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Glad to to see that Sasha Frere-Jones is a Pete Seeger fan. Since Seeger's on my all-star list, here's a tribute for the great man's 86th birthday by Studs Terkel, who's also on that list. "Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain't no one like him." Thanks for the link, SFJ! I'm also struck by Terkel's rhetorical question "How could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition." I wondered this myself after hearing Seeger on an NPR retrospective, and going to a sunny and meandering anti-nuke rally in Central Park soon afterward. Chants get old really quickly, and so does rhetoric. Music is the definition of unity; it might help lift current protesters from our general crestfallenness if we sang, not just new songs but what Seeger already taught us. Totally old-fashioned, true. But it's been known to work.

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Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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