Musician Pete Seeger singing during a concert celebrating his 90th birthday in New York on May 3, 2009. Photo: Lucas Jackson/ReutersMusician Pete Seeger singing during a concert celebrating his 90th birthday in New York on May 3, 2009. Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage, has died at the age of 94.

Seeger’s grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep in the New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days.

“He was chopping wood 10 days ago,” Cahill-Jackson recalled.

Seeger – with his a lanky frame, banjo and full white beard – was a well-known figure in folk music. He performed with Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s, leaning on two canes.

He wrote or co-wrote If I Had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, Where Have All the Flowers Gone and Kisses Sweeter than Wine. He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his banjo strapped on. With The Weavers, a quartet put together in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group – Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman – churned out hit recordings of Goodnight Irene, Tzena, Tzena and On Top of Old Smokey.

An inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them

“Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger,” Arlo Guthrie once said.

Seeger’s musical career was always tightly linked with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the clean-up of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.

He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal.

Seeger called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the music he, Guthrie, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter and others had created or preserved.

“The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones,” he told the Associated Press in 2006. “And I showed the kids there’s a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio.”

His scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and Seeger accused the network of censorship.

He finally got to sing it five months later in a stirring return appearance.

Seeger’s output included dozens of albums and single records for adults and children. He also was the author or co-author of a number of books including American Favourite Ballads and How to Play the Five-String Banjo.

He appeared in the films To Hear My Banjo Play in 1946 and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon in 1970.

By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honours.

President Bill Clinton hailed him as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them”.

Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honoured him with We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger. While pleased with the album, Seeger said he wished it was “more serious”.

A 2009 concert at Madison Square Garden to mark Seeger’s 90th birthday featured Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vader and Emmylou Harris among other performers.

In 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album for Pete and he was a 2014 nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which was won by Stephen Colbert.

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