183. Airgram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State1
SUBJECT
- Folk Singer Pete Seeger’s Tour of Soviet Union
American Folk singer Pete Seeger concluded his latest tour of the Soviet Union with a recital November 20 before an audience of 1700 Soviet and foreign students in the ornate main auditorium of Moscow State University. He had already appeared under Goskontsert auspices in Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Komerova.
Appearing without benefit of any special lighting or staging, and with only a fair sound system but a good interpreter, he got a warm reception for a mixed concert of recognized favorites (The Hammer Song, Freight Train, We Shall Overcome, Hush, Little Baby, and Let There Be Sunshine); straight and not so straight anti-war songs (Last Train to Nuremberg, and two of his own compositions: To Ho Chi Minh, and Land of 1000 Songs); and a miscellany including songs in favor of controlling pollution and population. The most unusual item was a song about a Jewish Collective Farmer in the Ukraine, one verse [Page 473] of which was in Yiddish, which was greeted by mixed laughter and confusion.
Despite several enthusiastic tries, Seeger was unable to raise the students into any kind of audience participation, and should perhaps have known Soviet audiences well enough not to try. He did get outbreaks of rhythmic applause for some of his more acid lyrics, such as the linking of the names of Calley, Medina, Custer and Nixon, as well as both houses of Congress, in Last Train to Nuremberg, but generally the audience was most favorable to the non-polemical songs it recognized. Aside from several comments about not being allowed to present protest songs on American television, Seeger limited his non-singing remarks to ecological problems and his own resolve to give up concerts for a year and return to his home near New York to work on community problems. (An American correspondent in the audience at Novosibirsk reported that his polemical remarks there were long enough to get in the way of the singing.)
The effect on the Moscow audience must have been as mixed as the program. The performer they had come to see (and tickets were hard to get) was obviously opposed to his own government and some other aspects of American life, but he was just as obviously free to travel and prosper, and he was planning to work within the system, even volunteering that his “dirty stream”, the Hudson River, was already getting cleaner. And, his third and last encore closed with the ambiguous line: “I know that you who hear my singing can make those freedom bells go ringing.”