Long time passing in the dark backward and abysm of time

In the piecemeal, inexpert, largely intuitive country that has been my lifelong experience of music, Pete Seeger is like William Shakespeare.  He's everywhere.  If you come at things from a strange angle, as I did and do, a common thread over the years is thinking, every once in a while, variations on,  "Oh, he wrote that.  And that.  Oh, that's a line from Pete Seeger.  He wrote THAT?  Really, wow."  When I listened to Bruce Springsteen's album of Pete Seeger's songs, I felt quite a lot like the person seeing Hamlet for the first time who exclaimed, "But it's full of cliches!" Only that possibly-fictional person was disappointed, while, to my great good fortune, I was delighted.

His testimony before HUAC, which you can read here -- http://www.peteseeger.net/HUAC.htm -- if you haven't already, takes place against a horrible background and has sinister overtones.  In this it is not unlike certain strands of Shakespearean comedy, where the actual practices of torture and the myriad imperfections of Elizabethan and Jacobean justice are lurking.  Reading the increased exasperation of the committee, I was uneasily aware of the horrors in the background, not to mention their offspring sliming around this country and the world to this day; but mostly I was laughing far too hard to attend to them for more than a moment at a time.

I hope the two of them are collaborating on a musical, that's all.

Pamela