If I Had a Hammer: A Pete Seeger Sing Along Songbook | 50 Folk Songs with Lyrics and Guitar Chords | Protest and Traditional Sheet Music Songbook | Classic American Folk

by Pete Seeger (Artist)

(Personality). This songbook features over 50 of the most memorable songs by legendary folk singer, songwriter and banjo player Pete Seeger presented with words and chords. Edited by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood, the creators of the Rise Up Singing books, it also includes background information on many of the songs with quotations by Seeger drawn from his autobiography Where Have All the Flowers A Singalong Memoir. Songs All Mixed Up * The Bells of Rhymney * Goodnight, Irene * How Can I Keep from Singing * If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song) * Kisses Sweeter Than Wine * Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream * Lonesome Valley * Midnight Special * Old Time Religion * Sing People Sing * This Land Is Your Land * Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) * Water Is Wide * We Shall Overcome * Where Have All the Flowers Gone? * and more. Spiral bound.

60 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

Peter Seeger, better known as Pete Seeger, was a folk singer, political activist, and a key figure in the mid-20th century American folk music revival. As a member of the Weavers, he had a string of hits, including a 1949 recording of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. However, his career as a mainstream performer was seriously curtailed by the Second Red Scare: he came under severe attack as a former member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Later, he re-emerged on the public scene as a pioneer of protest music in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

He was perhaps best known as the author or co-author of the songs "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)", and "Turn, Turn, Turn!", which have been recorded by many artists both in and outside the folk revival movement and are still sung throughout the world. "Flowers" was a hit recording for The Kingston Trio (1962), Marlene Dietrich, who recorded it in English, German and French (1962), and Johnny Rivers (1965). "If I Had a Hammer" was a hit for Peter, Paul & Mary (1962) and Trini Lopez (1963), while The Byrds popularized "Turn, Turn, Turn!" in the mid-1960s. Seeger was also widely credited with popularizing the traditional song "We Shall Overcome", which was recorded by Joan Baez and many other singer-activists, and became the publicly perceived anthem of the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement soon after musicologist Guy Carawan introduced it at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.