Several weeks ago PBS aired Pete Seeger: The Power of Song as part of their American Masters series. If you missed it, make amends and check here for reruns. It’s terrific, but I won’t review it; Variety did that well, noting that Seeger is one of “a few rare people [who] actually deserve the hagiography treatment.”
Author, co-author, or hitmaker of classics like Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Little Boxes, If I Had a Hammer, and Turn, Turn, Turn!, Seeger, now 88, also popularized the traditional song We Shall Overcome and connected it to the civil rights movement.
Blacklisted from television for 17 years because of his early Communist affiliations and principled refusal to rat out others, Seeger finally appeared on The Smothers Brothers Show in September 1967.
He sang Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, ostensibly a song about a bull-headed captain who drowns while leading his WWII platoon across an unfordable river. CBS, gutless and unresponsive to public opinion against America’s escalating Vietnam involvement, cut the song from the telecast, but after much publicity, the Smothers team prevailed, and Seeger came back to sing it the following January. He describes the incident here.
The last two verses are:
Well, I’m not going to point any moral;
I’ll leave that for yourself
Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
You’d like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man’ll be over his head, we’re
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on! ————-(full lyrics here)
Seeger wrote the tune in 1967, early in the quagmire of Vietnam. Its reference to President Johnson’s Vietnam Wa
r policy was obvious. Over four decades later, deep into the quagmire of ventriloquist Dick Cheney’s misbegotten Mideast adventure, its reference to Cheney’s dummy is just as obvious.
Pete Seeger is a national treasure.
