In honoring Pete Seeger’s passing grab the hand of the person next to you and sing.”
“There was nothing I didn’t love about Pete,” said multi-instrumentalist Eric Weissberg, best-known for his “Dueling Banjos” performance for the movie Deliverance. “The way he did things always seemed to be exactly the right way.”
The Woodstock resident believes he owes his career to Pete Seeger, who gave him banjo lessons when Weissberg was eight years old. Even earlier, at the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, Seeger came each year to sing with the students. “He sang to us and then got us to sing,” remembered Weissberg, “starting when I was four or five.”
The youngster encountered the icon again at Camp Woodland, the lefty camp in Phoenicia’s Woodland Valley, where Seeger would visit twice each summer. The camp’s caretaker, Takashi Ohta, was the father of Toshi, who became Seeger’s wife. Weissberg’s mother befriended Toshi when both of them worked in the camp office.
At the age of six, the boy went several times to Seeger’s subbasement apartment on MacDougal Street to attend “wingdings,” daytime hootenannies for small children. Seeger would invite friends to play along, including such folk and blues luminaries as Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry. “I was coming face-to-face with these people,” marveled Weissberg.
When he was about eight, he was showing musical promise and was given a banjo to play. In the process of writing a book on teaching the banjo, Seeger formed a group of ten students, mostly adults, but Weissberg and his friend Micky were invited. “He was very patient, beyond belief,” said Weissberg. Years later, he recalled, “Pete told me, ‘Eric, I was one week ahead of you. I would give the class a new strumming technique or new chords, and the next week, you could play it better than I could.’ That must’ve been an exaggeration, but he told me that.”
At that point, the Weavers were just forming, and Weissberg’s parents took him to see an early concert. “Pete told the audience, ‘We’re trying to think of a name. Whoever comes up with a name for the quartet will get a copy of the new album when it comes out. And somebody named them the Weavers. I was right there!”
Over the years, Weissberg launched a successful career performing with bluegrass groups and working as a session musician for Bob Dylan, Art Garfunkel, Tom Paxton, the Clancy Brothers, and other stars. When he needed a retreat from recording work in New York City, he bought, after a two-year search, a quirky house on Boggs Hill Road. Later he discovered that Toshi’s family had lived there during the Camp Woodland days, and Pete and Toshi had raised their children in the house.
“All these things came together,” mused Weissberg. “There’s no question in my mind that running into Pete Seeger at age four — that’s why I play. The planet is going to be a very different place without Pete on it. I don’t know how we’re going to get through it. It’s not a great place right now, and he held things together for decades. Only his memory can do that now.”
Activist filmmaker DeeDee Halleck says, “I knew who Pete Seeger was because my parents had a copy of the People’s Song Book which they burned in 1950 when they found out that our neighbor across the street was head of security and had turned his attention to rooting out the left wing commies in our militarized town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was the beginning of Truman’s own Red Scare and his first victims were federal employees. My father worked at the Oak Ridge National Lab where the atomic bomb had been built. My parents had friends who were being purged and they didn’t want the book around when the security chief’s kids came over to play with us.
