Re Seeger has never been an easy man.
to get hold of. It was always not merely a
question of whether he was home but wheth-
er he was in the country. And at 55. the grizz-
ly-bearded troubador folkloreate is busier
than ever.

To get an interview we took advantage of
his period of recuperation from a long-
delayed hernia operation to beard him in his
hillside den up in Beacon, N.Y. &

It was a cold, snowy day. and he had the
fire going. Completely disinterested in my
presence were his dog. Crowder, and his
cat, Snuggles, who lay sleeping most of the
’ time on the shaggy rug and the sofa, respec-

tively.

I -wasn’t long settled before Seeger got
into one of his main concerns: ecology.From
his living room window he pointed out
through the overcast toward a dim shoreline
on the far side of the Hudson River. Nothing
else was visible but I could tell from the way
he moved his finger and squinfed that he was
drawing for me what lay beyond.

‘*You used to be able to see 45 miles into
the Catskills over there,” he said, “but now
the smog comes up from New York and Pitts-
burgh, and even from Chicago, and just
hangs over the mountains.”’ I said that the
gray seemed to be nothing more than over-
cast.

“Today that’s true,’ he said, “but on a
clear day you'll see that smog just hanging
out there. It’s really a terrible thing.”

The irony was inescapable: Pete and
Toshi Seeger moving out of the city (Green-
wich Village), building their own home
in the country on a hill overlooking the
Hudson, and the smog is blown up from
the cities to hang outside their window, and
the river itself is polluted. Then he talks
about another ‘‘city’’ problem that’s in his

neighborhood: the attempt by big realtors to
urban renewalize Blacks out of Newburgh,
which lies just across the river from the
Seegers. : ee

With Seeger’s involvement in the strug-
gles to save the environment, and the neigh-
borhoods of Newburgh, it became clear that

his removal from the city is more geograph-

ical than umbilical. He underscores it; “‘If

I had it to do over again I wouldn’t leave

the city. The whole fight to save the cities,

the fight against the landlords, the fight
against racism, is very exciting — I’d like
to be part of it.”

_ The ‘‘doing it over again” goes back 25

years to a patch of hillside covered with~

trees and rocks. ‘‘But it was cheap,’’ Seeger
added. He and Toshi chopped the trees down
and built a cabin with their own four hands

(friends helped, but Pete and Toshi did most

of the work). “‘I put up the beams,” he

said, sweeping his arm over his head, ‘‘and

Toshi did the cementing.”

With grandson, Teo.

Originany the cabin was one big room,
the kitchen cut off from the living room by a
half wall and a three-step elevation. It was
here they raised their three children.
It became too crowded, however, so they
added a few rooms as they went along. Their
son and daughters are now grown up and
gone. i
‘‘We're rattling around in this place all
alone now,” Pete said. :
“‘Who’s rattling?’’ Toshi wanted to know
from the kitchen where she was preparing
lunch.
Pete laughed.
He hasn’t really had much time to rattle
around up in Beacon. Over the years he has
visited and performed: in 24 countries on

. i)

every continent, not to mention his song- N\
gathering and singing at every nook and .\
cranny in the USA. His most recent trips \
abroad took him to Southeast Asia, the Sov- \
iet Union and China. =
“In Hanoi I found such a generosity and ; \

openness among the people,’ he said. ‘‘I y
walked down the street early one morning, | . : \
afl by myself, and people turned to look at
this tall white man with the banjo and they
would smile. Some would shout out, ‘Abayo-
yo, Abayoyo’ — I had appeared on television :
and sang that song. ;
“But they were also very critical.
I had the feeling they were wonder-
ing, ‘Is this person sincere? Oh yes, he sings
about peace, but does he mean it?’ Ata party \
I sang songs from different parts of the
world and then I sang some about the Hudson

C TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1974—PAGE 6