New Pete Seeger DVD Now Available

The new Pete Seeger DVD is finally available, in tandem with the remastered CD of the 1997 album PETE, or separately. Although the DVD will not be released nationally until next year, pre-release downloads and physical copies are available though their website.

Meanwhile, rehearsals are in full swing toward opening night of our 36th Annual Winter Solstice Celebration at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine next Thursday December 17. Our extraordinary production team has already been at work in the Cathedral for a week. The riggers have dropped their cables from the roof to fly the trusses for the lighting, the sound system and the Sun gong, and the staging will load-in this weekend. Renato Braz has just arrived from São Paulo, so I'm glad to turn my full attention now to the music.

In June of 1982, Pete came to Cornwall, in the Litchfield Hills of northwest Connecticut, to take part in our Living Music Festival, along with the Consort, vocalist Susan Osborn, and the Brazilian samba band Pe de Boi. I had engaged filmmaker Phil Garvin to capture the event with a three-camera crew, but the tapes then gathered dust for 33 years. After Pete's passing last year, I located Phil in Denver, and luckily he still had the original reels, which were then sent to a videotape restoration facility in Kentucky, and finally to a studio in Connecticut that made the conversion to High Definition digital.

This is vintage Pete, in the kind of grass-roots context where he felt at home. And it is vintage Consort as well, with the players that made the album Common Ground. It includes the only footage we know of Susan Osborn singing "Lay Down Your Burden," a song we have only recently brought back into the Consort's repertoire. Theresa Thomason will sing it in our upcoming Winter Solstice Celebration.

In the 77-minute film of the Living Music Festival, Pete sings "John Henry," "The Garden Song," "Drunken Sailor," Roll the Old Chariot Along," "Still de Nachte," "The Internationale," "Old Time Religion," "Nicaragua Carol," and "Wimoweh."

The Consort plays "Icarus," "Lay Down Your Burden," "Wolf Eyes," "Minuit," and "Common Ground," with Pete joining us on these last three songs. The players of the Consort include cellist David Darling, guitarists Oscar Castro-Neves and Jim Scott, bassist Gordie Johnson, and percussionist Ted Moore, along with vocalist Susan Osborn and myself.

DVD Bonus Features

1. The PETE-NIC (17 minutes)
In the summer of 1997, we invited Pete and all the singers and instrumentalists who made the album PETE to come to my farm in Litchfield for a musical picnic to celebrate the album's Grammy win. In this slice-of-life footage, Pete leads everyone in "Well May the World Go," "My Rainbow Race," "All Mixed Up," and "Common Ground." Instrumental players include Irish whistle virtuoso Joanie Madden, banjoist Paul Prestopino, percussionist Gordon Gottlieb, and myself.

2. PETE SEEGER SOLO (5 minutes)
In March of 2005, Pete sang at an event in Goshen, CT, for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society on the 40th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," the Pettus Bridge March in Selma, Alabama, March 6, 1965. Pete had received a telegram from Dr. Martin King inviting him to that march, and Pete and his wife Toshi had gone to Alabama and marched with the people for three days. This is rare footage of Pete singing the song "Take it from Dr. King," He sings here, at age 85, with the same gusto he had when he was 25.

To post a comment, you must register and login.