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Pete Seeger was a member of the popular folksinging group, The Weavers, from 1948 to 1953, when their record contract was canceled by Decca records. The political activities of the group, and the political songs that they sang brought them the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover launched an FBI investigation, the first ever of musicians in the United States and leaked their names to “Red Channels,” which published them, causing the group to be blacklisted. The Weavers were unable to get radio airplay and many of their performances were canceled. It has been reported that Pete and the other members of the group may have been members of Communist Party USA. Communist Party membership roles have been kept secret and I can not verify that, but it seems likely as many show business and intellectual Americans were party members during the depression era and WWII.

When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 Pete Seeger refused to name other members of the various political organizations that he belonged to and received a jail sentence for contempt of Congress, later rescinded. He has been continually active in political and environmental causes, including the civil right movement and the anti (Vietnam) war movement. I have heard that Seeger is scheduled to appear at an environmental rally, to take place at Lake Baikal in Siberia, sometime later this decade.

Pete Seeger did not appear on network television as an entertainer for almost two decades after his blacklisting. Here is a segment from the Oct. 25, 1968 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which broke that cycle. He still sings this song and still makes the connection to current events that is implicit in it.

Editors note: (This text was copied from an email from The Bob Edwards show on XM radio. Pete is Bob’s guest in today’s (Feb. 22) edition.)

Pete Seeger was banned from American commercial television for more than 17 years after topping both the pop charts and the blacklist. He wrote or co-wrote many of our most iconic folk songs. Now almost 90, Seeger is still performing and still writing. He’s publishing a new songbook this year. And the PBS program American Masters pays tribute on February 27 with Peter Seeger: The Power of Song.

As a teenager, Spike Jones, the son of a Southern Pacific railroad agent, learned to use pots and pans, forks, knives and spoons as musical instruments from a railroad restaurant chef. Jones formed and led his own band as a teen. In the 1930s he was the drummer in Victor Young’s Orchestra. In 1942 Jones was the drummer for Bing Crosby’s first recording of “White Christmas,” with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra. At the same time Jones was working with his own band “The City Slickers,” which specialized in comic, novelty songs. Spike and the City Slickers recorded “Der Fuehrer’s Face” in 1942, which had been written for a Disney cartoon, originally intended to be titled “Donald Duck in Axis Land,” made for the U.S Government and released in 1943. Jone’s preemptive success caused Disney to rename the cartoon after the song.

Here is a segment from a 1950s television show. Spike Jones had shows on both NBC and CBS during that decade. Here Spike and the City Slickers perform “Twelfth Street Rag.” The segment features a dig at Ed Sullivan, who had refused to show Elvis Presley below the waist on his program.

The video I had shown earlier of Art Tatum was recorded on a Spike Jones broadcast. He often had musical guests on his show and usually included them in the comedy routines.

Watch and listen to the way these two very different jazz saxophonists play “Ballade,” which is just a fancy French way of saying they are playing a ballad. Hawkins, on the tenor sax, plays the melody emotively, with some improvisations, because it is jazz after all. Parker reminds me of the scene in “Amadeus” when the Emperor Joseph II tells Mozart “There are simply too many notes.” The exuberant flourishes and cascading arpeggios of Parker’s playing were confounding to the jazz musicians of the 1940s. Charlie Parker was trying to recreate on the alto sax what Art Tatum did on the piano.