Letters from Pete: How Pete Seeger mentored and inspired generations of musicians

SEPTEMBER 20, 2019

From the November/December 2019 issue of Acoustic Guitar | BY JEFFREY PEPPER RODGERS

Tony Trischka grew up with Pete Seeger’s banjo ringing in his house, by way of his parents’ records of the Weavers, the Almanac Singers, and Seeger’s folk songs for children. In 1962, at age 13, Trischka started getting serious about wanting to play. So he got ahold of Seeger’s seminal book How to Play the Five-String Banjoand decided to contact the man himself. 

“I wrote a letter to ‘Pete Seeger, Beacon, New York’—it was like writing to Santa Claus at the North Pole,” Trischka recalls. “And I said something to the effect that ‘You’re the best banjo player in the world.’”

To Trischka’s astonishment, a couple of weeks later came a handwritten reply. “Dear Tony,” wrote Seeger, then 43 and a star of the ascendant folk revival. “Art is not a horse race, so I must disagree with you. There is no such thing as ‘Best’—but I’m glad you like my music.”

Trischka, who of course became one of the great banjo innovators of his generation, is far from the only aspiring musician to be stunned to receive a letter from Seeger. In 1970, as a college student in Minnesota, John McCutcheon was working through Seeger’s banjo book but was stumped about how to frail, so he wrote the author for advice. 

Seeger not only wrote back, but said he was playing in Minnesota soon and could give a firsthand demonstration. 

Hardly believing he’d received this invitation from someone who was drawing audiences of thousands, McCutcheon approached Seeger after the concert. “He was walking out and had his banjo over his shoulder,” McCutcheon recalls. 

“He said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, I remember you.’ And with the crowd around him, he took out his banjo and said, ‘You use the back of your fingernail.’” When McCutcheon asked how to learn more about the frailing style, Seeger suggested he go south—to the banjo’s home turf in America. 

“That was the very first time somebody said to me, you have to go where it is to get it,” says McCutcheon. “After hearing this one more time from [musician and musicologist] Guy Carawan mere months later, I decided, OK, that’s what I have to do. And nearly 50 years later, here I am, still on that odyssey.”

It’s a remarkable fact that one of the most influential musicians of the last century—as a banjo player, guitarist, songwriter, arranger, song leader, author, teacher, and activist—was also one of the most accessible. In addition to meeting people everywhere he traveled, Seeger got mail by the bushel from all over the world, and he made a herculean effort to answer every letter in longhand. 

As his fame grew, the job became overwhelming, and he tried to keep up by dictating letters to be typed, returning letters with responses in the margins, or sending apologetic form letters. Seeger’s mission to answer his mail was not just a quirk of personality. It reflected the core beliefs of a man who dedicated his life, as he often put it, to planting seeds—in particular, encouraging others to make music and get involved in their communities.