of singers, dancers and marching bands, performed a tribute to Porter in Miami, Florida during the 57th King Orange Jamboree parade, whose theme was “Anything Goes”. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra performed a program of Cole Porter music at the Circle Theatre in Indianapolis, which also featured clips of Porter’s Hollywood films. “A Gala Birthday Concert” was held at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, with more than 40 entertainers and friends paying tribute to Porter’s long career in theater and film. In addition, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring Porter’s birth. The Indiana University Opera performed Porter’s musical, Jubilee, in Bloomington, Indiana.

In May 2007, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated to Cole Porter. In December 2010, his portrait was added to the Hoosier Heritage Gallery in the office of the Governor of Indiana. Numerous symphony orchestras have paid tribute to Porter in the years since his death including Seattle Symphony Orchestra, with Marvin Hamlisch as conductor and the Boston Pops, both in 2011. In 2012, Marvin Hamlisch, Michael Feinstein, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra honored Porter with a concert that included his familiar classics. The Cole Porter Festival is held every year in June in his hometown of Peru, Indiana, to foster music and art appreciation. Costumed singers in the cabaret-style Cole Porter Room at the Indiana Historical Society’s Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center in Indianapolis take requests from visitors and perform Porter’s hit songs. After Porter’s death, his 1908 Steinway grand piano, which he had used when composing since the mid-1930s, was displayed and played in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel until 2017. As of late 2018, it was being rebuilt, after which it will reside, temporarily, at the New-York Historical Society. Porter is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame  and Great American Songbook Hall of Fame, which recognized his “musically complex [songs] with witty, urbane lyrics”. In 2014, Porter was honored with a plaque on the Legacy Walk in Chicago, which celebrates LGBT achievers.

Ira Gershwin (born Israel Gershowitz, December 6, 1896 – August 17, 1983) was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs in the English language of the 20th century.

With George he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as “I Got Rhythm”, “Embraceable You”, “The Man I Love” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”. He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George’s opera Porgy and Bess.

The success the Gershwin brothers had with their collaborative works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played. His mastery of songwriting continued, however, after the early death of George. He wrote additional hit songs with composers Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, Harry Warren and Harold Arlen.

His critically acclaimed 1959 book Lyrics on Several Occasions, an amalgam of autobiography and annotated anthology, is an important source for studying the art of the lyricist in the golden age of American popular song.

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Life and career

Gershwin was born at 242 Snediker Avenue in Brooklyn, the oldest of four children of Morris (Moishe) and Rose Gershovitz (née Rosa Bruskin), who were Russian Jews, born in St Petersburg, who had emigrated to the US in 1891. Ira’s siblings were George (Jacob, b. 1898), Arthur (b. 1900) and Frances (b. 1906). Morris changed the family name to “Gershwine” (or alternatively “Gershvin”) well before their children rose to fame; it was not spelled “Gershwin” until later. Shy in his youth, Ira spent much of his time at home reading, but from grammar school through college he played a prominent part in several school newspapers and magazines.

He graduated in 1914 from Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students, where he met Yip Harburg, with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship and a love of Gilbert and Sullivan. He attended the City College of New York but dropped out.

The childhood home of Ira and George Gershwin was in the center of the Yiddish Theater District, on the second floor at 91 Second Avenue, between East 5th Street and East 6th Street. They frequented the local Yiddish theaters.

While George began composing and “plugging” in Tin Pan Alley from the age of 18, Ira worked as a cashier in his father’s Turkish baths. It was not until 1921 that Ira became involved in the music business. Alex Aarons signed Ira to write the songs for his next show, Two Little Girls in Blue, ultimately produced by Abraham Erlanger, along with co-composers Vincent Youmans and Paul Lannin. So as not to appear to trade off George’s growing reputation, Ira wrote under the pseudonym “Arthur Francis”, after his youngest two siblings. His lyrics were well received, allowing him successfully to enter the show-business world with just one show. Later the same year, the Gershwins collaborated for the first time on a score; this was for A Dangerous Maid, which played in Atlantic City and on tour.

It was not until 1924 that Ira and George teamed up to write the music for what became their first Broadway hit Lady, Be Good. Once the brothers joined forces, their combined talents became one of the most influential forces in the history of American Musical Theatre. “When the Gershwins teamed up to write songs for Lady, Be Good, the American musical found its native idiom.” Together, they wrote the music for more than 12 shows and four films. Some of their more famous works include “The Man I Love”, “Fascinating Rhythm”, “Someone to Watch Over Me”, “I Got Rhythm” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”. Their partnership continued until George’s sudden death from a brain tumor in 1937. Following his brother’s death, Ira waited nearly three years before writing again.

After this temporary retirement, Ira teamed up with accomplished composers such as Jerome Kern (Cover Girl); Kurt Weill (Where Do We Go from Here?; Lady in the Dark); and Harold Arlen (Life Begins at 8:40; A Star Is Born).  Over the next 14 years, Gershwin continued to write the lyrics for many film scores and a few Broadway shows. But the failure of Park Avenue in 1946 (a “smart” show about divorce, co-written with composer Arthur Schwartz) was his farewell to Broadway.  As he wrote at the time, “Am reading a couple of stories for possible musicalization (if there is such a word) but I hope I don’t like them as I think I deserve a long rest.”

In 1947, he took 11 songs George had written but never used, provided them with new lyrics, and incorporated them into the Betty Grable film The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. He later wrote comic lyrics for Billy Wilder’s 1964 movie Kiss Me, Stupid, although most critics believe his final major work was for the 1954 Judy Garland film A Star Is Born.

American singer, pianist and musical historian Michael Feinstein worked for Gershwin in the lyricist’s latter years, helping him with his archive. Several lost musical treasures were unearthed during this period, and Feinstein performed some of the material. Feinstein’s book The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs about working for Ira, and George and Ira’s music was published in 2012.

According to a 1999 story in Vanity Fair, Ira Gershwin’s love for loud music was as great as his wife’s loathing of it. When Debby Boone—daughter-in-law of his neighbor Rosemary Clooney—returned from Japan with one of the first Sony Walkmans (utilizing cassette tape), Clooney gave it to Michael Feinstein to give to Ira, “so he could crank it in his ears, you know. And he said, ‘This is absolutely wonderful!’ And he called his broker and bought Sony stock!”

Awards and honors

Three of Ira Gershwin’s songs (“They Can’t Take That Away From Me” (1937), “Long Ago (And Far Away)” (1944) and “The Man That Got Away” (1954)) were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, though none won.

Along with George S Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, he was a recipient of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Of Thee I Sing.

In 1988 UCLA established The George and Ira Gershwin Lifetime Musical Achievement Award in recognition of the brothers’ contribution to music, and for their gift to UCLA of the fight song “Strike Up the Band for UCLA”. Recipients include Angela Lansbury (1988), Ray Charles (1991), Mel Tormé (1994), Bernadette Peters (1995), Frank Sinatra (2000), Stevie Wonder (2002), k.d. lang (2003), James Taylor (2004), Babyface (2005), Burt Bacharach (2006), Quincy Jones (2007), Lionel Richie (2008) and Julie Andrews (2009).

Legacy

Ira Gershwin was a joyous listener to the sounds of the modern world. “He had a sharp eye and ear for the minutiae of living.” He noted in a diary: “Heard in a day: An elevator’s purr, telephone’s ring, telephone’s buzz, a baby’s moans, a shout of delight, a screech from a ‘flat wheel’, hoarse honks, a hoarse voice, a tinkle, a match scratch on sandpaper, a deep resounding boom of dynamiting in the impending subway, iron hooks on the gutter.”

In 1987, Ira’s widow, Leonore, established the Ira Gershwin Literacy Center at University Settlement, a century-old institution at 185 Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, New York City. The center is designed to give English-language programs to primarily Hispanic and Chinese Americans. Ira and his younger brother George spent many after-school hours at the Settlement.

The George and Ira Gershwin Collection and the Ira Gershwin Files from the Law Office of Leonard Saxe are both at the Library of Congress Music Division. The Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart Gershwin Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds a number of Ira’s manuscripts and other material.

In 2007, the United States Library of Congress named its Prize for Popular Song after him and his brother George. Recognizing the profound and positive effect of American popular music on the world’s culture, the prize will be given annually to a composer or performer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence a*sociated with the Gershwins.

Personal life

He married Leonore (née Strunsky) in 1926. He died of heart disease in Beverly Hills, California, on 17 August 1983 at the age of 86. He is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Leonore died in 1991.

Notable songs

• “But Not for Me“
• “Embraceable You“
• “How Long Has This Been Going On?”
• “I Can’t Get Started“
• “I Got Rhythm“
• “I’ve Got a Crush on You“
• “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off“
• “Love Is Here To Stay“
• “The Man I Love“
• “The Man That Got Away”
• “My Ship” (music by Kurt Weill)
• “Nice Work If You Can Get It“
• “‘S Wonderful”
• “Someone to Watch Over Me“
• “Strike Up the Band“
• “They Can’t Take That Away from Me“
• “They All Laughed“

Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler (born 17 July 1949) is an English musician and songwriter. He is best known as the bassist and primary lyricist of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath. He has also recorded and performed with Heaven & Hell, GZR, and Ozzy Osbourne. Butler currently is the bassist of Deadland Ritual.

Biography

Early life

Butler received the nickname “Geezer” at approximately age eight, because he “used to call everybody Geezer” at school. “It was just a slang term for a man.”

Butler grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Birmingham. The Butler family had seven children and were poor, typically having “no money whatsoever”.  Two of Butler’s older brothers had been called upon to serve in the army, and in the Vietnam War era, Butler feared that he would be next. However, mandatory service was ended in England a couple of years before he was due to be conscripted.

Butler was heavily influenced by the writing of Aleister Crowley as a teenager.  By his late teens, he had stopped attending Mass. He cited a loss of belief, and feels that everyone should sooner or later decide for themselves what to believe in. By the end “I was going to Mass every Sunday just to take a look at all the nice girls that were going there”, he recalled years later.

Black Sabbath

Butler formed his first band, Rare Breed, in the autumn of 1967, with John “Ozzy” Osbourne soon joining as lead vocalist. At that time, Butler was dating a girl who lived near Tony Iommi, and Iommi’s earliest memories of Butler involved seeing him walking past his house every day to visit her. Later, Iommi and Butler became acquainted when their bands played at a nearby nightclub. Separated for a time, Osbourne and Butler reunited in the blues foursome, Polka Tulk, along with guitarist Iommi and drummer Bill Ward, both of whom had recently left the band Mythology. They renamed their new band Earth, but a band already existed in the small-time English circuit with the same name, so they were forced to change the name yet again. Inspired by the popular Boris Karloff horror film of the same name, Butler suggested the name Black Sabbath in early 1969.

Inspired by John Lennon, Butler played rhythm guitar in his pre-Sabbath days, including with Rare Breed. When Sabbath was formed, Iommi made it clear that he did not want to play with another guitarist, so Butler moved to bass.  According to Butler, “I’d never played bass until I was on stage at the first gig that we played. Borrowed the bass guitar off one of my friends and it only had three strings on it.” Butler lists Jack Bruce of Cream as his biggest influence as a bassist. Iommi described Butler as being “from another planet” in the band’s early days; he took LSD, wore Indian hippie dresses, and was very peaceful. At the time Black Sabbath was formed, Butler was studying to become an accountant, and this training resulted in him managing the band’s finances in the early days.

After Black Sabbath fired vocalist Ozzy Osbourne in 1979, Butler also briefly left the band to deal with the divorce from his first wife. The 1980 album Heaven and Hell was actually recorded with bassist Craig Gruber but Butler returned to the band at the last minute and re-recorded the bass parts prior to release. He again left the band in 1984 after touring in support of their 1983 album, Born Again, though he returned months later as the band attempted a comeback with vocalist David Donato.

In 1988, Butler joined the backing band of his former Sabbath bandmate Osbourne to take part in the No Rest for the Wicked World Tour. He rejoined Black Sabbath in 1991 for the reunion of the Mob Rules line-up, but again quit the group after the Cross Purposes tour in 1994.

In 1995 Butler again joined Osbourne’s band to perform on the Ozzmosis album. After recording Ozzmosis, he formed G/Z/R, issuing Plastic Planet in 1995. His next solo album, Black Science, followed in 1997. Butler returned to Sabbath once more for the 1997 edition of Ozzfest, and has remained with the band since. In 2005 he released Ohmwork, his third solo album. In October 2006 it was announced that Butler, along with Tony Iommi, would be reforming the Dehumanizer-era Black Sabbath line-up with Vinny Appice and Ronnie James Dio, under the name Heaven & Hell to differentiate between the reunited touring band fronted by Osbourne, and the Dio-fronted version of the band.

He rejoined Iommi and Osbourne to record 13 and toured in support of the album, which reached its conclusion in 2017.

Personal life

Butler is married to Gloria Butler, who managed Heaven & Hell. He was divorced from his first wife in 1980. He also shares his Los Angeles home with several cats, of whom he has posted pictures on his website. His oldest son, Biff Butler, was the frontman in the nu metal band Apartment 26. Butler says Biff is very religious and brings up his children in the Catholic faith. Butler’s other son James earned a degree in social sciences from Oxford University and resides in London. Butler describes him as “very politically minded”. “My youngest is extremely left-wing, and I think it’s because he was brought up knowing wealth and money, whereas I was brought up having no money whatsoever. That’s where the church came in and made up for the lack of money because everybody knew each other in the street and everybody used to help each other out”, Butler said.

Butler is a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa Football Club, and during Black Sabbath’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Butler is heard shouting “Up the Villa” as the members of the band left the stage. He has referred to football as his “religion” and has stated that Villa legend Peter McParland is his “all-time hero”.

According to Osbourne, Butler “never uses foul language”. He was raised on a vegetarian diet, largely due to his family being too poor to buy meat on a regular basis, and has been a vegan since approximately 1994. His mother was also a vegetarian.

Butler appeared in a promotional ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2009 and later urged fans to boycott Fortnum & Mason until they remove foie gras from their shelves. Butler said, “I’ve seen some outrageous things in my time, but watching those poor birds suffer simply so that their diseased livers can be sold on your shop floor is horrific!”

Over the years, Butler has become disillusioned with politics, saying “For me, it’s almost pointless voting anymore because it seems to be the same no matter what party or politics you stand for. It all seems corrupted to me. It’s all the same old people that rule the world.”  He has also expressed concern over the increasing level of control government has in people’s lives. “Every time I go back to England, there are things that totally surprise me that you never think would happen in England, just all the CCTV everywhere. There seems to be so much control over people these days”, he said in 2014.

In January 2015, Butler was briefly detained after a bar brawl in Death Valley, California and charged with misdemeanor a*sault, public intoxication and vandalism. He was released following detoxification and a citation. In 2016 he opened up about the event: “This guy started mouthing off about something. He was, like, some drunken Nazi bloke. He […] started going on about Jews and everything – Jews this, Jews that. My missus is Jewish and I’d just had enough, and me hand sort of met his chin. I whacked him one.”

Style and legacy

Butler is noted for his melodic playing, and as being one of the first bassists to use a wah pedal and to down-tune his instrument (from the standard E-A-D-G to the lower C#-F#-B-E), as exemplified on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album, to match Iommi who had started tuning his guitar to C# (a minor third down). During the band’s Ozzy Osbourne era, Butler wrote most of the band’s lyrics, drawing heavily upon his fascination with religion, science-fiction, fantasy and horror, and musings on the darker side of human nature that posed a constant threat of global annihilation.

Butler is regarded as one of the most influential bassists in heavy metal. Billy Sheehan of Mr. Big said: “He’s a founding father of a whole genre of music and a man who really set the bar early on to be such an integral part of the sound and song structure of Sabbath”.[ In Mick Wall’s biography of Iron Maiden entitled Run to the Hills, founder Steve Harris recalls: “I distinctly remember trying to play along to Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” – at first I just could not get it. I threw the guitar on my bed and walked out in a huff, but the next day I came back, picked it up and played it all the way through note-for-note! Once I got going, I started getting into bass-lines with a bit more subtlety to them…”.

Former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, who defined him his “number 1 influence”, stated: “All true metal bassists look up to Geezer as a pioneer and Godfather of our chosen instrument. The best, ever”. Rex Brown of Pantera and Kill Devil Hill a*serted: “He’s a legend. He’s everything. Geezer is so much of an influence on me.  Other bassists such as Cliff Burton, Les Claypool, Steve DiGiorgio,  Alex Webster, John Myung, Johnny Lee Middleton, Greg Smith[ cited Butler as a significant influence on their style.

Equipment

Butler currently endorses Lakland basses and has his own signature model. For amplification, Butler is endorsed by Hartke bass amplification, Kilo bass head and 4X10 HyDrive cabinet. In the past, he has been known to use Ampeg SVT & B-15 bass amps and Fender, Dan Armstrong Plexi, Rickenbacker, Yamaha BB, Vigier and B.C. Rich Basses.

According to the Geezer Butler Bass Rig Rundown, he used the following over the years.

• Pre-CBS Fender Precision (x2)
• Dan Armstrong Plexiglass (Made by Ampeg)
• John Birch (JB1 body style) In white (customised with a sticker in the style of a Coca Cola label but says “enjoy cocaine.”)
• John Birch (JB1 body style) In black
• John Birch (JB1 body style) 8 string
• Jaydee Roadie 2 (Created by John Diggins)
• BC Rich Eagle Deluxe
• BC Rich Iron Bird
• Spector NS-2 (in white)
• Vigier Passion 5
• Vigier Arpege
• Vigier Excess
• Bill Nash custom precision (recording “13”)

Lakland basses

From early 2000s

• Joe Osborn 44-60 (now called a Vintage Jazz)
  • In Seafoam green
  • In Black with tortoise pickguard
  • In Black with grey pickguard (Virgin Mary and Henry sticker)
• Joe Osborn 55-60 (5 string Jazz bass)
• Bob Glaub 44-62 Precision Jazz
  • In black with tortoise pickguard
  • In black with grey pickguard
  • In shoreline gold with grey pickguard (Seen on Classic Albums: Black Sabbath)
• 44-51 Precision with (Vintage Single Coil pickup) Black with White pick guard as well as 3 small “Henry” stickers.
• 44-51M Precision with a Split Coil, White with Black pick guard and a GZR sticker in the bridge
• 44-64 Duck Dunn (Vintage P with J style Neck) Singe Precision (Gold sparkle with white pick guard. Jazz bass neck with pearloid block inlays.
• Custom Lakland 51 style Precision in with the emblem of Aston Villa (Seen during Paranoid on “The End of The End” DVD)

Signature Lakland basses

Released in 2013

• Signature #1 Black with black and grey aluminum striped pickguard. Custom fret board inlays
• Signature #2 Black with black and grey aluminum striped pickguard. Plain headstock, Henry sticker on 5th fret, rose gold inlays
• Signature #3 Black with white pickguard, rose gold inlays. All black head stock.

Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is an American musician, singer, songwriter and actor. Simon’s musical career has spanned over six decades. He reached fame and commercial success as half of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, formed in 1956 with Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote nearly all of their songs, including US number-one singles “The Sound of Silence”, “Mrs. Robinson”, and “Bridge over Troubled Water”.

After Simon & Garfunkel split up in 1970, at the height of their popularity, Simon began a successful solo career. He recorded three acclaimed albums over the following five years. In 1986, following a career slump, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music, which sold 14 million copies worldwide and remains his most popular solo work. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony (1980) and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman (1998) with the poet Derek Walcott.On June 3, 2016, Simon released his 13th solo album, Stranger to Stranger, which debuted at number one on the Billboard Album Chart and the UK Albums Chart.

Simon has earned sixteen Grammy awards for his solo and collaborative work, including three for Album of the Year (Bridge Over Troubled Water, Still Crazy After All These Years, and Graceland), and a Lifetime Achievement Award.[5] He is a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: first in 1990 as a member of Simon & Garfunkel and again in 2001 for his solo career. In 2006 he was selected as one of the “100 People Who Shaped the World” by Time. In 2011, Rolling Stone named Simon one of the 100 greatest guitarists, and in 2015 he was ranked eighth in their list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007.

Biography

Early years

Simon was born on October 13, 1941, in Newark, New Jersey, to Hungarian-Jewish parents. His father, Louis (1916–1995), was a college professor, double-bass player, and dance bandleader who performed under the name “Lee Sims”. His mother, Belle (1910–2007), was an elementary school teacher. In 1945, his family moved to the Kew Gardens Hills section of Flushing, Queens, in New York City.

The musician Donald Fagen described Simon’s childhood as that of “a certain kind of New York Jew, almost a stereotype, really, to whom music and baseball are very important. I think it has to do with the parents. The parents are either immigrants or first-generation Americans who felt like outsiders, and a*similation was the key thought—they gravitated to black music and baseball looking for an alternative culture.” Simon, upon hearing Fagen’s description, said it “isn’t far from the truth.” Simon said about his childhood, “I was a ballplayer. I’d go on my bike, and I’d hustle kids in stickball.” He added that his father was a New York Yankees fan:

I used to listen to games with my father. He was a nice guy. Fun. Funny. Smart. He didn’t play with me as much as I played with my kids. He was at work until late at night. … Sometimes [until] two in the morning.

Simon’s musical career began after meeting Art Garfunkel when they were both 11. They performed in a production of Alice in Wonderland for their sixth-grade graduation, and began singing together when they were 13, occasionally performing at school dances. Their idols were the Everly Brothers, whom they imitated in their use of close two-part harmony. Simon also developed an interest in jazz, folk, and blues, especially in the music of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly.

Simon’s first song written for himself and Garfunkel, when Simon was 12 or 13, was called “The Girl for Me,” and according to Simon became the “neighborhood hit.” His father wrote the words and chords on paper for the boys to use. That paper became the first officially copyrighted Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel song, and is now in the Library of Congress. In 1957, in their mid-teens, they recorded the song “Hey, Schoolgirl” under the name “Tom & Jerry”, a name that was given to them by their label Big Records. The single reached No. 49 on the pop charts.

After graduating from Forest Hills High School, Simon majored in English at Queens College and graduated in 1963, while Garfunkel studied mathematics education at Columbia University in Manhattan. Simon was a brother in the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, earned a degree in English literature, and briefly attended Brooklyn Law School for one semester after graduation in 1963.

Early career

Between 1957 and 1964, Simon wrote, recorded and released more than 30 songs, occasionally reuniting with Garfunkel as Tom & Jerry for some singles, including “Our Song” and “That’s My Story”. Most of the songs Simon recorded during that time were performed alone or with musicians other than Garfunkel. They were released on minor record labels including Amy, Big, Hunt, King, Tribute, and Madison. He used several pseudonyms for these recordings, usually “Jerry Landis”, but also “Paul Kane” and “True Taylor”. By 1962, working as Jerry Landis, he was a frequent writer/producer for several Amy Records artists, overseeing material released by Dotty Daniels, The Vels and Ritchie Cordell.

Simon enjoyed moderate success with singles as part of the group Tico and the Triumphs, including “Motorcycle”, which reached No. 97 on the Billboard charts in 1962. Tico and the Triumphs released four 45s. Marty Cooper, known as Tico, sang lead on several of these releases, but “Motorcycle” featured Simon’s vocal. Also in 1962, Simon reached No. 99 on the pop charts as Jerry Landis with the novelty song “The Lone Teen Ranger”. Both chart singles were released on Amy Records.

Simon and Garfunkel

In early 1964, Simon and Garfunkel got an audition with Columbia Records, whose executive Clive Davis signed them to produce an album. Columbia decided that the two would be called “Simon & Garfunkel” instead of “Tom & Jerry”. According to Simon, this was the first time artists’ surnames had been used in pop music without their first names. Simon and Garfunkel’s first LP, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was released on October 19, 1964, with 12 folk songs, five of which were written by Simon. The album initially flopped.

After the album release, Simon moved to England. While in the UK, Simon co-wrote several songs with Bruce Woodley of the Australian pop group the Seekers, including “I Wish You Could Be Here”, “Cloudy”, and “Red Rubber Ball”. Woodley’s co-author credit was omitted from “Cloudy” on the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. The American group the Cyrkle recorded a cover of “Red Rubber Ball” that reached No. 2 in the U.S. Simon also contributed to the Seekers’ catalogue with “Someday One Day”, which was released in March 1966, charting around the same time as Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” (a Top 10 hit from their second U.K. album, Sounds of Silence and later included on their third U.S. album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme).

Back on the American east coast, radio stations began receiving requests for the Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. track “The Sound of Silence”. Simon & Garfunkel’s producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed the track with electric guitar, bass guitar and drums, releasing it as a single that eventually went to No. 1 on the U.S. pop charts. Wilson did not inform the duo of his plan, and Simon was “horrified” when he first heard it.

The success of “The Sound of Silence” drew Simon back to the United States to reunite with Garfunkel. Together they recorded four more albums: Sounds of Silence; Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme; Bookends; and the hugely successful Bridge over Troubled Water. Simon and Garfunkel also contributed extensively to the soundtrack of the Mike Nichols film The Graduate (1967), starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. While writing “Mrs. Robinson”, Simon originally toyed with the title “Mrs. Roosevelt”. When Garfunkel reported this indecision over the song’s name to the director, Nichols replied, “Don’t be ridiculous! We’re making a movie here! It’s Mrs. Robinson!”

Simon and Garfunkel returned to the UK in the fall of 1968 and did a church concert appearance at Kraft Hall, which was broadcast on the BBC, and also featured Paul’s brother Ed on a performance of the instrumental “Anji”.

Simon pursued solo projects after Bridge over Troubled Water, reuniting occasionally with Garfunkel for various projects. Actor Warren Beatty brought Simon into a solo performance at the Cleveland Arena in April 1972 —a benefit concert for the George McGovern 1972 presidential campaign—and after that, Beatty obtained the duo’s agreement to reunite in mid-June at Madison Square Garden, another political concert called Together for McGovern. Garfunkel joined Simon again on the 1975 Top Ten single “My Little Town”. Simon wrote it for Garfunkel, whose solo output Simon judged to be lacking “bite”. The song was included on their respective solo albums: Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years and Garfunkel’s Breakaway. Contrary to popular belief, the song is not autobiographical of Simon’s early life in New York City. Simon also provided guitar on Garfunkel’s 1973 album Angel Clare, and added backing vocals to the song “Down in the Willow Garden”. In 1981, they reunited again for the famous concert in Central Park, followed by a world tour and an aborted reunion album, to have been entitled Think Too Much, which was eventually released (without Garfunkel) as Hearts and Bones. Together, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

In 2003, Simon and Garfunkel reunited once again when they received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. This reunion led to a US tour—the acclaimed “Old Friends” concert series—followed by a 2004 international encore that culminated in a free concert at the Colosseum in Rome that drew 600,000 people.[31] In 2005, the pair sang “Mrs. Robinson” and “Homeward Bound”, plus “Bridge Over Troubled Water” with Aaron Neville, in the benefit concert From the Big Apple to The Big Easy – The Concert for New Orleans (eventually released as a DVD) for Hurricane Katrina victims.

The pair performed together in April 2010 in New Orleans at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

1971–1976

After Simon and Garfunkel split in 1970, Simon began writing and recording solo material again. His album Paul Simon was released in January 1972, preceded by his first experiment with world music, the Jamaican-inspired “Mother and Child Reunion”. The single was a hit, reaching both the American and British Top 5. The album received universal acclaim, with critics praising the variety of styles and the confessional lyrics, reaching No. 4 in the U.S. and No. 1 in the UK and Japan. It later spawned another Top 30 hit with “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”.

Simon’s next project was the pop-folk album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, released in May 1973. It contained some of his most popular and polished recordings. The lead single, “Kodachrome”, was a No. 2 hit in America, and the follow-up, the gospel-flavored “Loves Me Like a Rock” was even bigger, topping the Cashbox charts. Other songs like the weary “American Tune” or the melancholic “Something So Right” — a tribute to Simon’s first wife, Peggy, which received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Song of the Year – became standards in the musician’s catalog. Critical and commercial reception for this second album was even stronger than for his debut. At the time, reviewers noted how the songs were fresh and unworried on the surface, while still exploring socially and politically conscious themes on a deeper level. The album reached No. 1 on the Cashbox album charts. As a souvenir for the tour that came next, in 1974 it was released as a live album, Live Rhymin’, which was moderately successful and displayed some changes in Simon’s music style, adopting world and religious music.

Highly anticipated, Still Crazy After All These Years was his next album. Released in October 1975 and produced by Simon and Phil Ramone, it marked another departure. The mood of the album was darker, as he wrote and recorded it in the wake of his divorce. Preceded by the feel-good duet with Phoebe Snow, “Gone at Last” (a Top 25 hit) and the Simon & Garfunkel reunion track “My Little Town” (a No. 9 on Billboard), the album was his only No. 1 on the Billboard charts to date. The 18th Grammy Awards named it the Album of the Year and Simon’s performance the year’s Best Male Pop Vocal. With Simon in the forefront of popular music, the third single from the album, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” reached the top spot of the Billboard charts, his only single to reach No. 1 on this list. Also, on May 3, 1976, Simon put together a benefit show at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the New York Public Library. Phoebe Snow, Jimmy Cliff and the Brecker Brothers also performed. The concert produced over $30,000 for the Library.

1977–1985

After three successful studio albums, Simon became less productive during the second half of the 1970s. He dabbled in various projects, including writing music for the film Shampoo, which became the music for the song “Silent Eyes” on the Still Crazy album, and acting (he was cast as Tony Lacey in Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall). He achieved another hit in this decade, with the lead single of his 1977 compilation, Greatest Hits, Etc., “Slip Slidin’ Away,” reaching No. 5 in the United States.

In 1980, Simon released One-Trick Pony, his debut album with Warner Bros. Records and his first in almost five years. It was paired with the motion picture of the same name, which Simon wrote and starred in. Although it produced his last Top 10 hit with the upbeat “Late in the Evening” (also a No. 1 hit on the Radio & Records American charts), the album did not sell well.

Simon & Garfunkel included eight songs from Simon’s solo career on the set list for their September 19, 1981 concert in Central Park. Five of those were rearranged as duets; Simon performed the other three songs solo. The resulting live album, TV special, and videocassette (later DVD) releases were all major hits.

Simon released Hearts and Bones in 1983. This was a polished and confessional album that was eventually viewed as one of his best works, but the album did not sell well when it was released. This marked a low point in Simon’s commercial popularity; both the album and the lead single, “Allergies”, missed the American Top 40. Hearts and Bones included “The Late Great Johnny Ace”, a song partly about Johnny Ace, an American R&B singer, and partly about slain Beatle John Lennon. A successful U.S. solo tour featured Simon and his guitar, with a recording of the rhythm track and horns for “Late in the Evening”. In January 1985, Simon lent his talent to USA for Africa and performed on the relief fundraising single “We Are the World”.

1986–1992

As he commented years later, after the disappointing commercial performance of Hearts and Bones, Simon felt he had lost his inspiration to a point of no return, and that his commercial fortunes were unlikely to change. While driving his car in late 1984 in this state of frustration, Simon listened to a cassette of the Boyoyo Boys’ instrumental Gumboots: Accordion Jive Volume II which had been lent to him by Heidi Berg, a singer-songwriter he was working with at the time. Lorne Michaels had introduced Simon to Berg when Berg was working as the bandleader for Michael’s The New Show. Interested by the unusual sound, he wrote lyrics to the number, which he sang over a re-recording of the song. It was the first composition of a new musical project that became the Grammy-award-winning album Graceland, a mixture of musical styles including pop, a cappella, isicathamiya, rock, zydeco and mbaqanga.

Simon travelled to South Africa to embark on further recording the album. Sessions with African musicians took place in Johannesburg in February 1985. Overdubbing and additional recording was done in April 1986, in New York. The sessions featured many South African musicians and groups, particularly Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Simon also collaborated with several American artists, singing a duet with Linda Ronstadt in “Under African Skies”, and playing with Los Lobos in “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints”. Simon was briefly listed on the U.N. Boycott list but was removed after he indicated that he had not violated the cultural boycott.[33][34]

Warner Bros. Records had serious doubts about releasing such an eclectic album to the mainstream,[citation needed] but did so in August 1986. Graceland was praised by critics and the public, and became Simon’s most successful solo album. Slowly climbing the worldwide charts, it reached No. 1 in many countries, including the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—and peaked at No. 3 in the U.S. It was the second-best-selling album of 1987 in the US, selling five million copies and eventually reaching 5x Platinum certification. Another seven million copies sold internationally, making it his best-selling album. The lead single was “You Can Call Me Al”, utilising a synthesizer riff, a whistle solo, and an unusual bass run, in which the second half was a reversed recording of the first half. “You Can Call Me Al” was accompanied by a humorous video featuring actor Chevy Chase (who lip synced all of Simon’s lyrics while Simon sits next to him, silently playing various instruments), which was shown on MTV. The single reached UK Top 5 and the U.S. Top 25. Further singles, including the lead track, “The Boy in the Bubble” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”, were not commercial hits but became radio standards and were highly praised.

At age 45, Simon found himself back at the forefront of popular music. He received the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1987 and also Grammy Award for Record of the Year for the title track one year later. He also embarked on the very successful Graceland Tour, which was documented on music video. Simon found himself embracing new sounds, which some critics viewed negatively—however, Simon reportedly felt it was a natural artistic experiment, considering that world music was already present on much of his early work, including such Simon & Garfunkel hits as “El Condor Pasa” and his early solo recording “Mother and Child Reunion”, which was recorded in Kingston, Jamaica. One way or another, Warner Bros. Records (who by this time controlled and reissued all his previous Columbia albums) re-established Simon as one of their most successful artists. In an attempt to capitalize on his renewed success, WB Records released the album Negotiations and Love Songs in November 1988, a mixture of popular hits and personal favorites that covered Simon’s entire career and became an enduring seller in his catalog.

After Graceland, Simon decided to extend his roots with the Brazilian music-flavored The Rhythm of the Saints. Sessions for the album began in December 1989, and took place in Rio de Janeiro and New York, featuring guitarist J. J. Cale and many Brazilian and African musicians. The tone of the album was more introspective and relatively low-key compared to the mostly upbeat numbers of Graceland. Released in October 1990, the album received excellent critical reviews and achieved very respectable sales, peaking at No. 4 in the U.S. and No. 1 in the UK. The lead single, “The Obvious Child”, featuring the Grupo Cultural Olodum, became his last Top 20 hit in the UK and appeared near the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100. Although not as successful as Graceland, The Rhythm of the Saints was received as a competent successor and consistent complement on Simon’s attempts to explore (and popularize) world music, and also received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year.

Simon’s ex-wife Carrie Fisher said in her autobiography Wishful Drinking that the song “She Moves On” is about her. It’s one of several she claimed, followed by the line, “If you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you, do it. Because he is so brilliant at it.”

The success of both albums allowed Simon to stage another New York concert. On August 15, 1991, almost a decade after his concert with Garfunkel, Simon staged a second concert in Central Park with African and South American bands. The success of the concert surpassed all expectations, and reportedly over 750,000 people attended—one of the largest concert audiences in history. He later remembered the concert as “…the most memorable moment in my career.” The success of the show led to both a live album and an Emmy-winning TV special. In the middle, Simon embarked on the successful Born at the Right Time Tour, and promoted the album with further singles, including “Proof”—accompanied with a humorous video that again featured Chevy Chase, and added Steve Martin. On March 4, 1992, he appeared on his own episode of MTV Unplugged, offering renditions of many of his most famous compositions. Broadcast in June, the show was a success, though it did not receive an album release.

1993–1998

After Unplugged, Simon’s place in the forefront of popular music dropped notably. A Simon & Garfunkel reunion took place in September 1993, and in another attempt to capitalize on the occasion, Columbia released Paul Simon 1964/1993 in September, a three-disc compilation that received a reduced version on the two-disc album The Paul Simon Anthology one month later. In 1995 he made news for appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where he performed the song “Ten Years”, which he composed specially for the tenth anniversary of the show. Also that year, he was featured on the Annie Lennox version of his 1973 song “Something So Right”, which appeared briefly on the UK Top 50 once it was released as a single in November.

Since the early stages of the nineties, Simon was fully involved on The Capeman, a musical that finally opened on January 29, 1998. Simon worked enthusiastically on the project for many years and described it as “a New York Puerto Rican story based on events that happened in 1959—events that I remembered.” The musical tells the story of real-life Puerto Rican youth Salvador Agron, who wore a cape while committing two murders in 1959 New York, and went on to become a writer in prison. Featuring Marc Anthony as the young Agron and Rubén Blades as the older Agron, the play received terrible reviews and very poor box office receipts from the very beginning, and closed on March 28 after just 68 performances—a failure that reportedly cost Simon 11 million dollars.

Simon recorded an album of songs from the show, which was released in November 1997. It was received with very mixed reviews, though many critics praised the combination of doo-wop, rockabilly and Caribbean music that the album reflected. In commercial terms, Songs from The Capeman was a failure—it found Simon missing the Top 40 of the Billboard charts for the first time in his career. The cast album was never released on CD but eventually became available online.

1999–2007

After the disaster of The Capeman, Simon’s career was again in an unexpected crisis. However, entering the new millennium, he maintained a respectable reputation, offering critically acclaimed new material and receiving commercial attention. In 1999, Simon embarked on a North American tour with Bob Dylan, where each alternated as headline act with a “middle” section where they performed together, starting on the first of June and ending September 18. The collaboration was generally well-received, with just one critic, Seth Rogovoy from the Berkshire Eagle, questioning the collaboration.

In an attempt to return successfully to the music market, Simon wrote and recorded a new album very quickly, with You’re the One arriving in October 2000. The album consisted mostly of folk-pop writing combined with foreign musical sounds, particularly grooves from North Africa. While not reaching the commercial heights of previous albums, it managed at least to reach both the British and American Top 20. It received favorable reviews and received a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. He toured extensively for the album, and one performance in Paris was released to home video.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Simon sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on America: A Tribute to Heroes, a multi-network broadcast to benefit the September 11 Telethon Fund and performed “The Boxer” at the opening of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after September 11. In 2002, he wrote and recorded “Father and Daughter”, the theme song for the animated family film The Wild Thornberrys Movie. The track was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song. In 2003, he participated on another Simon & Garfunkel reunion. One year later, Simon’s studio albums were re-released both individually and together in a limited-edition nine-CD boxed set, Paul Simon: The Studio Recordings 1972–2000.

At the time, Simon was already working on a new album with Brian Eno called Surprise, which was released in May 2006. Most of the album was inspired by the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq invasion, and the war that followed. In personal terms, Simon was also inspired by the fact of having turned 60 in 2001, which he humorously referred to on “Old” from You’re the One.

Surprise was a commercial hit, reaching No. 14 in the Billboard 200 and No. 4 in the UK. Most critics also praised the album, and many of them called it a “comeback”. Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic wrote that “Simon doesn’t achieve his comeback by reconnecting with the sound and spirit of his classic work; he has achieved it by being as restless and ambitious as he was at his popular and creative peak, which makes Surprise all the more remarkable.” The album was supported with the successful Surprise Tour from May–November 2006.

In March 2004, Walter Yetnikoff published a book called Howling at the Moon, in which he criticized Simon personally and for his tenuous business partnership with Columbia Records in the past.

In 2007 Simon was the inaugural recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress, and later performed as part of a gala of his work.

2008–2013

After living in Montauk, New York, for many years, Simon relocated to New Canaan, Connecticut.

Simon is one of a small number of performers who are named as the copyright owner on their recordings (most records have the recording company as the named owner of the recording). This noteworthy development was spearheaded by the Bee Gees after their successful $200 million lawsuit against RSO Records, which remains the largest successful lawsuit against a record company by an artist or group. All of Simon’s solo recordings, including those originally issued by Columbia Records, are currently distributed by Sony Records’ Legacy Recordings unit. His albums were issued by Warner Music Group until mid-2010. In mid-2010, Simon moved his catalog of solo work from Warner Bros. Records to Sony/Columbia Records where Simon and Garfunkel’s catalog is. Simon’s back catalog of solo recordings would be marketed by Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings unit.

In February 2009, Simon performed back-to-back shows in New York City at the Beacon Theatre, which had recently been renovated. Simon was reunited with Art Garfunkel at the first show as well as with the cast of The Capeman; also playing in the band was Graceland bassist Bakithi Kumalo. In May 2009, Simon toured with Garfunkel in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. In October 2009, they appeared together at the 25th Anniversary of The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The pair performed four of their most popular songs: “The Sound of Silence”, “The Boxer”, “Cecilia”, and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

Simon’s album So Beautiful or So What was released on the Concord Music Group label on April 12, 2011. The album received high marks from the artist, “It’s the best work I’ve done in 20 years.” It was reported that Simon attempted to have Bob Dylan guest on the album.

On November 10, 2010, Simon released a new song called “Getting Ready for Christmas Day”. It premiered on National Public Radio, and was included on the album So Beautiful or So What. The song samples a 1941 sermon by the Rev. J.M. Gates, also entitled “Getting Ready for Christmas Day”. Simon performed the song live on The Colbert Report on December 16, 2010. The first video featured J.M. Gates’ giving the sermon and his church in 2010 with its display board showing many of Simon’s lyrics; the second video illustrates the song with cartoon images.

In the premiere show of the final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show on September 10, 2010, Simon surprised Oprah and the audience with a song dedicated to Oprah and her show lasting 25 years (an update of a song he did for her show’s 10th anniversary).

Rounding off his 2011 World Tour, which included the United States, the U.K., the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany, Simon appeared at Ramat Gan Stadium in Israel in July 2011, making his first concert appearance in Israel since 1983. On September 11, 2011, Paul Simon performed “The Sound of Silence” at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, site of the World Trade Center, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

On February 26, 2012, Simon paid tribute to fellow musicians Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen who were the recipients of the first annual PEN Awards for songwriting excellence at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts.[50] In 1986, Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music, where he has served on the Board of Trustees.

On June 5, 2012, Simon released a 25th anniversary box set of Graceland, which included a remastered edition of the original album, the 2012 documentary film Under African Skies, the original 1987 “African Concert” from Zimbabwe, an audio narrative “The Story of ‘Graceland'” as told by Paul Simon, and other interviews and paraphernalia. He played a few concerts in Europe with the original musicians to commemorate the anniversary.

On December 19, 2012, Simon performed at the funeral of Victoria Leigh Soto, a teacher killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

On June 14, 2013, at Sting’s Back to Bass Tour, Simon performed his song “The Boxer” and Sting’s “Fields of Gold” with Sting.

In September 2013, Simon delivered the Richard Ellmann Lecture in Modern Literature at Emory University.

2014–present

In February 2014, Simon embarked on a joint concert tour titled On Stage Together with English musician Sting, playing 21 concerts in North America. The tour continued in early 2015, with ten shows in Australia and New Zealand,  and 23 concerts in Europe,  ending on April 18, 2015.

On August 4, 2015, Simon performed “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”, “Homeward Bound”, and “Late in the Evening” alongside Billy Joel at the final concert of Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. On September 11, 2015, Simon appeared during the premiere week of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Simon, who performed “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” with Colbert for his surprise appearance, had been promoted prior to the show as “Simon and Garfunkel tribute band Troubled Waters.” Simon’s additional performance of “An American Tune” was posted as a bonus on the show’s YouTube channel.

Simon also wrote and performed the theme song for the comedian Louis C.K.’s show Horace and Pete, which debuted January 30, 2016. The song, which can be heard during the show’s opening, intermission, and closing credits, is sparse, featuring only Simon’s voice and an acoustic guitar. Simon made a cameo appearance onscreen in the tenth and final episode of the series.

On June 3, 2016 Simon released his thirteenth solo studio album, Stranger to Stranger via Concord Records. He began writing new material shortly after releasing his twelfth studio album, So Beautiful or So What, in April 2011. Simon collaborated with the Italian electronic dance music artist Clap! Clap! on three songs—”The Werewolf”, “Street Angel”, and “Wristband”. Simon was introduced to him by his son, Adrian, who was a fan of his work. The two met up in July 2011 when Simon was touring behind So Beautiful or So What in Milan, Italy. He and Clap! Clap! worked together via email over the course of making the album. Simon also worked with longtime friend Roy Halee, who is listed as co-producer on the album. “I always liked working with him more than anyone else,” Simon noted. Following the release of the album, Simon noted that “showbiz doesn’t hold any interest for me” and discussed future retirement, stating: “I am going to see what happens if I let go”.

On July 25, 2016, he performed “Bridge over Troubled Water” at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. On May 24, 2017, he debuted a new version of “Questions for the Angels” with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

On February 5, 2018, Simon announced his retirement from touring in a letter to fans, citing time away from family and the death of longtime guitarist Vincent Nguini as key factors, but he did not rule out performing live altogether.  At the same time, it was announced that he would embark on his farewell concert tour on May 16 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at Rogers Arena. Homeward Bound – The Farewell Tour encompassed shows across North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, and Simon played his final concert in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, New York on September 22, 2018.

On September 7, 2018, Simon released his fourteenth album, In the Blue Light, consisting of re-recordings of select lesser-known songs from his catalog, often altering their original arrangements, harmonic structures, and lyrics.

Simon announced his return to the live stage to close San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival on Sunday, August 11, 2019 with an appearance at the Golden Gate Park event and planned to donate his net proceeds to local environmental non-profit organization(s).

Songwriting

In an in-depth interview reprinted in American Songwriter, Simon discusses the craft of songwriting with music journalist Tom Moon. In the interview, Simon explains the basic themes in his songwriting: love, family, and social commentary; as well as the overarching messages of religion, spirituality, and God in his lyrics. Simon goes on in the interview to explain the process of how he goes about writing songs, “The music always precedes the words. The words often come from the sound of the music and eventually evolve into coherent thoughts. Or incoherent thoughts. Rhythm plays a crucial part in the lyric-making as well. It’s like a puzzle to find the right words to express what the music is saying.”

Projects

Music for Broadway

In the late 1990s, Simon wrote and produced a Broadway musical called The Capeman, which lost $11 million during its 1998 run. In April 2008, the Brooklyn Academy of Music celebrated Paul Simon’s works, and dedicated a week to Songs From the Capeman with a good portion of the show’s songs performed by a cast of singers and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Simon himself appeared during the BAM shows, performing “Trailways Bus” and “Late in the Evening”. In August 2010, The Capeman was staged for three nights in the Delacorte Theatre in New York’s Central Park. The production was directed by Diane Paulus and produced in conjunction with the Public Theater.

Film and television

Simon has also dabbled in acting. He played music producer Tony Lacey, a supporting character, in the 1977 Woody Allen feature film Annie Hall. He wrote and starred in 1980’s One Trick Pony as Jonah Levin, a journeyman rock and roller. Simon also wrote all the songs in the film. Paul Simon also appeared on The Muppet Show (the only episode to use only the songs of one songwriter, Simon). In 1990, he played the character of—appropriately enough—Simple Simon on the Disney Channel TV movie, Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme.

In 1978, Simon made a cameo appearance in the movie, The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash.

He has been the subject of two films by Jeremy Marre, the first on Graceland, the second on The Capeman.

On November 18, 2008, Simon was a guest on The Colbert Report promoting his book Lyrics 1964–2008. After an interview with Stephen Colbert, Simon performed “American Tune”.

Simon performed a Stevie Wonder song at the White House in 2009 at an event honoring Wonder’s musical career and contributions.

In May 2009, The Library of Congress: Paul Simon and Friends Live Concert was released on DVD, via Shout! Factory. The PBS concert was recorded in 2007.

Simon appeared at the Glastonbury Festival 2011 in England.

Saturday Night Live

Simon has appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL), either as host or musical guest, 14 times. On one appearance in the late 1980s, he worked with the politician who shared his name, Illinois Senator Paul Simon.[ Simon’s most recent SNL appearance on a Saturday night was on the October 13, 2018 episode hosted by Seth Myers. Prior to that, he appeared in the March 9, 2013 episode hosted by Justin Timberlake as a member of the Five-Timers Club. In one SNL skit from 1986 (when he was promoting Graceland), Simon plays himself, waiting in line with a friend to get into a movie. He amazes his friend by remembering intricate details about prior meetings with passers-by, but draws a complete blank when approached by Art Garfunkel, despite the latter’s numerous memory prompts. Simon appeared alongside George Harrison as musical guest on the Thanksgiving Day episode of SNL (November 20, 1976). The two performed “Here Comes the Sun” and “Homeward Bound” together, while Simon performed “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” solo earlier in the show. On that episode, Simon opened the show performing “Still Crazy After All These Years” in a turkey outfit, since Thanksgiving was the following week. About halfway through the song, Simon tells the band to stop playing because of his embarrassment. After giving a frustrated speech to the audience, he leaves the stage, backed by applause. Lorne Michaels greets him positively backstage, but Simon is still upset, yelling at him because of the humiliating turkey outfit. This is one of SNL’s most played sketches. Simon closed the 40th anniversary SNL show on February 15, 2015, with a performance of “Still Crazy After All These Years”, sans turkey outfit. Simon also played a snippet of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” with Sir Paul McCartney during the special’s introductory sequence. Simon was the musical guest on the October 13, 2018 episode, with host Seth Meyers (in addition they showed much of the Thanksgiving episode from 1976 described above as the Prime Time special from 10-11pm). It was also his 77th birthday.

On September 29, 2001, Simon made a special appearance on the first SNL to air after the September 11, 2001 attacks. On that show, he performed “The Boxer” to the audience and the NYC firefighters and police officers. He is also a friend of former SNL star Chevy Chase, who appeared in his video for “You Can Call Me Al” lip synching the song while Simon looks disgruntled and mimes backing vocals and the playing of various instruments beside him. Chase would also appear in Simon’s 1991 video for the song “Proof” alongside Steve Martin. He is a close friend of SNL producer Lorne Michaels, who produced the 1977 TV show The Paul Simon Special, as well as the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park four years later. Simon and Lorne Michaels were the subjects of a 2006 episode of the Sundance Channel documentary series, Iconoclasts.

Awards and honors

Simon has won 12 Grammy Awards (one of them a Lifetime Achievement Award) and five Album of the Year Grammy nominations, the most recent for You’re the One in 2001. He is one of only six artists to have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year more than once as the main credited artist. In 1998 he was entered in the Grammy Hall of Fame for the Simon & Garfunkel album Bridge over Troubled Water. He received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song for the song “Father and Daughter” in 2002. He is also a two-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; as a solo artist in 2001, and in 1990 as half of Simon & Garfunkel.

 

Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist.

A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene”, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, Seeger re-emerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture, workers rights, and environmental causes.

A prolific songwriter, his best-known songs include “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (with additional lyrics by Joe Hickerson), “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” (with Lee Hays of the Weavers), “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” (also with Hays), and “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement. “Flowers” was a hit recording for the Kingston Trio (1962); Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962); and Johnny Rivers (1965). “If I Had a Hammer” was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963) while the Byrds had a number one hit with “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in 1965.

Seeger was one of the folk singers responsible for popularizing the spiritual “We Shall Overcome” (also recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists) that became the acknowledged anthem of the Civil Rights Movement, soon after folk singer and activist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. In the PBS American Masters episode “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song”, Seeger said it was he who changed the lyric from the traditional “We will overcome” to the more singable “We shall overcome”.

Early years

Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, at the French Hospital, Midtown Manhattan. His family, which Seeger called “enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition”,  traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a doctor from Württemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s.

Seeger’s father, the Harvard-trained composer and musicologist Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to American parents. Charles established the first musicology curriculum in the U.S. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1913, helped found the American Musicological Society, and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology. Pete’s mother, Constance de Clyver Seeger (née Edson), raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.

In 1912, his father Charles Seeger was hired to establish the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, but was forced to resign in 1918 because of his outspoken pacifism during World War I. Charles and Constance moved back east, making Charles’ parents’ estate in Patterson, New York, just north of New York City, their base of operations. When baby Pete was eighteen months old, they set out with him and his two older brothers in a homemade trailer to bring musical uplift to the working people in the American South. Upon their return, Constance taught violin and Charles taught composition at the New York Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard), whose president, family friend Frank Damrosch, was Constance’s adoptive “uncle”. Charles also taught part-time at the New School for Social Research. Career and money tensions led to quarrels and reconciliations, but when Charles discovered Constance had opened a secret bank account in her own name, they separated, and Charles took custody of their three sons.[8] Beginning in 1936, Charles held various administrative positions in the federal government’s Farm Resettlement program, the WPA’s Federal Music Project (1938–1940) and the wartime Pan American Union. After World War II, he taught ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University.

Charles and Constance divorced when Pete was seven and in 1932 Charles married his composition student and a*sistant, Ruth Crawford, now considered by many to be one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century. Deeply interested in folk music, Ruth had contributed musical arrangements to Carl Sandburg’s extremely influential folk song anthology the American Songbag (1927) and later created significant original settings for eight of Sandburg’s poems. Pete’s eldest brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older brother, John Seeger, taught in the 1950s at the Dalton School in Manhattan and was the principal from 1960 to 1976 at Fieldston Lower School in the Bronx. Pete’s uncle, Alan Seeger, a noted American war poet (“I Have a Rendezvous with Death”), had been one of the first American soldiers to be killed in World War I. All four of Pete’s half-siblings from his father’s second marriage – Margaret (Peggy), Mike, Barbara, and Penelope (Penny) – became folk singers. Peggy Seeger, a well-known performer in her own right, married British folk singer and activist Ewan MacColl. Mike Seeger was a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, married Pete’s half-sister Penny – also a talented singer who died young. Barbara Seeger joined her siblings in recording folk songs for children. In 1935, Pete attended Camp Rising Sun, an international leadership camp held every summer in upstate New York that influenced his life’s work. His final visit occurred in 2012.

Career

Early work

At four, Seeger was sent away to boarding school, but came home two years later when his parents learned the school had failed to inform them he had contracted scarlet fever. He attended first and second grades in Nyack, New York, where his mother lived, before entering boarding school in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Despite being classical musicians, his parents did not press him to play an instrument. On his own, the otherwise bookish and withdrawn boy gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport. At thirteen, Seeger enrolled in the Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1936. He was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the George E. Jonas Foundation’s international summer leadership program. During the summer of 1936, while traveling with his father and stepmother, Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in western North Carolina near Asheville, organized by local folklorist, lecturer, and traditional music performer Bascom Lamar Lunsford, whom Charles Seeger had hired for Farm Resettlement music projects. The festival took place in a covered baseball field. There the Seegers:

watched square-dance teams from Bear Wallow, Happy Hollow, Cane Creek, Spooks Branch, Cheoah Valley, Bull Creek, and Soco Gap; heard the five-string banjo player Samantha Bumgarner; and family string bands, including a group of Indians from the Cherokee reservation who played string instruments and sang ballads. They wandered among the crowds who camped out at the edge of the field, hearing music being made there as well. As Lunsford’s daughter would later recall, those country people “held the riches that Dad had discovered. They could sing, fiddle, pick the banjos, and guitars with traditional grace and style found nowhere else but deep in the mountains. I can still hear those haunting melodies drift over the ball park.”

For the Seegers, experiencing the beauty of this music firsthand was a “conversion experience”. Pete was deeply affected and, after learning basic strokes from Lunsford, spent much of the next four years trying to master the five-string banjo.[17] The teenage Seeger also sometimes accompanied his parents to regular Saturday evening gatherings at the Greenwich Village loft of painter and art teacher Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita. Benton, a lover of Americana, played “Cindy” and “Old Joe Clark” with his students Charlie and Jackson Pollock; friends from the “hillbilly” recording industry; as well as avant-garde composers Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell. It was at one of Benton’s parties that Pete heard “John Henry” for the first time.

Seeger enrolled at Harvard College on a partial scholarship, but as he became increasingly involved with politics and folk music, his grades suffered and he lost his scholarship. He dropped out of college in 1938.[ He dreamed of a career in journalism and took courses in art, as well. His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal. He polished his performance skills during a summer stint of touring New York State with The Vagabond Puppeteers (Jerry Oberwager, 22; Mary Wallace, 22; and Harriet Holtzman, 23), a traveling puppet theater “inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico”.  One of their shows coincided with a strike by dairy farmers. The group reprised its act in October in New York City. An article in the October 2, 1939, Daily Worker reported on the Puppeteers’ six-week tour this way:

During the entire trip the group never ate once in a restaurant. They slept out at night under the stars and cooked their own meals in the open, very often they were the guests of farmers. At rural affairs and union meetings, the farm women would bring “suppers” and would vie with each other to see who could feed the troupe most, and after the affair the farmers would have earnest discussions about who would have the honor of taking them home for the night.

“They fed us too well,” the girls reported. “And we could live the entire winter just by taking advantage of all the offers to spend a week on the farm.

In the farmers’ homes they talked about politics and the farmers’ problems, about antisemitism and Unionism, about war and peace and social security — “and always,” the puppeteers report, “the farmers wanted to know what can be done to create a stronger unity between themselves and city workers. They felt the need of this more strongly than ever before, and the support of the CIO in their milk strike has given them a new understanding and a new respect for the power that lies in solidarity. One summer has convinced us that a minimum of organized effort on the part of city organizations—unions, consumers’ bodies, the American Labor Party and similar groups—can not only reach the farmers but weld them into a pretty solid front with city folks that will be one of the best guarantees for progress.

That fall, Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., a*sisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father’s, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger’s job was to help Lomax sift through commercial “race” and “hillbilly” music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938–53). Lomax also encouraged Seeger’s folk singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray’s weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940–41) alongside Josh White, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer’s Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940). Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially-integrated cast. The show was a success, but was not picked up by commercial sponsors for nationwide broadcasting because of its integrated cast. During the war, Seeger also performed on nationwide radio broadcasts by Norman Corwin.

From 1942-1945, Seeger served in the Army, as an Entertainment Specialist.

In 1949, Seeger worked as the vocal instructor for the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, New York.

Early activism

In 1936, at the age of 17, Pete Seeger joined the Young Communist League (YCL), then at the height of its influence. In 1942, he became a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) itself but left in 1949.

In the spring of 1941, the twenty-one-year-old Seeger performed as a member of the Almanac Singers along with Millard Lampell, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Butch, and Bess Lomax Hawes, and Lee Hays. Seeger and the Almanacs cut several albums of 78s on Keynote and other labels, Songs for John Doe (recorded in late February or March and released in May 1941), the Talking Union, and an album each of sea shanties and pioneer songs. Written by Millard Lampell, Songs for John Doe was performed by Lampell, Seeger, and Hays, joined by Josh White and Sam Gary. It contained lines such as, “It wouldn’t be much thrill to die for Du Pont in Brazil,” that were sharply critical of Roosevelt’s unprecedented peacetime draft (enacted in September 1940). This anti-war/anti-draft tone reflected the Communist Party line after the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which maintained the war was “phony” and a mere pretext for big American corporations to get Hitler to attack Soviet Russia. Seeger has said he believed this line of argument at the time — as did many fellow members of the Young Communist League (YCL). Though nominally members of the Popular Front, which was allied with Roosevelt and more moderate liberals, the YCL’s members still smarted from Roosevelt and Churchill’s arms embargo to Loyalist Spain (which Roosevelt later called a mistake), and the alliance frayed in the confusing welter of events.

A June 16, 1941, review in Time magazine, which under its owner, Henry Luce, had become very interventionist, denounced the Almanacs’ John Doe, accusing it of scrupulously echoing what it called “the mendacious Moscow tune” that “Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war.” Eleanor Roosevelt, a fan of folk music, reportedly found the album “in bad taste,” though President Roosevelt, when the album was shown to him, merely observed, correctly as it turned out, that few people would ever hear it. More alarmist was the reaction of eminent German-born Harvard Professor of Government Carl Joachim Friedrich, an adviser on domestic propaganda to the United States military. In a review in the June 1941 Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Poison in Our System,” he pronounced Songs for John Doe “…strictly subversive and illegal,” “…whether Communist or Nazi financed,” and “a matter for the attorney general,” observing further that “mere” legal “suppression” would not be sufficient to counteract this type of populist poison,[28] the poison being folk music and the ease with which it could be spread.

While the U.S. had not officially declared war on the Axis powers in the summer of 1941, the country was energetically producing arms and ammunition for their allies overseas. Despite the boom in manufacturing this concerted rearming effort brought, African-Americans were barred from working in defense plants. Racial tensions rose as Black labor leaders (such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin) and their white allies began organizing protests and marches. To combat this social unrest, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 (The Fair Employment Act) on 25 June 1941. The order came three days after Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, at which time the Communist Party quickly directed its members to get behind the draft and forbade participation in strikes for the duration of the war — angering some leftists. Copies of Songs for John Doe were removed from sale, and the remaining inventory destroyed, though a few copies may exist in the hands of private collectors. The Almanac Singers’ Talking Union album, on the other hand, was reissued as an LP by Folkways (FH 5285A) in 1955 and is still available. The following year, the Almanacs issued Dear Mr. President, an album in support of Roosevelt and the war effort. The title song, “Dear Mr. President”, was a solo by Pete Seeger, and its lines expressed his lifelong credo:

Now, Mr. President,
We haven’t always agreed in the past, I know,
But that ain’t at all important now.
What is important is what we got to do,
We got to lick Mr. Hitler, and until we do,
Other things can wait.

Now, as I think of our great land …
I know it ain’t perfect, but it will be someday,
Just give us a little time.

This is the reason that I want to fight,
Not ’cause everything’s perfect, or everything’s right.
No, it’s just the opposite: I’m fightin’ because
I want a better America, and better laws,
And better homes, and jobs, and schools,
And no more Jim Crow, and no more rules like
“You can’t ride on this train ’cause you’re a Negro,”
“You can’t live here ’cause you’re a Jew,”
“You can’t work here ’cause you’re a union man.”

So, Mr. President,
We got this one big job to do
That’s lick Mr. Hitler and when we’re through,
Let no one else ever take his place
To trample down the human race.
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done.

Seeger’s critics, however, continued to bring up the Almanacs’ repudiated Songs for John Doe. In 1942, a year after the John Doe album’s brief appearance (and disappearance), the FBI decided that the now-pro-war Almanacs were still endangering the war effort by subverting recruitment. According to the New York World Telegram (February 14, 1942), Carl Friedrich’s 1941 article “The Poison in Our System” was printed up as a pamphlet and distributed by the Council for Democracy (an organization that Friedrich and Henry Luce’s right-hand man, C. D. Jackson, Vice President of Time magazine, had founded “…to combat all the Nazi, fascist, communist, pacifist …” antiwar groups in the United States).

Seeger served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific. He was trained as an airplane mechanic, but was reassigned to entertain the American troops with music. Later, when people asked him what he did in the war, he always answered: “I strummed my banjo.” After returning from service, Seeger and others established People’s Songs, conceived as a nationwide organization with branches on both coasts and designed to “create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American People.”  With Pete Seeger as its director, People’s Songs worked for the 1948 presidential campaign of Roosevelt’s former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate on the Progressive Party ticket. Despite having attracted enormous crowds nationwide, however, Wallace won only in New York City, and following the election, he was excoriated for accepting the help in his campaign of Communists and fellow travelers, such as Seeger and singer Paul Robeson.

Spanish Civil War songs

Seeger had been a fervent supporter of the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. In 1943, with Tom Glazer and Bess and Baldwin Hawes, he recorded an album of 78s called Songs of the Lincoln Battalion on Moe Asch’s Stinson label. This included such songs as “There’s a Valley in Spain called Jarama” and “Viva la Quince Brigada”. In 1960, this collection was re-issued by Moe Asch as one side of a Folkways LP called Songs of the Lincoln and International Brigades. On the other side was a reissue of the legendary Six Songs for Democracy (originally recorded in Barcelona in 1938 while bombs were falling), performed by Ernst Busch and a chorus of members of the Thälmann Battalion, made up of volunteers from Germany. The songs were: “Moorsoldaten” (“Peat Bog Soldiers”, composed by political prisoners of German concentration camps); “Die Thaelmann-Kolonne”, “Hans Beimler”, “Das Lied Von Der Einheitsfront” (“Song of The United Front” by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht), “Der Internationalen Brigaden” (“Song of the International Brigades”), and “Los cuatro generales” (“The Four Generals”, known in English as “The Four Insurgent Generals”).

Group recordings

As a self-described “split tenor” (between a tenor and a countertenor), Pete Seeger was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups: the Almanac Singers and the Weavers. The Almanac Singers, which Seeger co-founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays, was a topical group, designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement, racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, Sis Cunningham, Josh White, and Sam Gary. As a controversial Almanac singer, the 21-year-old Seeger performed under the stage name “Pete Bowers” to avoid compromising his father’s government career.

In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as the Weavers, named after the title of an 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann, about a workers’ strike (which contained the lines, “We’ll stand it no more, come what may!”). They did benefits for strikers, at which they sang songs such as ‘Talking Union’, about the struggles for unionisation of industrial workers such as miners and auto mobile workers. Besides Pete Seeger (performing under his own name), members of the Weavers included charter Almanac member Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman; later Frank Hamilton, Erik Darling, and Bernie Krause serially took Seeger’s place. In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare, the Weavers’ repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language — arguably rendering it even more powerful. The Weavers on occasion performed in tuxedos (unlike the Almanacs, who had dressed informally) and their managers refused to let them perform at political venues. The Weavers’ string of major hits began with “On Top of Old Smoky” and an arrangement of Lead Belly’s signature waltz, “Goodnight, Irene”,[4] which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950 and was covered by many other pop singers. On the flip side of “Irene” was the Israeli song “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena”. Other Weaver hits included “Dusty Old Dust” (“So Long It’s Been Good to Know You” by Woody Guthrie), “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” (by Hays, Seeger, and Lead Belly), and the South African Zulu song by Solomon Linda, “Wimoweh” (about Shaka), among others.

The Weavers’ performing career was abruptly derailed in 1953, at the peak of their popularity, when blacklisting prompted radio stations to refuse to play their records and all their bookings were canceled. They briefly returned to the stage, however, at a sold-out reunion at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and in a subsequent reunion tour, which produced a hit version of Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons”, as well as LPs of their concert performances. “Kumbaya”, a Gullah black spiritual dating from slavery days, was also introduced to wide audiences by Pete Seeger and the Weavers (in 1959), becoming a staple of Boy and Girl Scout campfires.

In the late 1950s, the Kingston Trio was formed in direct imitation of (and homage to) the Weavers, covering much of the latter’s repertoire, though with a more buttoned-down, uncontroversial, and mainstream collegiate persona. The Kingston Trio produced another phenomenal succession of Billboard chart hits and in its turn spawned a legion of imitators, laying the groundwork for the 1960s commercial folk revival.

In the documentary film Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007), Seeger states that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial.

Banjo and 12-string guitar

In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument. He went on to invent the Long Neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo. Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region,[citation needed] the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Seeger’s championing of and improvements to it. According to an unnamed musician quoted in David King Dunaway’s biography, “by nesting a resonant chord between two precise notes, a melody note and a chiming note on the fifth string”, Pete Seeger “gentrified” the more percussive traditional Appalachian “frailing” style, “with its vigorous hammering of the forearm and its percussive rapping of the fingernail on the banjo head.”[38] Although what Dunaway’s informant describes is the age-old droned frailing style, the implication is that Seeger made this more acceptable to mass audiences by omitting some of its percussive complexities, while presumably still preserving the characteristic driving rhythmic quality a*sociated with the style.

From the late 1950s on, Seeger also accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin that had been a*sociated with Lead Belly, who had styled himself “the King of the 12-String Guitar”. Seeger’s distinctive custom-made guitars had a triangular soundhole. He combined the long scale length (approximately 28″) and capo-to-key techniques that he favored on the banjo with a variant of drop-D (DADGBE) tuning, tuned two whole steps down with very heavy strings, which he played with thumb and finger picks.

Introduction of the “Steel Pan” to U.S. audiences

In 1956, then “Peter” Seeger (see film credits) and his wife, Toshi, traveled to Port of Spain, Trinidad, to seek out information on the steelpan, steel drum or “ping-pong” as it was sometimes called. The two searched out a local panyard director Isaiah and proceeded to film the construction, tuning and playing of the then new, national instrument of Trinidad-Tobago. He was attempting to include the unique flavor of the steel pan into American Folk music.

McCarthy era

In the 1950s and indeed consistently throughout his life, Seeger continued his support of civil and labor rights, racial equality, international understanding, and anti-militarism (all of which had characterized the Wallace campaign) and he continued to believe that songs could help people achieve these goals. However, with the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin’s atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Communism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.

On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Alone among the many witnesses after the 1950 conviction and imprisonment of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment (which would have a*serted that his testimony might be self-incriminating) and instead, as the Hollywood Ten had done, refused to name personal and political a*sociations on the grounds that this would violate his First Amendment rights: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my a*sociation, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.” Seeger’s refusal to answer questions that he believed violated his fundamental Constitutional rights led to a March 26, 1957, indictment for contempt of Congress; for some years, he had to keep the federal government apprised of where he was going any time he left the Southern District of New York. He was convicted in a jury trial of contempt of Congress in March 1961, and sentenced to ten 1-year terms in jail (to be served simultaneously), but in May 1962, an appeals court ruled the indictment to be flawed and overturned his conviction.

In 1960, the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government. Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled. Almost 50 years later, in February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of their predecessors.

Folk music revival

To earn money during the blacklist period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger worked gigs as a music teacher in schools and summer camps, and traveled the college campus circuit. He also recorded as many as five albums a year for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records label. As the nuclear disarmament movement picked up steam in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Seeger’s anti-war songs, such as, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (co-written with Joe Hickerson), “Turn! Turn! Turn!”,  adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and “The Bells of Rhymney” by the Welsh poet Idris Davies  (1957), gained wide currency. Seeger was the first person to make a studio recording of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” in 1956. Seeger also was closely a*sociated with the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 helped organize a landmark Carnegie Hall concert, featuring the youthful Freedom Singers, as a benefit for the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. This event, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” in August of that same year, brought the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” to wide audiences. He sang it on the 50-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, along with 1,000 other marchers.[49] By this time, Seeger was a senior figure in the 1960s folk revival centered in Greenwich Village, as a longtime columnist in Sing Out!, the successor to the People’s Songs Bulletin, and as a founder of the topical Broadside magazine. To describe the new crop of politically committed folk singers, he coined the phrase “Woody’s children”, alluding to his a*sociate and traveling companion, Woody Guthrie, who by this time had become a legendary figure. This urban folk-revival movement, a continuation of the activist tradition of the 1930s and 1940s and of People’s Songs, used adaptations of traditional tunes and lyrics to effect social change, a practice that goes back to the Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies’ Little Red Song Book, compiled by Swedish-born union organizer Joe Hill (1879–1915). (The Little Red Song Book had been a favorite of Woody Guthrie’s, who was known to carry it around.)

Seeger toured Australia in 1963. His single “Little Boxes”, written by Malvina Reynolds, was number one in the nation’s Top 40s. That tour sparked a folk boom throughout the country at a time when popular music tastes, post-Kennedy a*sassination, competed between folk, the surfing craze, and the British rock boom which gave the world the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, among others. Folk clubs sprung up all over the nation, folk performers were accepted in established venues, and Australian performers singing Australian folk songs – many of their own composing – emerged in concerts and festivals, on television, and on recordings, and overseas performers were encouraged to tour Australia.

The long television blacklist of Seeger began to end in the mid-1960s, when he hosted a regionally broadcast, educational, folk-music television show, Rainbow Quest. Among his guests were Johnny Cash, June Carter, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, the Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Hedy West, Donovan, The Clancy Brothers, Richard Fariña and Mimi Fariña, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mamou Cajun Band, Bernice Johnson Reagon, The Beers Family, Roscoe Holcomb, Malvina Reynolds, Sonia Malkine, and Shawn Phillips. Thirty-nine[40] hour-long programs were recorded at WNJU’s Newark studios in 1965 and 1966, produced by Seeger and his wife Toshi, with Sholom Rubinstein. The Smothers Brothers ended Seeger’s national blacklisting by broadcasting him singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on their CBS variety show on February 25, 1968, after his similar performance in September 1967 was censored by CBS.

In November 1976, Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song “Delbert Tibbs”, about the death-row inmate Delbert Tibbs, who was later exonerated. Seeger wrote the music and selected the words from poems written by Tibbs.

Seeger also supported the Jewish Camping Movement. He came to Surprise Lake Camp in Cold Spring, New York, over the summer many times. He sang and inspired countless campers.

Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan

Pete Seeger was one of the earliest backers of Bob Dylan; he was responsible for urging A&R man John Hammond to produce Dylan’s first LP on Columbia, and for inviting him to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, of which Seeger was a board member. There was a widely repeated story that Seeger was so upset over the extremely loud amplified sound that Dylan, backed by members of the Butterfield Blues Band, brought into the 1965 Newport Folk Festival that he threatened to disconnect the equipment. There are multiple versions of what went on, some fanciful. What is certain is that tensions had been running high between Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman and Festival Board members (who besides Seeger also included Theodore Bikel, Bruce Jackson, Alan Lomax, festival MC Peter Yarrow, and George Wein) over the scheduling of performers and other matters. Two days earlier, there had been a scuffle and brief exchange of blows between Grossman and Alan Lomax, and the Board in an emergency session had voted to ban Grossman from the grounds, but had backed off when George Wein pointed out that Grossman also managed highly popular draws Odetta and Peter, Paul and Mary. Seeger has been portrayed as a folk “purist” who was one of the main opponents to Dylan’s “going electric”. but when asked in 2001 about how he recalled his “objections” to the electric style, he said:

I couldn’t understand the words. I wanted to hear the words. It was a great song, “Maggie’s Farm,” and the sound was distorted. I ran over to the guy at the controls and shouted, “Fix the sound so you can hear the words.” He hollered back, “This is the way they want it.” I said “Damn it, if I had an axe, I’d cut the cable right now.” But I was at fault. I was the MC, and I could have said to the part of the crowd that booed Bob, “you didn’t boo Howlin’ Wolf yesterday. He was electric!” Though I still prefer to hear Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father’s old term.

Vietnam War era and beyond

A longstanding opponent of the arms race and of the Vietnam War, Seeger satirically attacked then-President Lyndon Johnson with his 1966 recording, on the album Dangerous Songs!?, of Len Chandler’s children’s song, “Beans in My Ears”. Beyond Chandler’s lyrics, Seeger said that “Mrs. Jay’s little son Alby” had “beans in his ears,” which, as the lyrics imply, ensures that a person does not hear what is said to them. To those opposed to continuing the Vietnam War, the phrase implied that “Alby Jay”, a loose pronunciation of Johnson’s nickname “LBJ,” did not listen to anti-war protests as he too had “beans in his ears”.

During 1966, Seeger and Malvina Reynolds took part in environmental activism. The album God Bless the Grass was released on January of that year and became the first album in history wholly dedicated to songs about environmental issues. Their politics were informed by the same ideologies of nationalism, populism, and criticism of big business.

Seeger attracted wider attention starting in 1967 with his song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”, about a captain — referred to in the lyrics as “the big fool” — who drowned while leading a platoon on maneuvers in Louisiana during World War II. With its lyrics about a platoon being led into danger by an ignorant captain, the song’s anti-war message was obvious — the line “the big fool said to push on” is repeated several times.[61] In the face of arguments with the management of CBS about whether the song’s political weight was in keeping with the usually light-hearted entertainment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the final lines were “Every time I read the paper/those old feelings come on/We are waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on.” The lyrics could be interpreted as an allegory of Johnson as the “big fool” and the Vietnam War as the foreseeable danger. Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show, after wide publicity, it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers’ Brothers show in the following January.

At the November 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium March on Washington, DC, Seeger led 500,000 protesters in singing John Lennon’s song “Give Peace a Chance” as they rallied across from the White House. Seeger’s voice carried over the crowd, interspersing phrases like, “Are you listening, Nixon?” between the choruses of protesters singing, “All we are saying … is give peace a chance”.

Inspired by Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled “This machine kills fascists,”photo Seeger’s banjo was emblazoned with the motto “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender.”

In the documentary film The Power of Song, Seeger mentions that he and his family visited North Vietnam in 1972.

Being a supporter of progressive labor unions, Seeger had supported Ed Sadlowski in his bid for the presidency of the United Steelworkers of America. In 1977, Seeger appeared at a fundraiser in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In 1978, Seeger joined American folk, blues, and jazz singer Barbara Dane at a rally in New York for striking coal miners.

In 1980, Pete Seeger performed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The performance was later released by Smithsonian Folkways as the album Singalong Sanders Theater, 1980.

Hudson River sloop Clearwater

In 1966, Seeger and his wife Toshi founded the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a non-profit organization based in Poughkeepsie, New York, that sought to protect the Hudson River and surrounding wetlands and waterways through advocacy and public education. It constructed a floating ambassador for this environmental mission, the sloop Clearwater, and began an annual music and environmental festival, today known as the Great Hudson River Revival.

Reflection on support for Soviet Communism

In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for Poland’s Solidarity resistance movement. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger’s decades-long personal dislike of communism in its Soviet form. In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change and that “the most lasting revolutions are those that take place over a period of time.” In his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers Gone (1993, 1997, reissued in 2009), Seeger wrote, “Should I apologize for all this? I think so.” He went on to put his thinking in context:

How could Hitler have been stopped? Litvinov, the Soviet delegate to the League of Nations in ’36, proposed a worldwide quarantine but got no takers. For more on those times check out pacifist Dave Dellinger‘s book, From Yale to Jail … At any rate, today I’ll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was merely a “hard driver” and not a “supremely cruel misleader.” I guess anyone who calls himself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. ought to apologize for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern White Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Who should my granddaughter Moraya apologize to? She’s part African, part European, part Chinese, part Japanese, part Native American. Let’s look ahead.

In a 1995 interview, however, he insisted that “I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.” In recent years, as the aging Seeger began to garner awards and recognition for his lifelong activism, he also found himself criticized once again for his opinions and a*sociations of the 1930s and 1940s. In 2006, David Boaz—Voice of America and NPR commentator and president of the libertarian Cato Institute—wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian, entitled “Stalin’s Songbird” in which he excoriated The New Yorker and The New York Times for lauding Seeger. He characterized Seeger as “someone with a longtime habit of following the party line” who had only “eventually” parted ways with the CPUSA. In support of this view, he quoted lines from the Almanac Singers’ May 1941 Songs for John Doe, contrasting them darkly with lines supporting the war from Dear Mr. President, issued in 1942, after the United States and the Soviet Union had entered the war.

In 2007, in response to criticism from historian Ron Radosh, a former Trotskyite who now writes for the conservative National Review — Seeger wrote a song condemning Stalin, “Big Joe Blues”:

I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe.
He ruled with an iron hand.
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land.
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race.
Instead he set it back
Right in the same nasty place.
I got the Big Joe Blues.
Keep your mouth shut or you will die fast.
I got the Big Joe Blues.
Do this job, no questions asked.
I got the Big Joe Blues.

The song was accompanied by a letter to Radosh, in which Seeger stated, “I think you’re right, I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R [in 1965].”

Later work

On March 16, 2007, Pete Seeger, his sister Peggy, his brothers Mike and John, his wife Toshi, and other family members spoke and performed at a symposium and concert sponsored by the American Folklife Center in honor of the Seeger family, held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.,  where Pete Seeger had been employed by the Archive of American Folk Song 67 years earlier.
In September 2008, Appleseed Recordings released At 89, Seeger’s first studio album in 12 years. On September 29, 2008, the 89-year-old singer-activist, once banned from commercial TV, made a rare national TV appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, singing “Take It From Dr. King”.

On January 18, 2009, Seeger and his grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen, and the crowd in singing the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land” in the finale of Barack Obama’s Inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of two verses not often included in the song, one about a “private property” sign the narrator cheerfully ignores, and the other making a passing reference to a Depression-era relief office. The former’s final line, however, “This land was made for you and me,” is modified to “That side was made for you and me.”

Over the years, he lent his fame to support numerous environmental organizations, including South Jersey’s Bayshore Center, the home of New Jersey’s tall ship, the oyster schooner A.J. Meerwald. Seeger’s benefit concerts helped raise funds for groups so they could continue to educate and spread environmental awareness. On May 3, 2009, at the Clearwater Concert, dozens of musicians gathered in New York at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Seeger’s 90th birthday (which was later televised on PBS during the summer), ranging from Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Eric Weissberg, Ani DiFranco and Roger McGuinn to Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Joanne Shenandoah, R. Carlos Nakai, Bill Miller, Joseph Fire Crow, Margo Thunderbird, Tom Paxton, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Arlo Guthrie. Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez was also invited to appear but his visa was not approved in time by the United States government. Consistent with Seeger’s long-time advocacy for environmental concerns, the proceeds from the event benefited the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, a non-profit organization founded by Seeger in 1966, to defend and restore the Hudson River. Seeger’s 90th Birthday was also celebrated at The College of Staten Island on May 4.

On September 19, 2009, Seeger made his first appearance at the 52nd Monterey Jazz Festival, which was particularly notable because the festival does not normally feature folk artists.

In 2010, still active at the age of 91, Seeger co-wrote and performed the song God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You with Lorre Wyatt, commenting on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A performance of the song by Seeger, Wyatt, and friends was recorded and filmed aboard the Sloop Clearwater in August for a single and video produced by Richard Barone and Matthew Billy, released on election day November 6, 2012.

On October 21, 2011, at age 92, Pete Seeger was part of a solidarity march with Occupy Wall Street to Columbus Circle in New York City. The march began with Seeger and fellow musicians exiting Symphony Space (95th and Broadway), where they had performed as part of a benefit for Seeger’s Clearwater organization. Thousands of people crowded Pete Seeger by the time they reached Columbus Circle, where he performed with his grandson, Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, David Amram, and other celebrated musicians.[105] The event, promoted under the name OccupyTheCircle, was live streamed, and dubbed by some as “The Pete Seeger March”.

On December 14, 2012, Seeger performed, along with Harry Belafonte, Jackson Browne, Common, and others, at a concert to bring awareness to the 37-year-long ordeal of Native American Activist Leonard Peltier. The concert was held at the Beacon Theater in New York City.

On April 9, 2013, Hachette Audio Books issued an audiobook entitled Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems. This two-CD spoken-word work was conceived of and produced by noted percussionist Jeff Haynes and presents Pete Seeger telling the stories of his life against a background of music performed by more than 40 musicians of varied genres. The launch of the audiobook was held at the Dia:Beacon on April 11, 2013, to an enthusiastic audience of around two hundred people, and featured many of the musicians from the project (among them Samite, Dar Williams, Dave Eggar, and Richie Stearns of the Horse Flies and Natalie Merchant) performing live under the direction of producer and percussionist Haynes.[108] April 15, 2013, Sirius XM Book Radio presented the Dia:Beacon concert as a special episode of “Cover to Cover Live with Maggie Linton and Kim Alexander” entitled “Pete Seeger: The Storm King and Friends.”

On August 9, 2013, one month widowed, Seeger was in New York City for the 400-year commemoration of the Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Iroquois and the Dutch. On an interview he gave that day to Democracy Now!, Seeger sang “I Come and Stand at Every Door”, as it was also the 68th anniversary of bombing of Nagasaki.

On September 21, 2013, Pete Seeger performed at Farm Aid at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York. Joined by Wille Nelson, Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews, he sang “This Land Is Your Land”,  and included a verse he said he had written specifically for the Farm Aid concert.

Personal life

Seeger married Toshi Aline Ota in 1943, whom he credited with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible. The couple remained married until Toshi’s death in July 2013.  Their first child, Peter Ōta Seeger, was born in 1944 and died at six months, while Pete was deployed overseas. Pete never saw him. They went on to have three more children: Daniel (an accomplished photographer and filmmaker), Mika (a potter and muralist), and Tinya (a potter), as well as grandchildren Tao Rodríguez-Seeger (a musician), Cassie (an artist), Kitama Cahill-Jackson (a psychotherapist), Moraya (a marriage and family therapist married to the NFL player Chris DeGeare), Penny, Isabelle, and great-grandchildren Dio and Gabel. Tao, a folk musician in his own right, sings and plays guitar, banjo, and harmonica with the Mammals. Kitama Jackson is a documentary filmmaker who was a*sociate producer of the PBS documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.

When asked by Beliefnet about his religious or spiritual beliefs, and his definition of God, Seeger replied:

Nobody knows for sure. But people undoubtedly get feelings which are not explainable and they feel they’re talking to God or they’re talking to their parents who are long dead. I feel most spiritual when I’m out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it’s all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I’m not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God. Whenever I’m listening to something I’m listening to God. I’ve had preachers of the gospel, Presbyterians and Methodists, saying, “Pete, I feel that you are a very spiritual person.” And maybe I am. I feel strongly that I’m trying to raise people’s spirits to get together. … I tell people I don’t think God is an old white man with a long white beard and no navel; nor do I think God is an old black woman with white hair and no navel. But I think God is literally everything, because I don’t believe that something can come out of nothing. And so there’s always been something. Always is a long time.

He was a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York.

Seeger lived in Beacon, New York. He remained engaged politically and maintained an active lifestyle in the Hudson Valley region of New York throughout his life. He and Toshi purchased their land in 1949 and lived there first in a trailer, then in a log cabin they built themselves. Toshi died in Beacon on July 9, 2013, at the age of 91,  and Pete died at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 27, 2014, at the age of 94.

Legacy

Response and reaction to Seeger’s death quickly poured in. President Barack Obama noted that Seeger had been called “America’s tuning fork”  and that he believed in “the power of song” to bring social change, “Over the years, Pete used his voice and his hammer to strike blows for workers’ rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation, and he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger.” Folksinger and fellow activist Billy Bragg wrote that: “Pete believed that music could make a difference. Not change the world, he never claimed that – he once said that if music could change the world he’d only be making music – but he believed that while music didn’t have agency, it did have the power to make a difference.” Bruce Springsteen said of Seeger’s death, “I lost a great friend and a great hero last night, Pete Seeger”, before performing “We Shall Overcome” while on tour in South Africa.

Tributes

• A proposal was made in 2009 to name the Walkway Over the Hudson in his honor.
• A posthumous suggestion that Seeger’s name be applied to the replacement Tappan Zee Bridge being built over the Hudson River was made by a local town supervisor. Seeger’s boat, the sloop Clearwater, is based at Beacon, New York, just upriver from the bridge.
• Oakwood Friends School located in Poughkeepsie New York, not far from Seeger’s home, performed Where Have All the Flowers Gone? at one of their worship meetings. The collaboration was with three teachers (playing guitar and vocals) as well as a student harmonica player and a student vocalist.
• A free five-day memorial called Seeger Fest took place on July 17 to 21, 2014, featuring Judy Collins, Peter Yarrow, Harry Belafonte, Anti-Flag, Michael Glabicki of Rusted Root, Steve Earle, Holly Near, Fred Hellerman, Guy Davis, DJ Logic, Paul Winter Consort, Dar Williams, DJ Kool Herc, The Rappers Delight Experience, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, David amram, Mik + Ruthy, Tom Chapin, James Maddock, The Chapin Sisters, Rebel Diaz, Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emma’s Revolution, Toni Blackman, Kim & Reggie Harris, Magpie, Abrazos Orcchestra, Nyraine, George Wein, The Vanaver Caravan, White Tiger Society, Lorre Wyatt, AKIR, Adira & Alana Amram, Aurora Barnes, The Owens Brothers, The Tony Lee Thomas Band, Jay Ungar & Molly Mason, Ney York Sity Labor Chorus, Roland Moussa, Roots Revelators, Kristen Graves, Bob Reid, Hudson River Sloop Singers, Walkabout Clearwater Chorus, Betty & The baby Boomers, Work O’ The Weavers, Jacob Bernz * Sarah Armour, and Amanda Palmer.
• In 2006, thirteen folk music songs made popular by Pete Seeger have been reinterpreted by Bruce Springsteen in his fourteenth studio album: “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions“
• In 2014, Wepecket Island Records recorded a Pete Seeger tribute album called “For Pete’s Sake“

Awards

Seeger received many awards and recognitions throughout his career, including:

• Induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1972)
• The Eugene V. Debs Award (1979)
• The Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award (1986)
• The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1993)
• The National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994)
• Kennedy Center Honor (1994)
• The Harvard Arts Medal (1996)
• The James Smithson Bicentennial Medal (1996)^[130]
• Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1996)
• Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 1996 for his record Pete (1997)
• The Felix Varela Medal, Cuba‘s highest honor for “his humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism” (1999)
• The Schneider Family Book Award for his children’s picture book The Deaf Musicians. (2007)
• The Mid-Hudson Civic Center Hall of Fame (2008)- Seeger and Arlo Guthrie performed the first public concert at the Poughkeepsie, New York not-for-profit family entertainment venue, close to Seeger’s home, in 1976. Grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger accepted the Hall of Fame plaque on behalf of his grandfather.
• Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album of 2008 for his record At 89 (2009)
• The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award for his commitment to peace and social justice as a musician, songwriter, activist, and environmentalist that spans over sixty years. (2008)
• The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2009)
• Grammy Award for Best Musical Album for Children of 2010 for his record album Tomorrow’s Children with the Rivertown Kids and Friends (2011)
• George Peabody Medal (2013)
• Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album of 2013 nomination for Pete Seeger: The Storm King; Stories, Narratives, Poems (2014)
• Woody Guthrie Prize (2014) (inaugural recipient)