Not long after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, my parents took me out to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to hear an evening of folk singers. The main event was Pete Seeger and what I recall is that he sang for a very long time and we all loved him. There were speeches, by him and others, about not letting the murder of J.F.K. kill our hopes and idealism…but the songs were much more eloquent. It was a very exciting evening.
Flash forward to the evening before the first inauguration of Barack Obama. There on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Seeger and Bruce Springsteen overwhelmed the audience — there and all over the world — with a passionate rendition of "This Land is Your Land." And I had to think…
Seeger spent his life singing and preaching about making America a better place. Often, he was denounced as a commie or worse for his messages, few of which seem all that radical today. What would he have thought that evening back at the Santa Monica Civic if someone had said to him, "You'll live long enough to sing that last song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as America inaugurates a black man as President of the United States"?
He just died at the age of 94. He saw an awful lot of his dreams come true.