SARANAC LAKE — Pete Seeger’s banjo is inscribed with the words, “This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
The Earth Care Coffeehouse: 10th Pete Seeger Tribute will be held Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church of Saranac Lake’s Great Hall to celebrate Earth Care and Seeger’s life work by sharing his music and supporting his passion project to clean the Hudson River.
Confirmed performers include Curt Stager; Keith Gorgas; Duane Gould; Lisa and Klaus Meissner, of the Rustic Riders; Tom Techman and Slo’ Jam; and The People’s Chorus.
The First Presbyterian Church of Saranac Lake is a certified Earth Care Congregation. To obtain and retain this certification it not only continually upgrades its facility to reduce carbon emissions and pollution, but also actively works to help its members and community care for God’s creation.
“Our church has been having an Earth Care Coffeehouse around Earth Day,” Lisa Meissner said. “And the year that Peter Seeger died, I was in Minnesota and a friend called and said we should do something for Peter Seeger. We weren’t able to do something around then, so the minister suggested why don’t we do something around Earth Day, and that’s what we did.
“We really wanted Curt Stager to be able to come and play, but he couldn’t do it until the first Saturday in May, which turned out to be his birthday. I made a list of all the musicians who might be interested in playing. I got about halfway through the list, and I said I should wait and see if I get any response. Everybody responded immediately, so it was like, OK, this is going to be good.
“The night was so much fun, and somebody said we should do this every year around his birthday, and that’s what we’ve done, except for COVID. It’s been 12 years, but we missed two years because of COVID, so it’s the 10th anniversary.”
The folk music icon was born May 3, 1919, in the French Hospital in New York City to parents Charles Louis Seeger Jr., a composer and musicologist, and Constance de Clyver Seeger (née Edson), a concert violinist and Juilliard School instructor.
“His father and mother collected folk music. He grew up traveling around as they collected music from different peoples and helped salvage the music that was dying because of radio and records. People weren’t making their own music in the same way anymore, but they certainly do here in Saranac Lake,” she said.
“There are a lot of musicians to ask to play. They loved the music. I think Pete spoke to them as far as unifying people and bringing people together. A lot of his songs really speak to what he called the ‘Teaspoon Brigade.’ So you have to fill sandbags for floods. If everybody just brings a teaspoon of sand, you can fill the bag, and many things like that. He was really about people working together to do great things.”
In between acts, Meisnner will read from Seeger’s collected letters from a book titled “In His Own Words.”
“He was a consummate letter writer, and everything he wrote he saved a carbon copy of. He had files and file cabinets full of his carbon copies, and he gave Rob and Sam Rosenthal, father and son, permission to go through them, and they organized it by topic. I will be reading a few things from that, so I will bring his words into it. That’ll be a lot of fun,” she said.
“Every year, we collect a donation. There is no cost to get in, there is no cost for the refreshments, but we do collect a donation if people want to donate. We usually raise between $800 and $1,000 for the Hudson Sloop Clearwater. The Hudson was really, really, really polluted with sewage from all the towns along the way from people’s garbage. Pete liked to sail up and down that river, and he’s got a song called ‘My Dirty Stream’ where he describes the problem. But he thought that if people could get on the water and see it, they would want to change it.
“Someone had mentioned to him there were these Hudson sailing sloops, so he and a bunch of people raised some funds to make a Hudson river sloop, and they called it The Clearwater. It’s still going. It’s been renovated.”
The sloop Clearwater, a replica vessel modeled after the Dutch vessels that sailed the Hudson River in the 18th and 19th centuries, was launched on May 17, 1969, from Harvey Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, Maine. Those early cargo vessels were specially designed for the variable winds, currents and depths of the Hudson.
Sailing from town to town today, the Clearwater models her course after that of the historic Dutch sloops. Their cargoes and crews were the main communication link between riverfront towns and outlying areas, which now house one-tenth of this nation’s population.
Clearwater continues that tradition as a vital link between communities and carries a message to the people who sail on her and see her iconic broad sails from the shore about the beauty and wealth of our region’s waterways, and the everlasting need to protect, preserve, and celebrate them, according to clearwater.org.
Pete stated, “I guess I’ve learned more from the Clearwater than anything else. All I did was help plant a seed.”
“For 10 years, we’ve been raising money for it, but we’ve never gone on it. This year, we decided that’s what we we’re doing. We’re going for our anniversary down to Beacon area and go on the Hudson Sloop Clearwater,” Meisnner said.
“They used to have a festival every year. They bring kids onto the boat. They have musicians on the boat. It’s a real event and describes the sails and how it works. In the towns they stop in, they would meet with kids from schools and do educational things along the way. A number of people who come to the event or perform at the event have been involved with the Clearwater over the years. Almost everybody will have a story to tell about how Peter Seeger influenced their lives.
“People come, sometimes, from quite some distance, which always surprises me. A lot of people love to come every year because there is a lot of signing together. There’s a real power in that. There was a documentary about Peter Seeger called ‘The Power of Song,’ and that’s what it feels like. There’s power in everybody being together and singing together. We keep doing it, and we keep saying well, one of these years, nobody will show up, but so far, people show up.”
Meisnner loves folk music, and her first memories of Seeger are at demonstrations.
“Because he would always play for causes,” she said. “I can remember, I was a young adult when I saw him in a concert for the first time. I had only seen him at demonstrations. I came from Long Island, and they were trying to put a nuclear power plant on the eastern end of Long Island, which was just absurd. In case of accident, there would be no way to get off the island.
“Three Mile Island really kind of killed that idea, that there could be an accident really became a reality. They had not started it yet, but it was ready to be started. It was that far along in the process, but then they took it apart. So that was powerful. and of course, against the Vietnam War and things like that. That’s how I got involved and just loving folk music.”