In 1973, my mother invited Pete Seeger to her wedding.
She had been a huge fan since high school, when her older brother Bill brought home a few of his albums. On Sundays she would take the L train across Chicago and join the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. At school, she took part in “hootenannies,” political folk-singing jam sessions popularized by Seeger. One summer she took a six-hour bus ride to Cairo, Illinois to march and sing in support of voting rights for the Black people who lived there.
Bill died in 2012. On a late spring afternoon, my mother and I were standing in the living room of his northside apartment. My uncle kept everything he owned in pristine condition, which reminded me of the Christmas gifts he’d sent us as children – always wrapped so meticulously that they seemed to have come directly from the manufacturer. Below a long wooden cabinet full of glassware was his record collection, tucked away inside a cardboard file box, each album pressed perfectly vertical against one another. I slid the box into the middle of the room and began gently pulling records out one by one. In-between several Bob Dylan LPs and a compilation of Gwendolyn Brooks poetry was Pete Seeger’s live album, “We Shall Overcome.” Bright sunlight shone in through the windows and reflected against the cover.
“That’s probably the copy we listened to as kids,” my mom said.
Two weeks after September 11, 2001, I moved to New York City. Young national guardsmen brandishing automatic rifles stood by subway turnstiles and paced platforms, looking nervous as people rushed on and off. A close friend and I discussed what we might do if President Bush restarted the military draft. What were our options for resistance? I rented a van to pick up a few milkcrates of jazz records and other belongings I’d been storing at his Jersey City apartment. Before entering the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan, we were stopped by police officers who made us open every door, shining their flashlights inside the echoing, empty metal interior.
One evening that November I stayed late in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn to catch a movie. Around midnight I walked outside into the cold, silent air, and found a cab willing to take me home. A few blocks up 7th Avenue, an NYPD patrol car pulled in front of us and immediately slowed to sloth-like speed. The cab driver began apologizing: “I’m so sorry, the police, they like to do this, they like to mess with us.” He paused. “I cannot go around or I will get a ticket, I’m sorry.”
“No worries,” I told him. He seemed to relax.
“Everything is so crazy now, I must be careful,” he said softly. As the police finally floated away, he began telling me how his wife had gone to visit relatives in Pakistan and was not being allowed back into the United States. When he attempted to visit her, he was detained and interrogated for many hours by border agents. He had no idea when he would see her again.
We pulled up to my building. He put the car in park and turned around in his seat.
“What do you think of all this?” he asked.
I remember telling him I was scared and uncertain. The car’s heater softly hummed. We sat for a while, sharing our fears, and did not find any answers. But we thanked each other for the opportunity to talk openly.
In 1970, my mother moved from Chicago to the tiny logging town of Rogue River, Oregon. She spent her days working with low-income elderly residents as one of the first “Volunteers in Service to America,” known as VISTA. She did odd jobs – driving people to their doctors’ appointments, or answering phone calls at the local community center. She organized the first “Meals on Wheels” program in that part of the state, providing free dinner to people like Blind Burt, an older man who lived in a tiny one-room house that was literally falling apart. Sometimes Burt would sit on the edge of his bed with his guitar and sing to her.
That year, Pete Seeger announced he would be performing at Portland State University. My mother was still buying Seeger’s albums, even reading his books, but had yet to see him live. She was determined to be there.
Rogue River is a long way from Portland. The day of the concert, she woke up before sunrise, caught a ride to the adjacent town of Medford, and boarded a Greyhound bus headed north. When she arrived in downtown Portland five hours later, she met her friend Paula, another VISTA. Together the two women walked to Smith Memorial Hall where Seeger was scheduled to sing.
Moments after they arrived it was announced that ticket sales had ended. The Portland State Perspective later wrote “Young and old they came. And hundreds were turned away.” Many people gave up and left, including Paula. “Well, I guess that’s it,” she said.
My mother refused. Along with a few other stragglers, she waited.
And then, the doors opened.
“Anyone out there?” Pete Seeger’s voice reverberated from somewhere inside. “Let those people in here!” my mother remembers him saying. Every remaining person walked in. None had to pay.
Seeger played two encores. When he finished, my mother stayed to shake his hand. He was very tall, she told me.
In the spring of 2013, New York City criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart had been imprisoned at the Women’s Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas for almost three years. She was 75. There had been a nine-month trial and multiple appeals. There were rallies and speeches and articles in the New York Times. There was an episode of the TV show Law and Order with a fictional version of Lynne, and a very real appearance by then-attorney general John Ashcroft on Late Night with David Letterman boasting of her arrest. There were hundreds of letters written to the judge, from former clients and fellow lawyers, attesting to how important Lynne had been in their lives. But it did not stop her incarceration.
I first met Lynne ten years before, shortly after my move to New York. A colleague of mine asked if I wanted to help build and run a website for Lynne’s “defense committee,” and I said sure. I was working as a part-time administrative assistant at a tiny non-profit in lower Manhattan and knew little of lawyers, but I did have some experience putting together websites.
“Defense committees” are typically ad hoc groups of volunteers working to support someone like Lynne who had been charged with political crimes. In the years before her trial, there would be small evening meetings at Lynne’s office in lower Manhattan, with an assortment of people talking politics and legal strategy: lawyers, professors, often her husband Ralph, a longtime activist in his own right. Sometimes, parked on Broadway just outside her office, there would also be a man sitting a car with government plates. “He’s been there since this morning,” Lynne would say, chuckling.
But now Lynne was in prison, fifteen hundred miles away. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and a shortened life span. Ralph would fly to Fort Worth each month and take a few photos with Lynne in her prison garb, the two of them smiling before a windowless prison backdrop. Sometimes I would post the photos on Facebook.
The committee set up an online petition to free Lynne, citing a federal law which applied to prisoners suffering from serious health conditions. At least once a week, a friend of Ralph and Lynne’s in San Francisco would email me a new set of signatures, which I would alphabetize and reformat, then post to Lynne’s website. The list grew rapidly, and the routine kept us hopeful.
One evening, as we topped 3,500 signatures, I received an email containing something different: a scanned postcard. The front was a convoluted mix of colorful illustrations and cramped, tiny lines of text, awkwardly centered under the heading “How to Build Global Community.” The back was much simpler: “Lynn Stewart should be outa jail!” it read, in a kind of polite scrawl, and was signed “old Pete Seeger.” Beneath his name he had drawn his banjo.
When my wife’s grandmother died, we immediately flew to Canada for the service and burial. I was nervous about being able to correctly follow all the Islamic prayers required for the ceremony. My father-in-law, a serious man who had barely survived the Partition of Pakistan from India as a child, sat next to me in a metal folding chair. As the prayers began to ring out through the auditorium, he looked straight ahead and gently told me “Just follow along to what I do.”
Our return trip to New York was on Delta Airlines. At the airport, my wife and I each entered our biographical data into a little computer terminal for U.S. Customs. The machine then spit out two paper receipts for us to bring up to a counter where an agent stood. My receipt looked normal. Hers had a giant black “X” printed across the entire piece of paper.
We nervously stood in line wondering what it meant. When we approached the customs agent together, he took my ticket, looked at his screen and silently back at me. But when he took my wife’s ticket he stared a bit longer at something on the screen we couldn’t see. “Let’s take a little walk,” he said.
We stepped past the ticket counters and through a door into a windowless room with one small TV screen attached near the ceiling, playing cartoons. White plastic chairs lined the walls. The man left, and we sat down, alone with the TV. Across from us, a sign for a bathroom and a brightly lit hallway stretched into somewhere unknown.
It is hard to describe the immediacy of fear in such a moment. Lawyers I worked with represented people who had been pulled away from their families at airports, but those airports and people had always seemed far away. I put my arm around my wife and stared down the hallway. I thought of the taxi driver I had spoken to over a decade before.
We sat in thick silence for maybe five minutes. Then the door opened. “Ok, you can go,” the man said.
My uncle Bill’s copy of Pete Seeger’s We Shall Overcome now sits within my own record collection. Fine print on the back cover reads “Royalties of Freedom Songs donated to Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee, Atlanta, Ga.” Only weeks after the recording was made, FBI agents forwarded a memorandum to the Central Intelligence Agency containing Seeger’s upcoming travel itinerary.
But this was not new: Seeger was under government surveillance almost his entire life. An early album, Songs for John Doe, wound up in an FBI file marked “Gramophone Records of a Seditious Nature.” The 1941 recording contained anti-war lyrics deemed so supposedly “radical” that the company pressing the record refused to print its own name on the label. Government agents spent the next year interrogating radio station operators across the east coast until they finally identified the company and ordered its remaining inventory of the album destroyed.
Last year I found a little store in northern California selling a copy of Songs for John Doe. The recording is actually three separate shellac records contained in a cardboard “book.” This copy was missing one of the records, but its black and white cover art was intact: a drawing framed by a singing woman and child and a man playing guitar centers on two men – one Black, one white – in work clothes walking next to each other. Inside are the lyrics to each of the songs, written clearly so that listeners can sing along. A short preamble notes, in part, that “Most of the tunes have been sung across America for many years. The words are the people’s language, and the thoughts are what the people are thinking.”
When I was young, about once a month my family would drive to the other side of the city to have dinner with old friends of my parents. Mike and Sara had served as VISTA volunteers with my mother years before in southern Oregon before also moving up to Portland. Once while in their 20s, Sara and my mother had driven across the country from San Francisco to New Jersey in a Volkswagen Bug, putting the car in neutral on downhill inclines to save gas. Now the couple had two kids roughly the same age as my sister and me. I suspect these dinners had been going on years before I was old enough to remember them.
As we finished our meal and conversation slowed, something odd would happen. One of the adults – usually Mike or maybe my mom – would walk across the room and pull a record from a sleeve. Likely Bob Dylan, but sometimes Pete Seeger. And all four of them would begin singing along, laughing, reminiscing. As a kid then, it was weird and boring – usually signaling it was time to get up and do something more fun. But now, the same age as my parents back then, those dinners bring to mind my mother’s stories of high school hootenannies and Blind Burt, the records they all sang along to inspiring he important work they’d done together decades before.
There is a photo I took on January 28, 2017, of my wife standing in a parking lot at John F. Kennedy airport. She’s looking directly at the camera, wearing a black stocking hat and a giant scarf over her winter coat.
“Remember,” she said when I showed her the photo, “Right after you took that picture, I gave my hat to your friend who organized the protest? She looked so cold!”
It was the first week of the Trump administration, and the president had announced his new “Muslim Ban.” When we arrived at the Terminal Four parking lot, there were maybe a hundred demonstrators holding signs. A few others were passing out hats and gloves. “LET THEM IN!” a group began to chant as we joined the crowd. Our phones began to buzz with news of similar protests at other airports across the country. Above us, three people dropped a banner from a parking structure that read “WE WILL LOVE AND PROTECT EACH OTHER.” Everyone cheered.
In 1988, Seeger was asked by the Washington Post why he thought the song “We Shall Overcome” had such emotional impact.
“It’s the genius of simplicity,” he told them. “I like to compare it to the backboard in basketball. You bounce your life experiences off it and they come back with new meaning.”
Pete Seeger did not show up at my mother’s wedding. But a few months later a postcard arrived in the mail.
“Sorry I couldn’t make the wedding!” it read. “Best, Pete”
Beneath the signature was a little drawing of his banjo.
Ian Head lives in San Pedro, CA with his brilliant partner Bina and their anxious rescue dog Annie. He works at the Center for Constitutional Rights and specializes in using the Freedom of Information Act to support social justice movements.