Pete Seeger
Album: Rainbow Race
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.peteseeger.org

A welcome reissue for a long-lost album from 1973, which the then-just-over-50-year-old Pete recorded for CBS with - unusually - a sensitive studio backing crew. On this selection of mostly self-penned songs (eight out of ten), Pete was on top form vocally, and he showcased his deep respect for humanity with a unique persuasiveness.

His pivotal role as a writer and singer of passionate, thoughtful and intensely relevant protest songs is rightly to the forefront here, whether tackling environmental causes, disarmament or civil rights issues; Last Train To Nuremberg draws entirely apposite parallels between Nazi war crimes and the Vietnam massacre (My Lai), for instance, while the album's title song may have started out as a simple children's song (and even became a pop hit in Scandinavia) but that hasn't prevented it from being appropriated many times over for various occasions since.

Although there's no disputing the impact of songs such as Words Words Words and Our Generation, which though of their time still absolutely refuse to date, the beautiful, reflective Sailing Down This Golden River is a particularly masterly example of Pete's craft that's even more timeless, while Snow Snow portrays Pete's affectionate response to the wonders of nature. And the album's two non-originals cohere with Pete's own compositions magnificently: Bud Foote's The Clearwater tells of Pete's own sloop of that name, while a tender cover of Woody Guthrie's Hobo's Lullaby closes the disc most fittingly.

David Kidman