Four decades later, Pete Seeger couldn’t let it go.
It was a cool night in September, the rain was coming down in sheets, and Pete was holed up in his dressing room at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, in upstate New York, minutes before a surprise appearance at the annual Farm Aid benefit concert. (For the occasion, he’d added a new, anti-fracking verse to the end of “This Land Is Your Land.”) It would turn out to be one of his last major public performances.
Outside on the lawn, I waited with tens of thousands of fans who were about to get a lesson in four-part harmony from a 94-year-old man with only a banjo and the warbly vestige of a voice. Backstage, Pete stood by a wall, strapped to his banjo, thin and tall as a birch tree. Neil Young, one of the show’s longtime headliners, had stopped in to pay his respects, and the conversation soon turned to the night in 1976 when Phil Ochs hanged himself.
On Tuesday morning, the day after Pete Seeger died, Mr. Young told me the story that Pete had told to him: Pete had been in New York City and was late for the train home to Beacon, an hour up the Hudson River. Ochs, a good friend and fellow folk singer, was in trouble. He’d been depressed and drinking for a long time, and he reached out to Pete.
“Phil really wanted to talk,” Mr. Young recalled. Pete had to choose between staying in the city another night or getting home. He chose the train.
“Pete remembered shaking hands with him, and when he said goodbye to him for the last time,” Mr. Young said. “He regretted not talking to him.”
For 37 years, the decision to leave that night ate at Pete. “ ‘I wish I’d done something more to stop that from happening,’ ” Mr. Young recalled him saying shortly before he took the stage.
Pete Seeger used to own audiences like that one. He knew their rhythms and needs; he believed in the power of a thousand voices singing in unison. The world could be changed, and it all started with five strings and a melody.
Wherever he went, he never stopped trying to win people over. In 1955, he was compelled to testify about his Communist affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I am proud that I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion,” he told his bewildered inquisitor. “I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity, and that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir.”
Perhaps that insistent optimism was why, standing backstage on a rainy September night, he still couldn’t accept that he had been powerless to save one man’s life.
Mr. Young understood. He had been in a similar situation 20 years ago. Kurt Cobain, the lead singer for Nirvana, had reached out in the days before he took his own life. “We were trying to connect, and we didn’t,” Mr. Young said. “I’d read some things he said, and I wanted to give him some relief.”
Mr. Young recounted his advice to Pete that evening. “Don’t try to take it with you. Leave it where it happened. I felt similar to how Pete felt for a while. But there’s nothing — you can’t carry it with you.” Mr. Young paused. “Pete carried it for a long time.”