Pete Seeger
God Bless The Grass

At times it is a pale and absorbed minstrelry that of Pete Seeger, the nightingale of Stalin, as his detractors liked to dub him. The life of a communist star-spangled, full of asperities, who did not once think more about calling himself out of the U.S. party after the twentieth congress of the Russian communists, where Khrushchev's secret report revealed the crimes of the Georgian dictator.

In short, it wasn't a matter of party membership for Pete. His was, paradoxically, a struggle fought with banjo, guitar, harmonica, flute, and words that sang about the importance of safeguarding creation in all its aspects. The abandonment of leftist political radicalism, therefore occurring in 1956, led the New York composer and singer - born in 1919 - to warm up his past from the '40s with Woody Guthrie, a historic figure of American roots folk. Together they crossed quiet but bustling America of the countryside, lesser-known states, lives marked by the traditional habits of a people born of no one. Together they initiated the experiment of unifying the national song and using its music to sing against the unscrupulous actions of governments, to show a face of the United States more ancestral yet equally active and contemporary.

Thus, Seeger presented himself to the '60s, devoid of retro extremism and oriented towards a less reactive and clearer way of thinking, all aimed at bringing to light issues that should belong to the public domain. In the name of a manifest opposition to the revolutionary irrationalism of the young crowds, perhaps too immersed in a great mass bath of lysergic.

We are only two years from 1968 when Pete released (Columbia Records) this purest album of eco-friendly songwriting and ethically correct titled God Bless The Grass. From the name alone, it's clear a demodé commitment (yet still alluring) compared to the momentum and visionary rhythms of the music with a great impact on the youth of that time. Inside lies the dignity of a songwriter who, without any embellishments, wants to present the public with serious problems and visions of essential simplicity, without ties and potential references to drug effects. The blessed grass Seeger speaks of is that which is around the front porch of the poor, growing even when concreteness gets tired of its work (listen to the title track).

This is an album of poetry with an elementary use of language, designed to offer visual depictions of large landscapes and portraits of singular situations that truly occurred, in which public institutions (such as the city of San Francisco) often intervened, to the masses. Millions of people thus had at hand a sensitive push towards ecological themes and a first awareness of how barbaric acts were being carried out against the environment everywhere. "God Bless The Grass" is a travel diary on three decades of amenities and filth, of blades of grass far from humans and humans far from the idea of protecting the territories, of clear waters that later brought to light the blackness of humanity. The dissemination of knowledge was the commitment that Seeger at the time made himself an open chest of.

The many tracks (all of short duration) that make up this release also bring to light a very broad repertoire of popular sound matrices, all-encompassing regarding the completeness of American folk. A truly totalizing musical landscape and—this time indeed—radical, in which the instruments mentioned at the beginning of the writing are protagonists. Often alone, few times combined for very light and delicate phrases. Which accompany the cheerful, epic, tavern-like, and fundamentally sincere and firm tone of a voice that for me is the quintessence of caresses on the vocal cords of a songwriter. One by one, these measured songs propose references to different genres. Country, blues, rock n' roll, cowboy ballad, chant, nursery rhyme, engaged song are interpreted by Seeger without ever raising his voice, and without exaggerations or virtuosity. It seems that in "God Bless The Grass" there is the amniotic fluid for preserving the originality of the music of the fifty states, which later drew upon a bit of everyone (from Dylan to Cinderella and much beyond), to strengthen or dismantle and rewrite. Outstanding is the craftsmanship on the banjo, an instrument to which the composer dedicated a book titled How To Play The Five-String Banjo which, as I read, was fundamental for the training of many musicians.

I thank God for having found among the dust of my father's shelves this masterpiece of clarity, commitment, solidarity, and great themes. Those that today politicians talk so much about. Themes which, however, were already covered many years ago and of which it seems no one cares today.