A Folk Legend's Fertile Ground

Condensed from an article by Ted Gest '68
in Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Summer 2014

Oberlin College was a key career stop in the life of legendary folk singer Pete Singer. The college was not afraid to host a man accused of Communist sympathies during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

At the time, Seeger's career was sidetracked because he belonged to the folk group the Weavers, which had been blacklisted by radio stations. “Seeger was a heroic figure to Oberlinians,” says Robert Fuller '56, Oberlin's president from 1970 to 1974. With many major performance opportunities lost, Seeger was reduced to singing for $25 daily in a New York City private school.

Michael Horowitz '55 and his roommate, Kent Sidon '54, decided to ask Seeger to sing at Oberlin. The roommates charged $1 for tickets to see the banjoist in the basement of Allen Art Museum, says Joe Hickerson '57. Hickerson was one of the 200 or so in the audience on April 1, 1954. “It was a complete sellout,” he wrote at the time. “I have never seen anything so wonderful in my life.”

In a 2012 Smithsonian Magazine article, Seeger recalled, “The next year I sang in the chapel for 500 people and I got $500. And the year after that, I sang in [Hall] auditorium, which had 1,000 people, and I got paid $1,000.” Hickerson adds, “Students from neighboring colleges were coming to Oberlin to see him perform and then inquiring about bringing him to their institutions. He had to hire a separate booking agent for the area.”

The story of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” originated, Hickerson believes, at a February 1956 performance he helped organize at First Church. While reading during the flight to Cleveland, Seeger came across lyrics from a traditional Cossacks folk song that included, “Where are the flowers? The girls have plucked them. Where are the girls? They're all married. Where are the men? They're all in the army.” He taped them to a microphone in Oberlin and sang it with just those three verses. It was four years later when Hickerson added two more: “Where have the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards. Where have the graveyards gone? Covered with flowers.”

Seeger sang often at Oberlin over the years. Typically, after a scheduled performance, he would be invited by students to a dormitory, usually Pyle Inn or Grey Gables, and would continue singing for hours.

In 1972 he was selected as the Oberlin commencement speaker (left) at the suggestion of Karen Buck Burgess '72. “It was a time of great social awareness between the peace movement and the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the re-examination of education and governance at Oberlin,” recalls Burgess. Seeger gave what President Fuller called a “commencement presentation,” a combination of talking and singing, telling the graduates, “We're either going to solve our problems or they're going to solve us.” The Oberlin News-Tribune reported that, “With a remarkable economy of words he managed to summarize the human condition.”