The Light's Gone Out

On a cold January day, Pete Seeger died.

People toss around words like “Giant” and “Living Legend” and half the time the people who get labelled this way don’t deserve it. Pete Seeger really was those things. More than that — he was a constant… he lived long enough so that some of us can say that he was Always There for us, from the time we were children until now when we are beginning to enter our Advanced Years. As one of my Facebook friends accurately pointed out just a few minutes ago, it feels as if we’ve lost a member of the family. He was everyone’s Favorite Uncle.

He wrote the songs that defined a generation, and he kept alive the great songs of the dying past, the songs of Tradition. 

More important than any of that, he was an ambassador of Positiveness, Goodness and Light in a world that has become increasingly become Negative, Evil and Dark. He was one of the few, so very few, who acted as our collective Conscience… and he was so good-natured about it that no one in their right mind could possibly have resented his call to Do Right.

This one hits awfully hard, ladies and gentlemen. If the world that we grew up in is an iceberg — adrift in a vast sea and slowly melting away into nothingness — Pete Seeger represents an enormous shard of that iceberg that just broke off and sank beneath the waves. I believe that we are diminished, not increased by Time… now, Time has claimed one of its biggest victims… and left us without a source of music and hope.

—Freder

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