💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~bencollver › log › 2022-03-08-folk-disobedience captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:34:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In the 1970s, Pete Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain.
Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships
that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A
pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they
invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More that a
hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had
played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger.
As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of
songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying
it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must
not sing any of these songs.
Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on
stage. He held up the paper and said, "I've been told that I'm not
allowed to sing these songs." He grinned at the crowd and said, "So
I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say
anything about *you* singing them."
He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang.
A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete
Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want
them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret
circles, for years. What could the government do? Arrest a hundred
thousand singers? It had been beaten by a few banjo chords and the
fame of a man whose songs were on the lips of the whole world.