10 p.m. to Midnight Host: Steve Winters
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This is our belated birthday tribute to Pete Seeger who celebrated his 90th birthday on May 3 — belated only because we hosted a live guest on last week’s show.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie exerted the greatest impact on folk music during the last century. Seeger is the essential singer and storyteller. An activist by nature, he’s a dreamer and idealist but also a tireless fighter for the causes of ordinary people. He’s served on the frontlines for peace, justice, equality and the environment. Without doubt, he is America’s most beloved folk artist. He received the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the nation’s highest artistic honor, in 1994, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame two years later and is a Grammy Award winner, His recordings (and tribute recordings) are voluminous, as befits a man whose been bring folk music to the world for nearly 70 years. I decided to simply air parts of his historic June 8, 1963 Carnegie Hall concert that was originally released in very shortened form on a long-playing record in the mid-1960s and then in 1989 as a complete concert CD set. To this day, it remains his most successful selling recording. In addition, there are three selections from tribute albums performed by non-Americans. The program concluded with two more of Pete’s “greatest hits.” The show opened with 30 minutes from bluegrass guitarist extraordinaire David Grier and Anne and Pete Sibley, who grew up in WSHU’s Connecticut broadcast area and now reside in Wyoming. The Sibleys recently won the “Great American Duet Sing-Off” on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion”. Both the Sibleys and Grier are in concert this weekend in our broadcast area.
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