Folk singer Seeger has belated blues for ‘cruel Joe’

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Pete Seeger has the Joe Stalin blues.

Decades after drifting away from the Communist Party, the 88-year-old banjo picker has written a song about the Soviet leader that’s as scathing as any tune in the folk legend’s long career.

“I’m singing about old Joe, cruel Joe. He ruled with an iron hand. He put an end to the dreams of so many in every land,” Mr. Seeger wrote in “The Big Joe Blues.”

Mr. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and apologized years ago for not recognizing that Josef Stalin was a “very cruel misleader.” But Friday he said the song he finally finished this year is a first for him, despite three visits to the Soviet Union beginning in the ’60s.

“It’s the first overt song about the Soviet Union,” Mr. Seeger said during a phone interview from his Hudson Valley home in Beacon. “I think I should have, though, when I was in the Soviet Union — I should have asked, ’Can I see one of the old gulags?’ ”

Mr. Seeger calls it a yodeling blues song, and sings the chorus so it sounds like “I got the Big Joe Bloo-ew-ew-ews!” He said it’s the sort of song his old buddy Woody Guthrie might have written in the 1950s.

The song’s existence also touches on a sensitive political issue: the view by critics on the right that the left recognized Stalin’s tyranny only belatedly. Partial lyrics were cited Friday by author Ron Radosh in a New York Sun column.

Mr. Radosh, an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, accused Mr. Seeger in the newspaper two months ago of failing to criticize the communist regimes he once backed.

Mr. Radosh took banjo lessons from Mr. Seeger in the ’50s — $2 for three hours — though Mr. Radosh took a very different political path from his childhood hero.

In a follow-up column, Mr. Radosh said he was tickled to receive a warm letter last week from his old idol with a copy of the song attached. He provided a copy of the song to the AP yesterday, and said he still admires Mr. Seeger.

“I think he is a man of principle,” Mr. Radosh said. “He’s often wrong.”

Mr. Seeger said he hopes to publish the song in the folk magazine “Sing Out.” Though Mr. Seeger’s voice has been reduced to a throaty croak, he said he has performed the song for friends.

Mr. Seeger is still politically active, concerned about the fate of humanity — and puckish. He agreed to answer questions on the phone from an AP reporter only if the story included lines from a song he wrote after the September 11 attacks about Martin Luther King. It goes like this: “Don’t say it can’t be done, the battle’s just begun, take it from Dr. King, you too can learn to sing. So drop the gun!”

“I get the whole crowd singing on it,” Mr. Seeger said. “I’ve never failed to get an audience singing, whether they’re 8 years old or 80 years old.”