American folk singer Pete Seeger breathes his last

Seeger died on Monday at the age of 94, leaving behind classics like Where Have All the Flowers Gone and If I Had a Hammer, laying out his vision of what the United States can and should be. Dubbed ‘America’s tuning fork’ by poet Carl Sandburg, the bald and bearded banjo-playing tenor brought a feast of material to US musical culture. He adapted a Negro spiritual for the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome and a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes for the Byrds hit Turn! Turn! Turn! Briefly a communist and a life-long activist for social and environmental issues, he was indicted for contempt of Congress in 1957 while playing, recording and listening to songs by those at the bottom of the ladder. ‘My job is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world and if used right it may help save the planet,’ The New York Times quoted Seeger as saying. Peter Seeger was born on 3 May, 1919 to parents who were a musicologist and a concert violinist. After they divorced, his father remarried a composer. Seeger’s first exposure to folk music and the banjo came at age 16, at a folk festival he attended with his father in Asheville, North Carolina. He learned the ukulele and studied journalism at Harvard before dropping out.