For Pete Seeger, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie…
It was a long time ago
when you put your words into song.
‘This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender’ you scribbled on your old guitar.
You wielded that banjo and guitar as weapons,
fiddling out a hail of truth.
Of solidarity.
Of immediate calls for peace.
You said of Leadbelly, that ‘Huddie Ledbetter was a helluva man’.
You sang and spoke through dust clouds and relief lines.
You taught us all, to seek out hope wherever we can.
And when they tried to call all of you ‘goddamned reds’,
you sang on ever louder and louder, rattlin’ their prejudices as they slept in their plush beds.
You rode and you rambled and thumbed your way around,
this land that is my land and your land too.
For you believed all this earth was shared common ground.
And when you sang of overcoming one day,
the injustice and the pain that you witnessed along the way,
they branded you a commie,
a pinko,
a nigger and a Jew-lover.
An enemy of the state.
While your banjo and your guitars wrestled their blind hate.
‘This machine kills fascists’ you etched on that guitar as well
but they were all deaf,
for they could not hear the tolling of the bell,
‘the bell of freedom,
the hammer of justice,
the song of love between your brothers and your sisters’.
And they knew not that they were the ones who would sizzle in their own bigoted hell.
And then came the marches.
You were there too.
Marching and singing with Dr. King in Birmingham and Selma.
And you faced their ugly spit,
their venomous rage,
their clubs and sticks and knives,
but you always knew,
that your cause was just and that the truth would one day prevail.
However long it may take, you would never give up.
You sang and you marched and you strummed yourselves,
victoriously into their jail.
Then they shot him down,
they shot Dr. King dead,
as they burnt and lynched many, many more.
Yet you stood firm,
you never wavered,
your blood was red after all,
and they could not tarnish the truth’s core.
And so it came to pass,
that Woody went on his way.
To his pastures of plenty up in the sky.
And Huddie too,
said his last goodbye.
And you were then one,
and you may have felt alone and overwhelmed by the battles and with all that was wrong.
But you saw that the people were with you.
As they had been, all along.
So you fiddled that old banjo,
dragging it through Newport and Calcutta and Dar-es-Salaam.
Through countless unknown halls in numberless unknown towns,
across this earth,
turning,
slowly,
putting smiles of amity on faces that were once pock-marked with disillusioned frowns.
Today as I pen these poorly scribbled words for all of you,
for Woody, Huddie, and Pete,
I do so in gratitude,
for after all the travails that you’ve been through,
I know that you know that this world still has its fair share of hate,
and of loss and of injustice and of gloom,
but I also know that you know that though all the old flowers may have gone,
there always will be,
as there always must be,
fresh flowers,
that will be ablaze somewhere,
driving away the apathy and reminding us all,
that this world has for all of us,
plenty of room
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