Pete Seeger has the Joe Stalin blues

[Jasman0717 9]

By MICHAEL HILL

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Pete Seeger has the Joe Stalin blues.

Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, the 88-year-old banjo-picker has written a song about the Soviet leader that's as scathing as any tune in the folk legend's long career.

"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," Seeger wrote in "The Big Joe Blues."

Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and apologized years ago for not recognizing that Josef Stalin was a "very cruel misleader." But he told The Associated Press on Friday that the song he finally finished this year is a first for him, despite three visits to the Soviet Union beginning in the '60s.

"It's the first overt song about the Soviet Union," Seeger said during a phone interview from his Hudson Valley home in Beacon. "I think I should have though, when I was in the Soviet Union - I should have asked, 'Can I see one of the old gulags?'"

Seeger calls it a yodeling blues song, and sings the chorus so it sounds like "I got the Big Joe Bloo-ew-ew-ews!" He said it's the sort of song his old buddy Woody Guthrie might have written in the '50s.

The song's existence also touches on a sensitive political issue: the view by critics on the right that the left recognized Stalin's tyranny only belatedly. Partial lyrics were cited Friday by author Ron Radosh in a New York Sun column.

Radosh, an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, accused Seeger in the newspaper two months ago of failing to criticize the communist regimes he once backed.

Radosh took banjo lessons from Seeger in the '50s - two dollars for three hours - though Radosh took a very different political path from his childhood hero.

In a follow-up column Friday, Radosh said he was tickled to receive a warm letter last week from his old idol with a copy of the song attached. He provided a copy of the song to the AP on Friday, and said he still admires Seeger.

"I think he is a man of principle," Radosh said. "He's often wrong."

Seeger said he hopes to publish the song in the folk magazine "Sing Out." Though Seeger's voice has been reduced to a throaty croak, he said he has performed the song for friends.

Seeger is still politically active, concerned about the fate of humanity - and puckish. He agreed to answer questions on the phone from an AP reporter only if the story included lines from a song he wrote after the Sept. 11 attacks about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It goes like this: "Don't say it can't be done, the battle's just begun, take it from Dr. King, you too can learn to sing. So drop the gun!"

"I get the whole crowd singing on it," Seeger said. "I've never failed to get an audience singing, whether they're 8 years old or 80 years old."

[Nagishkaw 510]

Im really feelin' OLD now ! Bless God , he's still alive and kickin' .

[peejay 327]

Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers, and a host of others were all children of the Dirty Thirties. I have a soft spot for the era my parents grew up in. The Great Depression. I grew up hearing about it from my parents. My dad grew up in rural northern Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl days. A lot of my dad's relatives in Oklahoma and Kansas fled the drought and dispair down Route 66 to California and Oregon in the Dirty Thirties. I still love to hear the old Woody Guthrie tune, Do-Re-Mi. A real classic. It says it all.

A lot of the American Lefties were fooled by the fake utopia of Red Russia. My mom's parents immigrated from Byelorussia to the USA during the time of the Czar and they left behind their parents and siblings. I still have a lot of relatives in present day Belarus and Russia that I have met. I ran across a Jewish guy in Houston that immigrated from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialiast Republic in the 1980's from Gomel after Chernobyl and I was telling him about my grandparents that immigrated from there before WW1. He told me, "Your grandparents avoided a hell of a lot of misery." My relatives in Belarus told us the same thing when we were reunited in the 1990's.

May Hitler and Stalin rot in hell until eternity.

[Jasman0717 9]

I went and bought a Seeger album about 30 years ago because it had a song called 'garbage' on it

[Nagishkaw 510]

I always liked The Weavers.