Pete Seeger walked into our little office in the Brill Building one morning with his banjo strapped across his back. If I remember correctly he had called unannounced at Paul Simon’s office down the hall and had left unsatisfied. So he was poking around, seeing who else was on the floor and he found me and my buddy Mitch Goldstein. Of course we invited him in.
He started telling us about our floor in the old days: which publishers were there, which composers he used to bump into. He told some very funny stories about a very young and desperately ambitious Paul (and, to a lesser degree, Art Garfunkel) going door to door, doing absolutely anything to get his foot in the door of the music biz.
We had a deeply fascinating conversation about how he had opened the gate for pop music to Zulu choral music decades before Paul Simon by recording his song Wimoweh with the Weavers in 1949. That song (which I remembered my parents singing as a folk song) had been corrupted by Pete from a recording of Mbube which Solomon Linda had recorded in the Twenties. Pete hadn’t known that Mbube, in Zulu culture, is an entire genre of music unto itself. He had simply heard this beautiful song. He had no idea what who was singing or what the guy was saying but it stuck in his head and he had to record his impression of it. It became a huge hit, was later adapted into “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by the Tokens and lives on today in The Lion King (and there’s yet one more cosmic echo from Pete that even some of his fans don’t know about).
Eventually we turned the conversation to our client Samite Mulondo who I just knew Pete would love. He got very excited about Samite’s music during that and subsequent conversations. In typical Pete fashion, he put his money (and, especially, his muscle) where his mouth was: Samite went on to perform at the Clearwater Festival and they did a number of other projects together. I have a very distinct memory of hanging out with Samite and Pete and Toshi along with Leslie Neblett and Eve Neuman (and Dana Gips, weren’t you guys there too?) on the last afternoon of the Clearwater Festival– Toshi driving the golf cart, trying to keep Pete from wearing himself down to a nub. A happy couple, deliriously exhausted after pulling off yet another unlikely miracle.