Yesterday we lost a legend. Everybody has a favorite Pete Seeger song, this is mine.

Courtesy of the YouTube page:

 On July 26, 1956, the House of Representatives voted 373 to 9 to cite Pete Seeger and seven others (including playwright Arthur Miller) for contempt, as they failed to cooperate with House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in their attempts to investigate alleged subversives and communists. Pete Seeger testified before the HUAC in 1955. 

In one of Pete's darkest moments, when his personal freedom, his career, and his safety were in jeopardy, a flash of inspiration ignited this song. The song was stirred by a passage from Mikhail Sholokhov's novel "And Quie Flows the Don". Around the world the song traveled and in 1962 at a UNICEF concert in Germany, Marlene Dietrich, Academy Award-nominated German-born American actress, first performed the song in French, as "Qui peut dire ou vont les fleurs?" Shortly after she sang it in German. The song's impact in Germany just after WWII was shattering. It's universal message, "let there be peace in the world" did not get lost in its translation. To the contrary, the combination of the language, the setting, and the great lyrics has had a profound effect on people all around the world. May it have the same effect today and bring renewed awareness to all that hear it.

When I was a teenager, the teachers in my high school went on strike.

The students were told that if we left class to stand with them we would be suspended. 

Of course being me, I did go out, and they did suspend me. However the strike was over in a matter of days, and my suspension was over at about the same time.

While I was standing outside in the cold, I suddenly burst into song. This song.

Soon all along the picket line voices were raised in harmony.

One of my best days ever, and well worth the few days of suspension I received. 

Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger joins Occupy Wall Street march. Okay NOW we have a protest!

Courtesy of Spinner:

Pete Seeger has spent decades protesting against war, racial inequaliy and unfair labor practices, and on Friday night , he lent his support -- and voice -- to the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. 

After performing at New York City's Symphony Space, the legendary folk singer fell in with a group of roughly 1,000 protestors and marched more than 30 blocks down Broadway. Upon reaching Columbus Circle, he sang a version of 'We Shall Overcome,' one of the many up-with-the-people anthems he's helped to popularize over the years. 

Joining the 92-year-old music legend were fellow folkie Arlo Guthrie, musician grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger, bluesman Guy Davis, composer David Amram and singer-storyteller Tom Chapin. 

Throughout the march, Seeger and the demonstrators chanted such slogans as, "We are the 99 percent," a rallying call in the movement against corporate greed.

Here is video of the event.  You can see Seeger and others illuminated by flashes starting around the :50 mark.

Personally as a child of the sixties and seventies I am not even sure how you even HAVE a protest without the presence of Mr. Seeger.

Just imagine how much easier it will be for the Republicans and their corporate masters to refer to the protesters as"hippies" now! Not that they were not already channeling the discriminatory vocabulary of their parents and grandparents from the 1960's in order to attack a movement that clearly scares them now, like those protests scared the Establishment back in the day.

Of course I don't see that as a bad thing. It took young people willing to speak truth to power back in the 60's to bring attention to an unjust war and out of control corporatism to foment a change (Short lived as it was.), and it clearly calls for a similar response today.

Perhaps Gryphen needs to go dig out his old tie-dye t-shirts, and rawhide headbands, and join the revolution.

But then again, haven't I always been part of it?