Pete’s Draggin’

Or

Peat Seeker 

(Doff the cap to Don)
Dirty hippie folk-singing Commie Pete Seeger has died at the age of 94, so I hope the funeral director has a hammer, because you know Earth Boy had himself nailed into a plain pine box to avoid a carbon footprint even in death. A fixture on national radio as a solo act in the 1940s when there were about 9 songs, Seeger joined the Weavers in the 1950s, hitting #1 with Goodnight, Irene before the lone bright spot of the McCarthy Era saw them get blacklisted. When the nation went to hell in a handbasket in the 1960s, it was on Seeger’s elbow, as he provided the soundtrack for protests, sit-ins and love-ins with a steady torrent of songs about disarmament, the environment and Bewitched fan fiction. Seeger co-opted the civil rights movement by forcing the spiritual We Shall Overcome down their throats, and then just depressed everyone by adapting Kumbaya as a camp song staple. He helped the Smothers Brothers piss off CBS by performing there, his first national appearance in more than a decade, sounded the drumbeat for wrongly convicted death row inmate Delbert Tibbs, who was later exonerated, and was an early backer of acoustic Bob Dylan and an early abandoner of electric Bob Dylan. Seeger kept rousing rabble well into his 90s, advocating for the environment, including a song about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, joining a solidarity march with Occupy Wall Street, singing about Native American Activist Leonard Peltier, and taking up the cause after The Dark Knight got snubbed for Best Picture in 2008.