Pete Seeger
Album: The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960
Label: Smithsonian Folkways
Tracks: 17+18
Website: http://www.folkways.si.edu

Here's a fantastic, previously unissued concert given by the 40-year-old Pete at Bowdoin College in Maine on 13th March 1960. This was a time when he'd been targeted by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, blacklisted, and under indictment for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about his political beliefs.

In the face of all of this pressure, Pete persevered, travelling throughout North America and performing "community concerts" in schools and other local venues. The close-on-two-hour concert, reproduced in full here over the course of two CDs, was recorded with extraordinary audio fidelity by the campus radio station WBOR-FM, capturing all the electric communal atmosphere of this gig. Its 35 tracks together form not only an entertaining and varied programme, but also a demonstration of the enormity of Pete's talent as a performer, song leader and social activist.

A key component of his success in involving the audience was that each one of the songs performed was prefaced by an introduction that put that song into a social and historical context, and this gambit never fails him throughout the extended set. The first disc takes us from the old folk song Penny's Farm into the intense He Lies In The American Land, composed by a Pennsylvanian steel worker about the death of one of his co-workers, then moves onto sea chanteys of Afro-American origin, a banjo medley, Gershwin's Summertime, D-Day Dodgers, a sequence of political songs, a 12-string-guitar instrumental, the English ballad The Water Is Wide and a stunning performance of Pete's own (then recent) setting of Bells Of Rhymney, finishing up with perennial Weavers favourite Goodnight Irene. And that's just the first half of the gig - eclectic or what?!…

Disc 2 brings us Big Rock Candy Mountain (in close on the Lomax version), a spiritual, civil rights and anti-war songs, a lengthy excerpt from Pete's ambitious medley from his then-not-quite-released Rainbow Quest album (which included the original three-verse version of Pete's own Where Have All The Flowers Gone?), the celebrated Vive La Quince Brigada, then a sequence of numbers popular from Pete's days with the Weavers group (Suliram, Wimoweh, Tzena) and some Leadbelly-originated songs, finally bringing the concert to a close with Worried Man Blues, which Pete had acquired from a 30s Carter Family recording.

The whole set is self-recommending, needless to say, and comes in a sturdy double-gatefold digipack complete with fulsome 24-page booklet and notes in the very best traditions of the SF house.

David Kidman