American Ballads - Pete Seeger (1957)

Seeger benefitted from the folk revival, but he had never stopped. He collected songs of the people and played them for whoever would listen.

This is a collection of some of the better known folk tunes that he played most of his career, accompanied only by his formidable banjo technique. In the tradition of American folk, the melodies and general ideas went back to the old world, but often were updated with more modern events (The Titanic and Jesse James, for instance).

Seeger’s banjo had this phrase written on it: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”