Pete Seeger in England

For most of the 1950s, Pete Seeger was unable to travel outside the US due to the persecution of senator Joe McCarthy's Unamerican Activities Committee. But by 1959 he had finally got his passport back and visited the UK, where he gave a memorable concert at St Pancras Town Hall. The event was recorded and had limited circulation as an LP on the Folklore label, but has now been made more widely available for the first time. Compared to the wholegrain earthiness of Woody Guthrie, Seeger was something of a white-bread folk singer, earnestly middle-class and didactic. Today his style sounds quaintly outdated; yet back in 1959 the concert must have come as a revelation to a British audience. He talks at length about his friends Woody and Lead Belly and sings their songs, adding some traditional folk ballads from the UK, Ireland and the Appalachians, trade union anthems and folk songs from Indonesia, Israel and South Africa, all accompanied on his five-string banjo. At various points you can hear a clear female voice joining in from the audience: it was his sister Peggy, sitting in the front row. By the time he returned to the UK for the 1964 concert at Manchester Free Trade Hall captured on the second disc (and issued here for the first time) the folk scene had moved on dramatically, thanks to a young man named Bob Dylan – and so had Seeger's repertoire. New songs such as Malvina Reynolds’ ‘Little Boxes’ and Dylan's ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall’ have taken their place alongside the likes of ‘Pastures of Plenty’, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’ as, at 45 years of age, Seeger bravely attempts to keep abreast of the fast-changin’ times. Yet you can also discern why a year later he was so appalled by Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival that he threatened to cut the cable with an axe.