Pete Seeger: Bolshie with a banjo RULERS should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung. Pete Seeger, who died this week at the age of 94, liked that quote from Plato. His tunes constantly poked the eyes of America's rulers. The civil-rights movement marched to his version of "We Shall Overcome." Peaceniks never tired of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?." Vietnam war protesters loved his adaptation of "Beans In My Ears," with its coy attack on Lyndon Johnson. Mr Seeger encouraged audiences to join in. Folk songs were for the people, he maintained; the emphasis on the solo frontman was a commercial invention. In Allan Winkler's book about Mr Seeger's music, "To Everything There is a Season," Tom Paxton recalls: "Pete never tried to convince us that he was "Appalachian," or black, Irish, African or Scottish," but made "the song the star and the singer merely the presenter." The revolutionary who wrote "If I Had a Hammer" was also a traditionalist, telling roadies, "If I had an axe I'd chop the microphone cable" at Bob Dylan's electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He palled around with Woody Guthrie, riding freight trains and hanging with hobos. But he wasn't like Woody, who was the real thing, raised in hard times before joining the Okie migration out West. Mr Seeger came from Manhattan, the establishment, pacifist parents who traced their roots back 200 years and were classical musicians; his father trained at Harvard, his mother in Paris. Both taught at Juilliard. He hated the boarding schools he went to. His progressive fans admired him for standing up to the red-baiters of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. He refused to take the Fifth, but dodged the congressmen's questions, insisting that although "my opinions may be different from yours...I love my country very deeply." He offered to play his banjo for his inquisitors. Fifty-four years later, he sang Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" at a concert for Barack Obama's inauguration. Conservatives were less charmed. It was wrong to blacklist singers in the 1950s, but that did not excuse Mr Seeger's lifelong embrace of communism and blindness to its horrors, they said. "My gosh, it sure is a book-reading country," Mr Seeger gushed to a Russian interviewer during a visit to the Soviet Union in 1965. It took decades for him to acknowledge that Stalin was "a supremely cruel misleader." In 2007 he wrote a letter responding to an article titled "Time for Pete Seeger to Repent" in the New York Sun, and admitted, "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags." He remained a communist, though "with a small "c."" He never did quite "Turn, Turn, Turn."