100 Years of Protest!

A Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration

by Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

The cast of 100 years of Protest show.

Carrying one of his banjos and a guitar, Michael Miles walked out of the East Moline Correctional Center, where he had just performed for 250 prisoners. He was exhausted and he looked toward the sky and there he saw six bald eagles soaring their majestic way toward the Mississippi River to the west.

“I had never seen a bald eagle before,” he says, awe still shadowing his thoughts. “I am a city kid, born and raised in Chicago. But I was so taken with that image and thoughts about the Mississippi that I started reading everything I could about the river. I became increasingly enchanted and started to think of how I could bring it and my feelings about it to life in music.”

Deborah Lader, Bill Brickey, Al Ehrich, composer Michael Miles and John Brennan rehearse for the concert "A Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration: 100 Years of Protest" at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. (Kristan Lieb / Chicago Tribune)

He spent a decade so doing and his work finally arrives in the world premiere of his “Mississippi River Suite,” a soaring and stirring composition that will conclude another of what have become a steady stream of Miles’ creations, which have included 2008’s "America 1968," about that tumultuous year. This latest is “A Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration: 100 Years of Protest!” and takes place at May 4 at the Old Town School of Folk Music where Miles has long been a fixture as teacher, administrator and performer.

He correctly refers to his shows as “musical documentaries for the stage.” But that description comes not at all close to capturing the expansive nature of the works. Ambitious almost in the extreme, they are the result of deep research and thought to create a one-time-only onstage mix of music, poetry, literature, photographic and video visuals that combine history, politics and pop culture into satisfyingly thought-provoking entertainments. (I know firsthand, having been featured in a few of the shows he performed at the Hideout some time ago.)

“Every decade of the 20th century has seen people in the streets, letting their voices be heard,” Miles says. “This country is all about the echoes of those voices being heard in the voices of protest today.”

Those voices are many, including those of Ida B. Wells, Gloria Steinem, Sojourner Truth, Eugene Debs, Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, Woody Guthrie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Sandburg, Jackie Robinson, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Muhammad Ali.

Their words will come from members of the cast and among the most powerful are from Seeger (to be delivered, appropriately, by Miles). They take us back to the Aug. 18, 1955 day when Seeger sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee, that witch-hunting congressional group seeking to bully witnesses into talking about what it considered subversive activities and to name the names of others who might be similarly involved.

That is where Seeger bravely said: “I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known. I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.”

Pete Seeger was born on May 3, 1919 and died in 2014 when he was 94. In his time he was the most famous banjo player on the planet, a member of The Weavers, social activist, environmentalist and famous for such songs as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer" and "Turn, Turn, Turn." At the time of his death, Bruce Springsteen called him “a walking, singing reminder of all of America's history ... a living archive of America's music and conscience, a testament to the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards a more humane and justified end.”

His high regard and influence can be judged by some of those who contributed to the wonderful 1998 album “Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger,” among them Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, the Indigo Girls, Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins, actor Tim Robbins and our town’s own Studs Terkel, a great friend of Seeger’s.

Miles and Seeger began their relationship in 1988 when Miles sent Seeger a letter. Seeger wrote back and the two would correspond regularly over the next decades, in letters handwritten and typed and with postcards. They met. They performed together.

“He changed my world entirely,” says Miles. “His ongoing encouragement, his advice about music and life, and his good cheer really helped steer the course of my music, my thinking and my life. And what he did for me, he did for a lot of people. He changed the Earth, changed how people think. He is the person who taught Martin Luther King the words to 'We Shall Overcome.' He was always trying to empower people through music." Miles helped organize the Old Town School’s celebration of what would have been Seeger’s 95th birthday in 2014 with workshops, the dedication of a Pete Seeger Room, an exhibit of the more than two decades of Seeger-Miles letters, screening of the film "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song," a family banjo-making class and a concert for children. The centerpiece was "From Senegal to Seeger — Stories of the American Banjo," Miles’ one-man show which incorporates songs and written words of Seeger and others, charting the history of the banjo.

And now there is this centennial celebration, preparation for which began more than a year ago, seeded in part by a grant from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

“I wanted to do something to honor Pete’s centennial but I didn’t want a sort of ‘best of’ concert,” Miles says. “I began to think about the state this country is in, all the dissent and anger. This is not time for people to be silent and that is what Pete stood for, the right to speak up.

“Yes, it is a lot of work to put this all together for a one-night-only show but there are a lot of rewards. It is a great joy for me to work with people I admire and people I care about.”

In this show, those people include such performers as Glenda Zahra Baker, John Brennan, Bill Brickey, Sue Demel, Al Ehrich, Deborah Lader, Mary Peterson, Brent Roman, and Jimmy Tomasello. One of them, flutist/composer Lloyd Brodnax King, has collaborated often with Miles and of this show says, “While my fingers don’t move as fast as they used to, my sound is super fat and I have way more to say on my instrument than ever before. All the musicians Michael has assembled are top-notch and in their prime. I’m not just blowing smoke. At our last rehearsal, Bill [Brickey] sang so powerfully that he made me believe Big Bill Broonzy had jumped out his grave to join us on stage.”

The show concludes with the 22-minute long “Mississippi Suite.” It is music (banjo, flute, bass and percussion) and spoken words and, as Miles says, “it uses the river that divides the nation as the foundation of a musical portrait of this divided nation.”

There is anger in the work but affection too, and hope. It understands that we are, always have been, an imperfect country but a place where we are marvelously able to follow a piece of Pete Seeger’s advice: “If there's something wrong, speak up.”

“A Pete Seeger Centennial Celebration: 100 Years of Protest!” is 7:30 p.m. May 4 at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Ave.; tickets $28 at 773-728-6000
and www.oldtownschool.org