Pete Seeger, at 94, still telling stories in song

As of last Friday, Pete Seeger has walked the earth for 94 years. He's been performing for 86 of them.

He was 8 when he first picked up a ukulele — a gift from his mom — and started singing to the kids at boarding school. He relates this on the phone from his Beacon home, speaking in gentle, rolling tones about his childhood and the long youth that followed. He tells stories, long ones, stories lit with humor and undimmed hope. He wonders about the future, worries about the planet, considers whether the human race will last.

And he sings. He has to. The American folk legend hasn't much of a voice any longer — it's a quavering wisp of what it was — and he doesn't remember nearly as many lyrics to nearly as many songs as he used to. But he can't tell a story without singing, just as he can't sing without telling a story. Even over the phone, with a reporter he's never met, he breaks into song lightly and often, as though he's done it a million times. Because he has.

Like that tale about entertaining his school mates. He describes the uke, the school, the trip to the music store to buy the sheet music for "The Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia." And then he sings it, jauntily delivering a spry jazz tune about a Southern ladies' man: "'When it comes to lovin' he's a real professor/Just a Mason Dixon valentine.'"

"I'd get the other kids my age in boarding school singing it," he says, and this is easy to imagine. Even in grammar school, Seeger was Seeger, leading a singalong before a packed house.

He'll be doing just that at 7 p.m. Sunday, when he takes the Proctors Mainstage with his sister Peggy, an acclaimed folk singer in her own right ("I'm Gonna Be an Engineer"), in a near-sold-out concert celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Eighth Step. The Seegers' concert proceeds will go to Camp Killooleet, a summer camp in Hancock, Vt., in honor of their late brother John, who ran it.

The May 12 gig will be their only joint concert this year. He and his sister will take turns: he'll sing some of his songs, she'll sing some of hers, they'll sing a few together. And he will, inevitably, tell stories. Though he doesn't get out as much or as far as he used to, the enduring American troubadour still roams wide in words and music.

In conversation he goes back to his itinerant days with Woody Guthrie. Seeger had a good ear, he says. "And so (Guthrie) let me tag along with him. And when he found out how ignorant I was about the country, he said, 'Pete, you ought to travel around a bit — make a living. Put a banjo on your back. Walk in somewhere, buy a nickel beer, and sip it as slow as you can. Someone says, "Kid, can you play that thing?" You say, "Maybe a little," and you keep on sipping your beer. And finally someone says, "Kid, I got a quarter for you if you play us a tune." And now you slip it around and play a tune.'"

He took Guthrie's advice. "And I never went hungry."

"This Land is Your Land" — that's a Guthrie song. Seeger has played it for decades, through the struggles of the McCarthy era (when he invoked the First Amendment, not the Fifth, in his refusal to testify against Communists) into the Vietnam era (when his co-written songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "If I Had a Hammer" became anthems of peace and protest) and on into the age of environmentalism, anti-fracking and Occupy. In 2009, he sang Guthrie's ballad at President Barack Obama's inauguration.

After all the years, is this land his land? "Yes and no," Seeger replies. "Just singing the song gives you a sense of ownership. On the other hand, it's obvious that the people with money really run the country."

Of his own songs, he says, "Like most songwriters, my best songs were written when I was young. I can still write a song, but not a great song."

Take "We'll All Be A-Doubling": He sings it, deems it "useful." But not great. Or "Take it from Dr. King," a lightly syncopated ode to MLK. He sings that one, too. Good, he says. Not great.

Now, his sister Peggy: she writes great stuff. "She is an absolutely extraordinary musician," he declares. Normally they perform at "little things in Woodstock, 100 people here, 300 people there. But now, with this big theater (at Proctors), it's gonna be quite interesting."

Peggy agrees. "It'll be a hoot, the concert with Pete." No matter that her half-brother (their father, Charles, was a musicologist) can't quite sing the way he used to. "I should reckon that a huge number of the people who are coming are coming just to see him, and he knows that an awful lot of them know all the words to his songs," she says from her home in England. "And so then he just starts them off and waves them along, and mouths the words — and they all follow along."

These days, Pete Seeger likes to break the audience into parts. "My main thing as a performer, now, is experimenting with how I can get a big crowd to sing and harmonize — to not just sing the melody, but sing the harmony." Seeger says he can generally count on a critical mass of people, maybe 5 or 10 percent, who have sung along with him before. "I look upon them as leaven in the loaf of bread. And if I start singing, then others start singing, and I say, 'Who can hit this high harmony? If you've got a high voice, you try.'"

Peggy wrote a song for his birthday: "It's Pete," a bouncy song about "a lanky man with a long-necked banjo in his hand" who can even get rocks on a hill to sing along. The pair of them don't normally celebrate their birthdays together, "but I just love him to death. So that's why I'm coming over." Pete "makes wonderful songs. He makes wonderful songs, and other people pick them up." She mentions one of her favorites, "Quite Early Morning," a simple, aching, hopeful song about humanity's chances for survival. Then, because she's a Seeger, too, Peggy starts singing it: "It's always darkest before the dawn."

Now six years away from a century, her brother looks ahead. "If there's a human race here in a hundred years, it will be because of several revolutions," he explains. The information revolution is one. The women's revolution is another. "If we use the brains God gave us, who knows what miracles may happen in the next few years?"

He credits Toshi, his wife of almost 70 years, with spearheading the now-annual Clearwater Festival, named for the Hudson River sloop and the so-named organization devoted to cleaning up the river. He helped build both 44 years ago. "I get more credit for that than I deserve," he says. "I didn't know a thing about sailing, not a thing."

But he grasped the appeal the first time a friend took him out on the water: "The wind may be from the north, but you can sail northwest, and then northeast, and the northwest — and use the very power against you to make your way. And Martin Luther King did the same thing." Tacking as metaphor? "I think so. It's a nice allegory for life."

And so, in "a little plastic bathtub of a boat," Seeger learned to sail on the Hudson — through toilet waste. This memory prompts a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith ("private affluence and public squalor") as he regards the view from his riverside home.

"I'm looking out my window at Newburgh right now," he says, and he tells of hiking up the river bank in 1949. The land was on sale for $100 an acre, and no one else wanted it. At first sight it looked too steep. But Seeger, ever the optimist, always beating his own path, hoofed up the hill and found a level half-acre. He and Toshi built a cabin there.

At boarding school he learned how to swing an ax, he says. "It's fun to use an ax. I've decided, ever since we could walk on two feet and found we could pick up a stick to hit an animal or an enemy, it's fun to pick it up and go WHACK."

Then he tells another story, and he sings another song.

abiancolli@timesunion.com • 518-454-5439 • @AmyBiancolli