Ann M. Pescatello

Perhaps the greatest tribute to the many talents of Charles Seeger is the sheer incomprehensibility of this biography.

These days, Seeger is perhaps best known as the father (by two different wives) of Pete, Peggy, and Mike Seeger. But, in his youth, he was a composer of some note; he was one of the founders of the discipline of musicology; he worked during the Great Depression to promote music in deprived regions of the country; he taught; and he wrote extensively about several sorts of music.

It's the writing that's the problem. I know more than most about music, and certainly more than most about folk music, and yet I found the descriptions of Seeger's many writings, especially in the chapter "California Dreaming, 1953-1970," so complex and interconnected and technical that I simply could not make sense of them.

It's a real burden on this book, and on Seeger's life history, which deserves to be better known. He -- like his children, like his second wife Ruth Crawford Seeger, like many of his friends and relatives -- was well worth studying as an individual, because of his creativity and his radicalism and his unusual interests. But information about Seeger the man makes up a relatively small portion of what is, after all, not a very thick book. Admittedly it is hard to talk to the contemporaries of a man who lived past ninety; most information about him had to come from students and children, not classmates or teachers. But, ultimately, the impression this book gives is almost of a robot spitting out ideas far faster than ordinary people can process them, while living an active life (after all, his politics got him in trouble!) but not a very normal one.

So be prepared to skim past parts of this book. But don't ignore the rest. If "Ye shall know (a man) by his fruits," few planted bigger orchards than Charles Seeger.… (more)