What a Story

As a newspaperman of old once said:

When facts get in the way of a legend, print the legend.  

The other day I came across a story that filled my heart with joy. 

It centers around someone I admire greatly, the legendary American folk singer, songwriter and social activist, Pete Seeger.

First a little background:

In the early seventies, Spain was still under the totalitarian regime of Francisco Franco, the last of the cabal of European dictators that included Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Franco and his party came to power after the devastating Spanish Civil War, whose struggle between republicanism and totalitarianism has been described in some circles as the "dress rehearsal" for the Second World War. 

Due to the devastation wrought by the Civil War, Spain played a secondary role in World War II and unlike their (ideological if not strict) allies Germany and Italy who lost the war and whose governments fell in line with those of the victors, Spain managed to isolate itself from its neighbors and Franco's repressive regime remained in power until the dictator's death in 1975. If you're a fan of the original Saturday Night Live broadcasts, here's some breaking news for you: Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still critically dead.

OK the story goes something like this:

By the seventies, there was a growing democracy movement in Spain and a group of anti-government activists asked Seeger, who was at the time, well known in Spain for his songs opposing war and oppression while promoting freedom, justice and equality, to come to their country.

Seeger was invited to perform at a soccer stadium in Barcelona which seated over 100,000. As he was preparing for the show, the authorities handed him a list of songs they told him he was prohibited to sing, He looked at the list and noticed it included virtually every song on his playlist. 

Unfazed, he took the stage, banjo in one hand, the list of banned songs in the other, and addressed the crowd. Showing them the list, he told the assembled that he had been informed he was not to sing a number of the songs he was planning to perform. 

"But...", he added with a sly grin on his face, "they never told me YOU can't sing them." So, he put his banjo strap over his shoulder and began to play the chords to songs like "If I Had a Hammer", "We Shall Overcome" and "Viva la Quince Brigada" (a song praising the efforts of the Spanish Republicans against the Franquistas during the Civil War), without opening his mouth, while the crowd who knew all the songs' lyrics from memory, sang their heart out.

 

I love this. It's the kind of story that makes you believe all will be well with the world, despite the obstacles we face. It especially rings true in our day, assuring us that the will of the people will ultimately prevail over the brutal forces of authority with the means and desire to quash it at their choosing.

The only problem with the story is that it never happened; it is as far as I can tell, fake news.

It does however, sound like something Pete Seeger would have done. He was after all, no stranger to taking up unpopular causes that often got him in trouble. 

As a teenager, Seeger was already involved with activism, joining the Young Communist League in 1936, (he later renounced Communism, at least the Soviet variety), and was a vocal supporter of the Republican cause in Spain. In 1940 along with the group The Almanac Singers, Seeger participated in the creation of the album, Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, named for the international group of volunteers who went to Spain to fight on the losing side of the Civil War, the Spanish Republic. 

In the fifties, he stood up to the United States House Committee on un-American Activities, telling them directly to their face that they had no right to ask American citizens to publicly declare their political ideology. For his efforts in support of the First Amendment, he was charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. He was later acquitted of the charges. 

But like so many creative people of the day, Seeger was black-listed and much of his livelihood was taken from him.

For nearly 17 years he was banned from appearing on television. When he finally returned in 1967, around the tipping point of the Vietnam War, Seeger was invited to perform on the nationally televised Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which itself was soon to be cancelled due to its controversial nature. On that program he performed a cynical anti-war song and thinly-veiled attack on President Johnson and his policies on the Vietnam War. The song was called Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. Too hot to handle for network TV, it didn't make it past the CBS censors. But Seeger was invited back a few months later, after the point had been tipped. This time it made the cut, and you can hear it here, capping off an anthology of folk songs dealing with war, going back to the American Revolution.

 

 

Heavy stuff for a comedy show. Ah those glorious sixties!

I so wanted to believe the story of the performance in Barcelona that I ignored my doubts, triggered by something that didn't make sense, namely the fact that repressive regimes don't get to be that way by allowing well-known critics of theirs, to perform in a soccer stadium filled with like-minded people.  

Eventually the skepticism got the better of me and I went online to check it out. Indeed there were a number of sites that featured the story including this YouTube video of the late folk singer Scott Alarik using it to illustrate the power of folk music.

The funny thing was that all the accounts of the story I found online including Alarik's, were the same story, verbatim. 

I thought it was strange that no one relaying the story bothered to tell it in their own words. Weirder still, given such an extraordinary act of defiance that allegedly took place not all that long ago attended by 100,000 souls, that no one present would have found it significant enough to have written their own account online. I'm still looking.

Ah you say, but most of the people in that crowd were Spanish, and in those days under Franco, English wasn't widely spoken in Spain, certainly not as it is today. Therefore any first-hand accounts of the concert must have been written in Spanish. So I googled: "Pete Seeger en España." Still nothing.

But I did find some revealing articles that led me to what really happened. 

Turns out Pete Seeger did sing in a soccer stadium in Barcelona, just not while Franco was alive. 

And he did travel to Spain during the Franco regime, in 1971. He did so at the request of the Valencian folk singer Raimon, who wrote this account for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. At first, Seeger was apprehensive with the idea of performing in Spain, given the political situation there at the time. But Raimon persisted, telling Seeger that if he didn't come, the people of Spain would be led to think the world outside of their country produced nothing more than the insipid pop music that the Franquistas allowed to be imported.

Traveling with Raimon, Seeger performed with little incident in small venues in three cities, Seville in the south, San Sebastián in the Basque region near the French border, and Terrassa in Catalonia, the same province as Barcelona. Things didn't get dicey until they got to Barcelona. Seeger's performance there was scheduled to take place not at the stadium, but at the School of Engineering on Barcelona's major thoroughfare, Avinguida Diagonal. 

There, Seeger, his sponsors including Raimon, and about would-be 100 concertgoers, were met by a squad of mounted police, on hand to stop the performance. But that wasn't all. The police decided to try out a newfangled anti-riot device in their arsenal, a water cannon. Unfortunately for the police, when they tried to blast the folk music loving miscreants into submission, all that came out of their mighty cannon was a trickle of water, the equivalent of a garden hose without its spray attachment. The crowd did disperse, laughing hysterically all the way. 

The incident inspired the section title of this article: "When the Franco regime pissed on Barcelona." 

In order to recoup the losses from the missed performance, and to help pay for Seeger's return trip home, an alternate concert was arranged the following day at a bar owned by the father of one of the organizers. Along with members of the crowd from the previous night who weren't intimidated by the pissing police, the joint was filled with regulars playing cards, Parcheesi and dominoes who hadn't a clue who the entertainment for the evening was.

Here is the recording of that performance made on February 15, 1971 at the Bar-Bodega Llopart in the neighborhood of Sants in Barcelona, recorded on cassette tape, along with commentary in Spanish and Catalán:

As  you can hear in his introduction, Seeger speaks of the incident that occurred the night before, attributing it to the "bad weather", which sparked a chorus of ironic laughter. He went on, "Someday I hope to return to this beautiful city and sing all the songs I want to." Which of course he did.

While the Parcheesi playing bar regulars that night didn't understand a word Seeger was singing, they eventually stopped playing to listen. "Hey this guy's pretty good, he must be important!" some were heard to say.

I'm not sure who the source is for the misleading account. As I wrote above, Seeger did perform in Barcelona during the Franco regime, and he did perform at a huge venue in that city, just not at the same time. And if you've ever seen him perform before a live audience you know that he wasn't averse to just playing banjo or guitar while the audience sang the lyrics.

Perhaps someone inadvertently put those disparate events together to weave the story, or did so purposefully to make a better story than the real one.  As the Scott Alarik video recorded in 2013 testifies, the story was written before Seeger's death in 2014, so perhaps it was Pete himself who made it up.

At this late date it probably doesn't matter, so maybe the quote at the top of this post, stolen from the 1962 John Ford film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, rings true. It just makes the legendary singer even more legendary,

On the other hand...

TO BE CONTINUED