20 minute read
IF I HAD A HAMMER
If I Had a Hammer
A folk song
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Pete Seeger picks up his banjo. “One of my favorite songs these days,” he says. “I sing it all the time.” Plucking the rhythm he’s plucked so many times, one two-three-and-four, one two-three-andfour, he closes his eyes and sings. “We are… climbin’…Jacob’s…ladder…” His voice is worn and wearied, sanded down by the sojourns of years. He repeats the phrase, jumping higher when his voice permits, and moves to the refrain: “Brothers…sisters…all.” In silence he puts down the banjo. “Revolutionists as well as religionists often forget that heaven doesn’t come in one big bang. It comes in many little steps.”
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"Turn! Turn! Turn!"
It’s fall. Turning, turning, turning, the air grows bitter; the wind begins to bite; things once green turn red, then gray. There’s a deep, ineluctable melancholy to it. For all its sweet resplendence, the season is, in a way, a death. It’s almost embarrassingly earnest. Walking past the reddening trees, layered against the looming cold, I find myself with a familiar, equally earnest craving. A soft voice and an acoustic guitar, singing of wind and rain, of lovers far from home, of fare-thee-wells and traveling on—down the highway, down the road, down the tracks. What we might call folk music.
But what, precisely, folk music is, what makes a song a folk song, is not so easy to pin down. American folk music has many permutations, and ideas of what it means have varied over the decades. In modern popular consciousness, it’s not much more than a vibe. Anything soft and acoustic is considered ‘folky.’ Browsing through Spotify, you can find playlists of folk rock, indie folk, folk pop, and “folk arc,” and within them, everything from Bob Dylan to Big Thief. Spotify’s “Essential Folk” spans from Pete Seeger’s bare vocals-and-banjo, to ’70s-soft rock, to Leonard Cohen’s synth-infused ’80s records. Not exactly a cohesive portrait of a musical form.
But folk, pure folk, the theme from which these variations arise—what is that? Every person I ask gives a slightly different answer. It’s music you might hear around a campfire, songs that seem like they’ve just always been there, and all you need to sing them is a voice and a guitar. It’s a vague sketch of a time and place, a composite of sonic attributes, a softly sung murmur from an era dead and gone, a hazy evocation of a deep-rooted but ineffable sentiment. Soothing, but somehow sad. The summation of it all, I think, is sincerity. Folk music is nothing if not sincere. When you hear a folk song, you know that the ideas, emotions, and attitudes it’s expressing are genuine. That what’s being sung is being felt, and whoever’s singing, they mean it.
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"Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues"
The academic definition of folk music is quite literal: it’s music of the folk! Songs from a country’s traditional popular culture, sung by and about ‘real’ people, passed down orally and re-sung through generations. It is the sonic embodiment of a people or a nation’s folklore, the searing but simple music that comes from and gets to the heart of the whole thing. But within the question of what constitutes folk music lies the question of who constitutes the folk. Whose music gets to embody a nation? And who decides?
American folk emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1930s. Of course, various folk music traditions had existed and thrived on the continent for centuries. There were Black spirituals and sea shanties, railroad songs and cowboy songs, Cajun ballads and Appalachian bluegrass, hillbilly music, and eventually, the blues. But it wasn’t cohesive. How could it be? America was and remains utterly incohesive.
As the Great Depression raged and the Dust Bowl covered the heartland in dusty darkness, they spurred an upswell of left-wing sentiment across the country. On the ascendant organized left, there was a yearning for a music that could voice the struggles of working people and unite them into action. Communist intellectuals in New York sought to construct a legitimate folk music tradition that would tie American national identity to progressive, proletarian causes. They sorted through various folk heritages across the country and chose the songs and musicians they thought best represented the aims and audience of their movement.
Pete Seeger was one of them. He was born in New York City into an upper-middle-class family of liberal New England Puritans who arrived on the East Coast before the American Revolution. His father worked at Harvard (studying folk music), and he went to Harvard himself before dropping out in 1938 to perform. He was passionate about music and social justice alike, hoping to use the former to fight for the latter. The musicians at the vanguard of the ’30s folk revival, Seeger included, had a repertoire of songs pulled from disparate existing folk traditions. They were not the ones who had originally sung these songs, and were sometimes whiter and often wealthier than those they drew from.
Then in rolled Woody Guthrie. The godfather of American folk music. A genuine rugged rural radical whose image would come to define the folk movement. The lone weary troubadour, who came from god knows where and god knows where he’s going: his clothes frayed, his voice rough and sandy, singing of working people and hardships and a land for all to share. Guthrie hailed from Oklahoma, and like many thousands, he “blew out on the winds of the Dust Bowl,” trudging west to California, searching for work. He roved about the American West, writing songs about the toils and struggles of the migrant workers he met and lived among. Guthrie wrote thousands of his own songs, and performed hundreds more that he picked up on the road. He not only meant what he sang—he lived it. Not just sincere, but authentic. “I get my words and tunes off the hungry folks and they get the credit for all I pause to scribble down,” he explained. “Music is some kind of electricity that makes a radio out of a man and his dial is in his head and he just sings according to how he’s feeling. The best stuff you can sing about is what you saw, and if you look hard enough you can see plenty to sing about.”
Guthrie became a mentor to Pete Seeger, who, to a certain extent, molded his career in Guthrie’s image. “Woody showed me how to hitchhike and how to ride freight trains,” he later recalled. “You wait in the outskirts of town and when the train is picking up speed, it’s still not going too fast, you can grab a hold of it and swing on. Getting off the first time, I didn’t know how to do it, and I fell down and skinned my knees and elbow and broke my banjo.”
Seeger and Guthrie traversed the country, performing at protests, picket lines, and union halls. They wrote many new songs, including “This Land is Your Land” and “If I Had a Hammer,” and performed old standards, adapting some to the credo of their politics. To one old folk song that he heard from Guthrie, “Talkin’ Blues,” Seeger added another verse. He called the song “Talking Union.” He talk-sings it, leaning into a country cadence, picking his banjo bluegrass-style:
This was the tenor of what became the popular idea of American folk music. It was about binding people to a cause and binding them together. Folk singers performed to point out injustice, and to inspire their listeners to join together in righteous, joyous song to combat it. The genre’s politics was its purpose. The lyrics didn’t need to rhyme and the voices didn’t need to sound pretty.
And they often didn’t. Woody Guthrie’s music, for all its searing lyricism and power, is not very fun to listen to. When I shuffle a folk playlist and one of his songs comes on, I appreciate it as a cultural artifact, but I’m unable to connect with it emotionally—or musically. When the next song plays, and I hear Joan Baez’s sweet soprano, or the swooning harmonies of Ian & Sylvia, I’m flooded with a wave of relief, melted into familiar comfort. With Guthrie, it seems that the roughness and gruffness is part of the point. His perceived authenticity, and thus the potency and message of his music appear bound up with his voice’s lack of prettiness. There are no frivolities or distractions, just a plain-talkin’ man from the plains, who’s seen and known poverty and injustice, imploring you to join him in the fight against it.
Despite their aversion to commercialism, Guthrie convinced Seeger to abandon his purist commitment to performing only at union halls and picket lines. By playing nightclubs and bars, he could extend his reach, bringing ever more people into the fold. Any loss in ideological rigor would be offset by the expansion of their audience, furthering the cause. In 1950, Seeger’s group The Weavers—to his and his record company’s surprise—scored a hit. Folk music proved to be not only commercially viable, but a potentially lucrative new sector of the music industry.
Seeger and his ilk were not given much of a chance to grapple with this moral quandary. The folk movement, whose acolytes were near-unanimous in their communist sympathy (if they were not card-carrying Party members), was caught in the crosshairs of McCarthyism as anti-communist panic enveloped the nation
in a second red scare. Pete Seeger was called to testify before the Committee on Un-American Activities. He refused to answer any questions he deemed improper and refused to testify against his comrades. Seeger was blacklisted. Guthrie too. The Weavers lost their recording contract. No venue, not even union halls, would let Seeger perform. He couldn’t appear on television; he couldn’t be played on the radio. The folk movement, for the moment, was laid low.
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“Early Mornin’ Rain”
From nothing, sound. A shower of plucked acoustic notes—light, nimble, each tumbling rapidly into the next. Soft raindrops falling, quick and quiet. A gentle baritone enters, descending with the bright metallic rain, washing over all.
A tenor jumps in, soaring over the melody. Harmonious downpour.
Then the alto. She sings the melody, but an octave higher. Three voices, flowing down together.
Their singing’s oh-so-warm, but you can tell it’s cold outside. The morning rain is falling, the sky outside is gray, but here, within the voices, shelter from the storm.
I have listened to Peter, Paul, and Mary’s cover of “Early Mornin’ Rain” hundreds of times. During dreary weather, on a long journey, in the mire of a spell of sadness, it compels me to return. When they sing, you yearn with them. Not necessarily
for a love gone-by, flying overhead to where the morning rain don’t fall—it’s not the specifics of the lyrics that resonate. It’s something outside of words, that dwells inside the sound itself. You relate to the feeling in the music, the feeling that it somehow, in those sonic waves, transfers to you. Something far more innate, far less tangible.
The baritone once more, alone.
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The second folk revival was born not of poverty but prosperity. Gone were the days of the Depression and the Dust Bowl; the boom of the 1950s brought into existence a burgeoning middle class that, for the first time, had the means to send their children to college. And when they grew tired of the sunny, all-American cultural hegemony that defined the decade, it was to folk music that they could turn their restless ears. For this young, white, educated generation, folk was an outlet of cultural rebellion. The movement once again found its geographic home in New York City, this time in Greenwich Village. Folkies would gather in a network of cafés and clubs, hanging around MacDougal Street and Washington Square. Folk was no longer just an outlet for political action. It was a discrete musical genre with stylistic conventions, and a social niche. It offered people community, and musicians an avenue to commercial success and even stardom.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, politics once again reasserted itself as the central value of the folk movement. Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary emerged as stars of the new revival. Like so many folk revivalists, they were middle-class children of the first folk movement. The songs Guthrie wrote on the run from the Dust Bowl were the songs they sang in summer camp, and the songs they now emulated. But they didn’t sound like Woody Guthrie. Their voices were sweet and melodious. You could ignore the lyrics and still enjoy their songs for the music alone. I often do. And that is not a consequence of happenstance. This generation’s folk music was a kind of pop; its stars were chosen and elevated by managers who stood to profit. Regardless of the virtue of their message, they were meant to sell.
Like Pete Seeger, and often with him, these artists performed at civil rights protests, singing songs decrying racism and injustice, hoping to unite people. They were just as earnest, and just as sincere in their idealism as the folk pioneers. But they feel less authentic. When Peter, Paul, and Mary sing, “You can’t jump a jet plane, like you can a freight train,” in “Early Mornin’ Rain,” you know that they have never actually hopped a freight train. We see their polish. But it doesn’t mean we doubt the feeling in their voices, or that it doesn’t resonate.
Bob Dylan killed folk music. He vaulted onto the scene in 1961 and exploded into stardom two years later. Unlike most of his contemporaries, his protest songs were blistering, his voice harsh and nasally. This seriousness and roughness, this lack of prettiness, lent him an air of authenticity that seemed missing from the folk revival. Dylan appeared the heir apparent to the tradition of Woody Guthrie. But he grew tired of folk, feeling artistically boxed in by its conventions. He picked up an electric guitar and left folk in the dust, pushing beyond established boundaries of genre and form, creating new ones. Many other artists followed suit. When greater fame, success, and artistic freedom could be found in other forms, it was there they flocked.
I’m not sure where Bob Dylan’s heart is, but it’s certainly not worn on his sleeve. He was not an idealist. His commitment was not to any cause or conventions but to his own artistic whims, and he followed where they took him. The genre he pioneered, folk-rock, was primarily concerned with individual expression and exploration. He was enigmatic and sometimes cruel, and his irony abounded. I don’t fault him for it; it’s the reason why I find his music and mythos so fascinating. But folk is defined by its idealism. Any music that believes it can change material conditions is incompatible with irony. And all it took was one betrayal of sincerity to sideline an entire movement.
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“If I Had a Hammer”
Pete Seeger wrote “The Hammer Song” in 1949. Peter, Paul, and Mary covered it 13 years later. It’s one of those indelible songs, somehow embedded in our collective consciousness. Its message is clear and universal, its lyricism simple but vivid. You can sing it with ease. And you can mean it.
Perhaps more than any other, “The Hammer Song” is emblematic of folk: the genre, the revivals, the entire history of the movement.
It’s all there, within the opening, titular line. The operative word. If. The singer doesn’t actually have a hammer. It’s all hypothetical. And therein lies the problem. Folk is a genre that genuinely believes that the power of its music can change the world. But it is, overwhelmingly, a genre whose performers and consumers come from privilege, over time increasingly removed from the issues and places about which they sang. It is a genre that seems predicated on saccharine naivete.
But Seeger’s song and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version don’t feel the same. Pete Seeger, though born into privilege, spent his whole life
putting it all on the line. He sang on the picket lines and he sang at the protests. He sang when the political climate was behind him and he sang when it wasn’t. When he cries, “I’d sing out danger,” I know he means it. He sang with Black performers in the ’40s under threat of violence from the Klan, and he didn’t stop singing when the bricks were thrown. When McCarthy came, he kept singing, even when it meant the blacklist. He kept singing wherever and whenever he could, undeterred, unrelenting. At the height of the Vietnam War, when he was finally allowed back on television, he sang a blistering protest song to a national audience of 13 million, one so piercing that Lyndon B. Johnson called the network in a fury and demanded the show’s cancellation. When Seeger sings the final verse, “I got a hammer,” I’m inclined to believe him. I look at Peter Seeger’s life and I wonder if maybe folk music isn’t so naive. Maybe it could work.
When Peter, Paul, and Mary sing, the “if” feels heavier. I do not for a moment doubt their sincerity, but there is something in the bright, calculated precision of their harmonies that feels contrived. I know that if I chose to, I could tune out the words and get lost in their voices. But does that make their version less noble than Seeger’s? Is their music, the dulcet tones of the folk revival, less virtuous than the rougher croaks for justice of their forebears? Does its designed prettiness detract from its value?
The problem of that question is exacerbated by the fact that, setting all political, moral, and philosophical considerations aside, I like the Peter, Paul, and Mary version more. I am warmed and pacified by their perfectly executed harmonies, and when I go to listen to a song, that feels more important than how much I believe what they’re saying. When Joan Didion writes about Joan Baez in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her verbiage oozes with acerbic scorn. Of Baez’s idyllic California residence, she writes: “So now the girl whose life is a crystal teardrop has her own place, a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little longer.” To Didion, Baez knows nothing of what she speaks, singing from one of Guthrie’s proverbial skyscrapers, preaching the changing of a world she does not understand. Yet it is her music that I, and so many others, reach for time and time again. It is the sweet, swooning, commercial, folk-pop of the 1960s that, six decades later, makes its way into the Spotify playlists of college students on an autumn day.
As I look at which folk songs I listen to on repeat, my uncertainty compounds as I realize that very few of them are political. “Early Mornin’ Rain,” “500 Miles,” “Dink’s Song”— none of them are about the unity of working people. They are individual declarations of yearning, divorced from the political struggles of bygone eras, that offer the spirit of the form without the baggage of direct political action. Songs about hopping freight trains sung by those who never did. Utterly sincere, but inauthentic.
So now I wonder if I’ve fallen into the trap of commerciality, if I’m simply a selfish, passive consumer of music, anathema to the original values of the genre I claim to cherish, and the values I purport to hold. But I’m not convinced that music, or art for that matter, needs to exist for a cause. That political art is inherently more
valuable than art that moves you on an individual level. Maybe that’s a consequence of my own privilege, that I don’t need music to sing of my own liberation. Or maybe the fighting words of those who don’t need to fight will always ring hollow.
I don’t know what gives music value, or what makes one kind ‘better’ than another. But when the vibrations of alloyed strings and vocal tissue, fused 60 years ago, emanate out of history and into my ears and soul, all earthly and analytical considerations seem to fade. I’m touched again by something beyond the reach of language. Something I can’t quite explain, that I don’t fully understand. And I think that’s why we listen to folk. It allows us for a moment, if we meet it on its terms, to put aside irony and nihilism. To experience something that feels honest and true and maybe even sappy. Something sincere, that only comes from music.
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Recently, I came across another Pete Seeger recording of “If I Had a Hammer.” It’s a live version, from the mid-1960s. As he winds up to sing, strumming his banjo, he speaks to the audience. “The interesting thing is, there’s not only two ways of singing this song, there’s about five or six different ways. But I’ve found that they nearly all harmonize with each other.” He pauses, and you can hear, as his cadence slightly shifts, a little smile appear on his face. “Now there’s a moral here somewhere,” he says, strumming louder. “It means that you can sing the way I wrote it or the way that somebody else changed it or the way that somebody else changed it. And they all harmonize together.”
He jumps into the song, immediately joined by the audience—from a crowd of voices, one chorus. His voice soars, unworn and unburdened, lifted ever higher by the people unified in front of him, unified by his song. When I hear it, I think I understand what Pete Seeger means when he speaks of heaven. And also, that there’s no one way to get there. Music can get you there in many ways. And they all harmonize together. For nine decades, with a banjo in hand, hopping freight trains, one song, one step at a time, Pete Seeger got a little closer. And when I close my eyes and let a folk song seep in, I think I do too. Not in one big bang, but many little steps.
JONATHAN GREEN B’25 is blowin’ in the wind.
