Pete Seeger

Peter Pete Seeger was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead Bellys Goodnight, Irene, which topped the charts forweeks in 1950. Members of the Weavers were blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. In the 1960s, he reemerged on the public scene as a prominent singer of protest music in support of international disarmament, civil rights, counterculture and environmental causes.

Seeger was born on May 3, 1919 at the French Hospital, Midtown Manhattan. His YankeeProtestant family, which Seeger called enormously Christian, in the Puritan, Calvinist New England tradition, traced its genealogy back over 200 years. A paternal ancestor, Karl Ludwig Seeger, a physician from Wrttemberg, Germany, had emigrated to America during the American Revolution and married into the old New England family of Parsons in the 1780s. Petes father, the Harvardtrained composer and musicologist Charles Louis Seeger, Jr., was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to American parents. Charles established the first musicology curriculum in the U.S. at the University of California in 1913, helped found the American Musicological Society, and was a key founder of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology. Petes mother, Constance de Clyver , raised in Tunisia and trained at the Paris Conservatory of Music, was a concert violinist and later a teacher at the Juilliard School.

Source: Wikipedia