CLOSE Pete Seeger will be remembered as a folk music legend. The 94-year-old was known for penning "Turn, Turn Turn" and popularizing "This Land is Your Land", but there are lots of other fascinating facts many may not know about Seeger. VPC 
 
 Seeger popularized "This Land Is Your Land" and "We Shall Overcome" and wrote "If I Had a Hammer" and "Turn, Turn, Turn." He opposed McCarthyism, marched beside MLK and led environmental campaigns. 
 
 Pete Seeger performs in 2008 in a scene from the motion picture "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song." (Photo: Genius Products/The Weinstein Company) Story Highlights He adapted and popularized 'We Shall Overcome' 
 
 Continued to perform into his 90s. 
 
 Was once a member of the Communist Party. 
 
 To Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, the singer/songwriter/activist who died Monday at the age of 94, was "the father of American folk music." 
 
 But Seeger, who popularized This Land Is Your Land and We Shall Overcome and wrote If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn, never liked the term folk music. 
 
 "It's been defined as the 'music of the peasants,' " Seeger told USA TODAY in a 2009 interview, "and then you get someone saying (of Seeger), 'he's no peasant!''' 
 
 Seeger, who dropped out of Harvard University in 1938 to ride a bicycle across the country, quoted his father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist: "My dad, the old professor, used to say, 'Never get into an argument about what's folk music and what isn't.' " 
 
 But whatever you called him, Seeger influenced scores of other singers, including Springsteen, Joan Baez, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp and Arlo Guthrie. All performed in 2009 at Seeger's 90th birthday party at sold-out Madison Square Garden, a fundraiser for his favorite local cause: cleaning up New York's Hudson River. 
 
 RELATED: Recommended listening: Pete Seeger 
 
 That night, Springsteen introduced Seeger saying, "He's gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He's gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself." 
 
 PHOTOS: A look at the life of Pete Seeger 
 
 Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Pete Seeger perform "This Land Is Your Land" at the Clearwater Concert: Creating the Next Generation of Environmental Leaders at Madison Square Garden on May 3, 2009. The concert honored Seeger on his 90th birthday. (Photo: Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY) 
 
 On his facebook page Tuesday, Arlo Guthrie, who performed often with Seeger and is the son of Woody Guthrie (who taught Seeger how to jump freight trains), described his last phone call to Seeger's hospital bed Monday night. 
 
 "I simply wanted him to know that I loved him dearly, like a father in some ways, a mentor in others and just as a dear friend a lot of the time," Guthrie wrote. 
 
 "I let him know I was having trouble writing his obituary - as I'd been asked -- but it seemed just so silly and I couldn't think of anything that didn't sound trite or plain stupid....We laughed, we talked, and I took my leave about 9:30." 
 
 "'Arlo,'" Seeger said, "sounding just like the man I've known all of my life, 'I guess I'll see ya later.' I've always loved the rising and falling inflections in his voice. 
 
 " 'Pete,' I said. "I guess we will." 
 
 Guthrie fell asleep until about 3 a.m. when texts and phone calls began from friends saying, "Pete had passed away." 
 
 "Well, of course he passed away," Guthrie said in response. "But that doesn't mean he's gone." 
 
 Seeger opposed McCarthyism, marched beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and led environmental campaigns. In 1969, he helped build a 10-foot sailing sloop called the Clearwater that continues to serve as a "floating classroom" and rallying point for cleaning up the Hudson. 
 
 "Songs won't save the planet," Seeger told his biographer David Dunaway, author of How Can I Keep From Singing? "But, then, neither will books or speeches. ... Songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons." He liked to quote Plato: "Rulers should be careful about what songs are allowed to be sung." 
 
 Seeger is the only singer in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who was convicted of contempt of Congress. In 1955, he refused to testify about his past membership in the Communist Party. (He later said he quit the party in 1949 and "should have left much earlier. It was stupid of me not to. ... I thought Stalin was the brave secretary Stalin and had no idea how cruel a leader he was.") 
 
 In 1961, his conviction was overturned on appeal, but Seeger continued to be blacklisted by commercial TV networks until 1967. Even then, CBS censored parts of his anti-Vietnam War musical allegory, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, when he sang it on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. 
 
 CLOSE Pete Seeger - from a May 2009 interview with The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal 
 
 In 2006, Springsteen helped introduce Seeger to a new generation when he recorded We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, an album of 13 songs popularized by Seeger, including John Henry and Shenandoah. Three years later, Springsteen persuaded Seeger to sing This Land Is Your Land with him at President Obama's inaugural concert in frigid temperatures on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 
 
 "He was so happy that day," Springsteen said later. "It was like, 'Pete, you outlasted the bastards, man.' It was so nice." 
 
 Much earlier, poet Carl Sandberg crowned Seeger "America's tuning fork." But when Bob Dylan called Seeger a saint, that was going too far. 
 
 "What a terrible thing to call someone," Seeger told USA TODAY on the eve of his 90th birthday. "I've made a lot of foolish mistakes over the years." 
 
 TIMELINE: Pete Seeger 1919 - 2014 
 
 But no one was better at leading sing-alongs. "There is no such thing as a wrong note," he liked to say when leading group renditions of songs like Amazing Grace, "just as long as you're singing along." 
 
 At the end of our interview in 2009, I mentioned that my father had attended one of Seeger's free outdoor concerts decades earlier. As my father told it, Seeger noticed my dad wasn't singing and urged him to join in. My father said he shot back, "It's a free country. If I don't want to sing, I don't have to." 
 
 When I told Seeger that story, he asked if my father was still alive. No, I said. 
 
 "That's too bad," Seeger replied, "because I have some new songs he might like." 
 
 Seeger was born in New York on May 3, 1919, to musical parents: His father was a Harvard-trained composer. His mother, Constance, was a concert violinist. 
 
 After dropping out of Harvard, Seeger met Woody Guthrie. They became part of the left-wing Almanac Singers who sang in opposition to the peacetime draft of 1940. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Seeger enlisted in the Army and trained as an airplane mechanic. He ended up being assigned to entertain the troops in the Pacific. When he was asked what he did in the war, he'd answer: "I strummed my banjo." 
 
 Seeger co-founded the Weavers, who had an apolitical hit, Good Night Irene, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950, but within three years they were blacklisted from radio and TV because of their left-wing politics. 
 
 Long after the blacklists ended, Seeger continued protesting. In 2011, he joined a march in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests. 
 
 MORE : Seeger's impact on labor movement 
 
 For more than 60 years, he lived in Beacon, N.Y., with his wife, Toshi, in a cabin he mostly built himself on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River, 60 miles north of Manhattan. Toshi, whom he called "the brains of the family," died at 91 in 2013, after nearly 70 years of marriage. Seeger is suvived by a son, Daniel; two daughters, Mika Seeger and Tinya Seeger; six grandchildren; and a great-grandson. 
 
 If he didn't being want to be called a folk singer, what term did he prefer? 
 
 "How about river singer," he suggested. "I sing up and down the Hudson River." 
 
 The last time I saw Seeger perform was in 2010 at an environmental fundraiser in an old church in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. He looked as pleased to be singing with a local children's chorus, with kids named Destiny Burroughs and Maddy Murphy, as he had at Madison Square Garden with Springsteen, Baez and Mellencamp. 
 
 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;!--iframe--&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1euexrH ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption A look back at Pete Seeger's music career 
 
 US President Obama has paid tribute to the American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, who has died following a short illness at the age of 94. 
 
 "Once called 'America's tuning fork', Pete Seeger believed deeply in the power of song," said Mr Obama. 
 
 "But more importantly, he believed in the power of community. 
 
 "To stand up for what's right, speak out against what's wrong, and move this country closer to the America he knew we could be." 
 
 Seeger died at New York hospital, his grandson said. 
 
 His songs included Turn! Turn! Turn! and If I Had A Hammer. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption One of Pete Seeger's best known songs is Where Have All the Flowers Gone? 
 
 In 2009, he was at a gala concert in the US capital ahead of President Obama's inauguration as president. 
 
 In his tribute, the president praised Seeger's activism. 
 
 "Over the years, Pete used his voice - and his hammer - to strike blows for worker's rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation. And he always invited us to sing along. 
 
 "For reminding us where we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Pete's family and all those who loved him," he added. 
 
 Seeger gained fame in The Weavers, formed in 1948, and continued to perform in his own right in a career spanning six decades. 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption President Obama said "we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger" 
 
 Renowned for his protest songs, Seeger was blacklisted by the US Government in the 1950s for his leftist stance. 
 
 Denied broadcast exposure, Seeger toured US college campuses spreading his music and ethos, later calling this the "most important job of my career". 
 
 He was quizzed by the Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 over whether he had sung for Communists, replying that he "greatly resented" the implication that his work made him any less American. 
 
 Seeger was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal. 
 
 He returned to TV in the late 1960s but had a protest song about the Vietnam War cut from broadcast. 
 
 British singer and left-wing activist Billy Bragg who performed with Seeger on several occasions called the singer "hugely encouraging". 
 
 "He was a very gentle man and intensely optimistic," he told the BBC. "He believed in humanity and the power of music to make a difference, not to change to the world. 
 
 "I performed at his 90th birthday and the fire was still there." 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Seeger (l) performed at a rally for detente in 1975 
 
 Seeger became a standard bearer for political causes from nuclear disarmament to the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. 
 
 In 2009, he was at a gala concert in the US capital ahead of Barack Obama's inauguration as president. 
 
 His predecessor Bill Clinton hailed the musician as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them.'' 
 
 Other songs that he co-wrote included Where Have All The Flowers Gone, while he was credited with making We Shall Overcome an anthem of resistance. 
 
 Turn! Turn! Turn! was made into a number one hit by The Byrds in 1965, and covered by a multitude of other artists including Dolly Parton and Chris de Burgh. 
 
 Image copyright AFP Image caption Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen honoured Seeger on his 90th birthday 
 
 Seeger's influence continued down the decades, with his induction into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, and he won a Grammy award in 1997 for best traditional folk album, Pete. 
 
 He won a further two Grammys - another for best traditional folk album in 2008 for At 89 and best children's album in 2010. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Billy Bragg plays a tribute to Pete Seeger 
 
 He was a nominee at Sunday night's ceremony in the spoken word category. 
 
 He was due to be honoured with the first Woody Guthrie Prize next month, given to an artist emulating the spirit of the musician's work. 
 
 Mark Radcliffe, host of BBC Radio 2's Folk show, paid tribute, saying: "Pete Seeger repeatedly put his career, his reputation and his personal security on the line so that he could play his significant musical part in campaigns for civil rights, environmental awareness and peace. 
 
 "He leaves behind a canon of songs that are both essential and true, and his contribution to folk music will be felt far into the future." 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Pete Seeger collected three Grammy awards during his long career 
 
 Seeger performed with Guthrie in his early years, and went on to have an effect on the protest music of later artists including Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez. 
 
 In 2006, Springsteen recorded an album of songs originally sung by Seeger. 
 
 On his 90th birthday, Seeger was feted by artists including Springsteen, Eddie Vedder and Dave Matthews in New York's Madison Square Garden. 
 
 Springsteen called him "a living archive of America's music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along". 
 
 His other musical output included albums for children, while he appeared on screen several times as well. 
 
 A reunion concert with The Weavers in 1980 was made into a documentary, while an early appearance was in To hear My Banjo Play in 1946. 
 
 The band, who had a number one hit with Good Night, Irene in the early 1950s, went their separate ways soon afterwards. 
 
 Seeger's wife Toshi, a film-maker and activist, died aged 91 in July 2013. They leave three children. ||||| A Generation’s Mentor 
 
 Mr. Seeger was a mentor to younger folk and topical singers in the ‘50s and ‘60s, among them Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded Sweet Honey in the Rock. Decades later, Bruce Springsteen drew from Mr. Seeger’s repertory of traditional music about a turbulent America in recording his 2006 album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” and in 2009 he performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with Mr. Seeger at the Obama inaugural. At a Madison Square Garden concert celebrating Mr. Seeger’s 90th birthday, Mr. Springsteen introduced him as “a living archive of America’s music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge history along.” 
 
 Although he recorded dozens of albums, Mr. Seeger distrusted commercialism and was never comfortable with the idea of stardom. He invariably tried to use his celebrity to bring attention and contributions to the causes that moved him, or to the traditional songs he wanted to preserve. 
 
 Mr. Seeger saw himself as part of a continuing folk tradition, constantly recycling and revising music that had been honed by time. 
 
 During the McCarthy era Mr. Seeger’s political affiliations, including membership in the Communist Party in the 1940s, led to his being blacklisted and later indicted for contempt of Congress. The pressure broke up the Weavers, and Mr. Seeger disappeared from commercial television until the late 1960s. But he never stopped recording, performing and listening to songs from ordinary people. Through the decades, his songs have become part of America’s folklore. 
 
 “My job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.” 
 
 Peter Seeger was born in Manhattan on May 3, 1919, to Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, a concert violinist. His parents later divorced. 
 
 Video 
 
 He began playing the ukulele while attending Avon Old Farms, a private boarding school in Connecticut. His father and his stepmother, the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, collected and transcribed rural American folk music, as did folklorists like John and Alan Lomax. He heard the five-string banjo, which would become his main instrument, when his father took him to a square-dance festival in North Carolina. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Young Pete became enthralled by rural traditions. “I liked the strident vocal tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing,” he is quoted as saying in “How Can I Keep From Singing,” a biography by David Dunaway. “The words of the songs had all the meat of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was real, not sentimental.” 
 
 Planning to be a journalist, Mr. Seeger attended Harvard, where he founded a radical newspaper and joined the Young Communist League. After two years he dropped out and went to New York City, where Alan Lomax introduced him to the blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly. Lomax also helped Mr. Seeger find a job cataloging and transcribing music at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. 
 
 Mr. Seeger met Guthrie, a songwriter who shared his love of vernacular music and agitprop ambitions, in 1940, when they performed at a benefit concert for migrant California workers. Traveling across the United States with Guthrie, Mr. Seeger picked up some of his style and repertory. He also hitchhiked and hopped freight trains by himself, learning and trading songs. 
 
 When he returned to New York later in 1940, Mr. Seeger made his first albums. He, Millard Lampell and Hays founded the Almanac Singers, who performed union songs and, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, antiwar songs, following the Communist Party line. Guthrie soon joined the group. 
 
 During World War II the Almanac Singers’ repertory turned to patriotic, anti-fascist songs, bringing them a broad audience, including a prime-time national radio spot. But the singers’ earlier antiwar songs, the target of an F.B.I. investigation, came to light, and the group’s career plummeted. 
 
 Before the group completely dissolved, however, Mr. Seeger was drafted in 1942 and assigned to a unit of performers. He married Toshi-Aline Ohta while on furlough in 1943. She would become essential to his work: he called her “the brains of the family.” 
 
 When he returned from the war he founded People’s Songs Inc., which published political songs and presented concerts for several years before going bankrupt. He also started his nightclub career, performing at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. Mr. Seeger and Paul Robeson toured with the campaign of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in 1948. 
 
 Forming the Weavers 
 
 Mr. Seeger invested $1,700 in 17 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y., and began building a log cabin there in the late 1940s. (He lived in Beacon for the rest of his life.) In 1949, Mr. Seeger, Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman started working together as the Weavers. They were signed to Decca Records by Gordon Jenkins, who was the company’s music director and an arranger for Frank Sinatra. With Jenkins’s elaborate orchestral arrangements, the group recorded a repertoire that stretched from “If I Had a Hammer” and a South African song, “Wimoweh” (the title was Mr. Seeger’s mishearing of “Mbube,” the name of a South African hit by Solomon Linda), to an Israeli soldiers’ song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” and a cleaned-up version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” Onstage, they also sang more pointed topical songs. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 In 1950 and 1951 the Weavers were national stars, with hit singles and engagements at major nightclubs. Their hits included “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” and Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” and they sold an estimated four million singles and albums. 
 
 Their commercial success was dampened, however, when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet that named performers with suspected Communist ties, appeared in June 1950 and listed Mr. Seeger, although by then he had quit the Communist Party. He later criticized himself for not having left the party sooner, though he continued to describe himself as a “communist with a small ‘c.' ” 
 
 Photo 
 
 By the summer of 1951, the “Red Channels” citation and leaks from F.B.I. files had led to the cancellation of television appearances. In 1951, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigated the Weavers for sedition. And in February 1952, a former member of People’s Songs testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that three of the four Weavers were members of the Communist Party. 
 
 As engagements dried up, the Weavers disbanded, though they reunited occasionally in the mid-1950s. After the group recorded an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, Mr. Seeger left, citing his objection to promoting tobacco use. 
 
 Shut out of national exposure, Mr. Seeger returned primarily to solo concerts, touring college coffeehouses, churches, schools and summer camps, building an audience for folk music among young people. He started to write a long-running column for the folk-song magazine Sing Out! And he recorded prolifically for the independent Folkways label, singing everything from children’s songs to Spanish Civil War anthems. 
 
 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
 
 In 1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In his testimony he said, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any conspiratorial nature.” He also stated: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.” 
 
 Mr. Seeger offered to sing the songs mentioned by the congressmen who questioned him. The committee declined. 
 
 Mr. Seeger was indicted in 1957 on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison, but the next year an appeals court dismissed the indictment as faulty. After the indictment, Mr. Seeger’s concerts were often picketed by the John Birch Society and other rightist groups. “All those protests did was sell tickets and get me free publicity,” he later said. “The more they protested, the bigger the audiences became.” 
 
 The Folk Revival Years 
 
 By then the folk revival was prospering. In 1959, Mr. Seeger was among the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. The Kingston Trio’s version of Mr. Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” reached the Top 40 in 1962, soon followed by Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer,” which rose to the Top 10. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Mr. Seeger was signed to a major label, Columbia Records, in 1961, but he remained unwelcome on network television. “Hootenanny,” an early-1960s show on ABC that capitalized on the folk revival, refused to book Mr. Seeger, causing other performers (including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary) to boycott it. “Hootenanny” eventually offered to present Mr. Seeger if he would sign a loyalty oath. He refused. 
 
 He toured the world, performing and collecting folk songs, in 1963 and returned to serenade civil rights advocates, who had made a rallying song of his “We Shall Overcome.” 
 
 Like many of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “We Shall Overcome” had convoluted traditional roots. It was based on old gospel songs, primarily “I’ll Overcome,” a hymn that striking tobacco workers had sung on a picket line in South Carolina. A slower version, “We Will Overcome,” was collected from Lucille Simmons, one of the workers, by Zilphia Horton, the musical director of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., which trained union organizers. 
 
 Ms. Horton taught it to Mr. Seeger, and her version of “We Will Overcome” was published in the People’s Songs newsletter. Mr. Seeger changed “We will” to “We shall” and added verses (“We’ll walk hand in hand”). He taught it to the singers Frank Hamilton, who would join the Weavers in 1962, and Guy Carawan, who became musical director at Highlander in the ‘50s. Mr. Carawan taught the song to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at its founding convention. 
 
 Photo 
 
 The song was copyrighted by Mr. Seeger, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Carawan and Ms. Horton. “At that time we didn’t know Lucille Simmons’s name,” Mr. Seeger wrote in an autobiographical songbook, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” pubished in 1993. All of the song’s royalties go to the “We Shall Overcome” Fund, administered by what is now the Highlander Research and Education Center, which provides grants to African-Americans organizing in the South. 
 
 Along with many elders of the protest-song movement, Mr. Seeger felt betrayed when Bob Dylan set aside protest songs for electric rock. When Mr. Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud electric blues band, some listeners booed, and reports emerged that Mr. Seeger had tried to cut the power cable with an ax. But witnesses, including the festival’s producer, George Wein, and production manager, Joe Boyd (later a leading folk-rock record producer), said he did not go that far. (An ax was available, however. A group of prisoners had used it while singing a logging song.) 
 
 In later recountings, Mr. Seeger said he had grown angry because the music was so loud and distorted that he couldn’t hear the words. 
 
 As the United States grew divided over the Vietnam War, Mr. Seeger wrote “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an antiwar song with the refrain “The big fool says to push on.” He performed the song during a taping of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in September 1967, his return to network television, but it was cut before the show was broadcast. After the Smothers Brothers publicized the censorship, Mr. Seeger returned to perform the song for broadcast in February 1968. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Fighting for the Hudson River 
 
 During the late 1960s Mr. Seeger started an improbable project: a sailing ship that would crusade for cleaner water on the Hudson River. Between other benefit concerts he raised money to build the Clearwater, a 106-foot sloop, which was launched in June 1969 with a crew of musicians. The ship became a symbol and a rallying point for antipollution efforts and education. 
 
 In May 2009, after decades of litigation and environmental activism led by Mr. Seeger’s nonprofit environmental organization, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, General Electric began dredging sediment containing PCBs it had dumped into the Hudson. Mr. Seeger and his wife also helped organize a yearly summer folk festival named after the Clearwater. 
 
 In the 1980s and ‘90s Mr. Seeger toured regularly with Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son, and continued to lead singalongs and perform benefit concerts. Recognition and awards arrived. He was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972, and in 1993 he was given a lifetime achievement Grammy Award. In 1994 he received a Kennedy Center Honor and, from President Bill Clinton, the National Medal of Arts, America’s highest arts honor, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 he traveled to Cuba to receive the Order of Félix Varela, Cuba’s highest cultural award, for his “humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism.” 
 
 Mr. Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in the category of early influences, in 1996. Arlo Guthrie, who paid tribute at the ceremony, mentioned that the Weavers’ hit “Goodnight, Irene” had reached No. 1, only to add, “I can’t think of a single event in Pete’s life that is probably less important to him.” Mr. Seeger made no acceptance speech, but he did lead a singalong of “Goodnight, Irene,” flanked by Stevie Wonder, David Byrne and members of the Jefferson Airplane. 
 
 Mr. Seeger won Grammy Awards for best traditional folk album in 1997, for the album “Pete” and, in 2009, for the album “At 89.” He won a Grammy in the children’s music category in 2011 for “Tomorrow’s Children.” 
 
 Mr. Seeger kept performing into the 21st century, despite a flagging voice; audiences happily sang along more loudly. He celebrated his 90th birthday, on May 3, 2009, at a Madison Square Garden concert — a benefit for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater — with Mr. Springsteen, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Ms. Baez, Ani DiFranco, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Emmylou Harris and dozens of other musicians paying tribute. That August he was back in Newport for the 50th anniversary of the Newport Folk Festival. 
 
 Mr. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died in 2013, days before the couple’s 70th anniversary. Survivors include his son, Daniel; his daughters, Mika and Tinya; two half-sisters, Peggy, also a folk singer, and Barbara; eight grandchildren, including Mr. Jackson and the musician Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, who performed with him at the Obama inaugural; and four great-grandchildren. His half-brother, Mike Seeger, a folklorist and performer who founded the New Lost City Ramblers, died in 2009. 
 
 Through the years, Mr. Seeger remained determinedly optimistic. “The key to the future of the world,” he said in 1994, “is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”
– Pete Seeger, a towering presence in American folk music and activism for many decades, has died after 94 years—and more than 100 albums. The bearded, banjo-playing protest singer gained fame with the Weavers in the '40s and is best known for popularizing songs like This Land Is Your Land and We Shall Overcome, as well as writing or co-writing folk classics like If I Had a Hammer and Turn, Turn, Turn, the BBC reports. He spearheaded the American folk revival of the '50s and '60s and was an inspiration and mentor to many younger singers including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But activism was as important to Seeger as music. A lifelong believer in causes like civil rights, racial equality, and anti-militarism, he saw folk music and community as "inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action," a New York Times obituary notes. Blacklisted in the McCarthyite '50s, his activism continued until the very end. At a 90th birthday tribute concert—a benefit to clean up New York's Hudson River—Bruce Springsteen introduced him, saying, "He's gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He's gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass. At 90, he remains a stealth dagger through the heart of our country's illusions about itself," USA Today reports.