Pete Seeger never separated music from conviction. Born in 1919 to a musicologist father and a violinist mother, he grew up surrounded by sound but found his true calling on the road, traveling Depression-era America to collect the folk songs of ordinary people.
A chance encounter with the five-string banjo at a North Carolina music festival set the course for the rest of his life — and a friendship with Woody Guthrie, formed soon after, set its purpose.
Seeger believed music could organize people, not just entertain them.
With Guthrie, he formed the Almanac Singers to support labor unions, then later founded the Weavers, whose recording of “Goodnight, Irene” became the best-selling song in the country in 1950.
But success came with cost: blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political affiliations, Seeger spent years exiled from commercial radio. He kept performing anyway, turning concerts into communal sing-alongs powered by his clear tenor and a banjo inscribed with the words “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
He wrote or popularized some of the era’s most enduring songs — “If I Had a Hammer,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” — and helped shape “We Shall Overcome” into the anthem of the civil rights movement.
Seeger sang until the very end of his long life, leaving behind a body of work inseparable from the causes he believed in.
A more complete story can be found in Musical Stamps, a book exploring the stories behind music-themed postage stamps. Visit the Books page for the latest on availability.
Suggested songs
🎵 Listen on YouTube
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Turn! Turn! Turn! (With Judy Collins)
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Stamp Details
- Subject: Pete Seeger, Music Icons series
- Issue Date: July 21, 2022
- Denomination: First-Class Mail Rate (Forever)
- First-Day-of-Issue City: Newport, Rhode Island, at the Jane Pickens Theater, for an event called “Newport Folk Presents: For Pete’s Sake”
- Designer: Art director Antonio Alcalá designed the stamp and pane; Dan Seeger’s photograph was color-tinted by Kristen Monthei
- Print Quantity: 22,000,000
- Format: Panes of 16, resembling a vintage 45 rpm record sleeve
- Design Note: The stamp art features a color-tinted, black-and-white photograph of Seeger taken in the early 1960s by his son, Dan Seeger, depicting the singer with his iconic banjo
