Sing It!: The Story of Pete Seeger

Gr 3–6—When Danziger wrote a play about Pete Seeger with her third grade music students and invited the famed folksinger to attend, she never dreamed that it would result in the beginnings of a biography on Seeger written for kids. She tells his life story using simple, sometimes folksy language, peppered with black-and-white photographs. Chapters move from his childhood (he was raised by classical musician parents) to his career and rise to fame. Also covered are his family life, political activism, and subsequent blacklisting. He is portrayed as humble, musically inquisitive, and a man truly of the people. The compelling narrative will hold the interest of many readers. Danziger writes generally about activism but shies away from addressing Seeger's specific political beliefs—other than his involvement in the Hudson River cleanup. When discussing Seeger's work to share folk music with mainstream U.S. society, Danziger describes him as going on "search and rescue" missions to "unearth" songs and save them from "extinction," depicting Seeger as a savior and framing traditional folk musicians as existing only in the past. Seeger, on the other hand, states that people "should be listening to the kind of people I learned from." And while Seeger provided extensive feedback in the first years of the book's creation, Danziger supplements this firsthand knowledge with citations from Wikipedia for a few of the historic events mentioned within.