The American singer and composer Pete Seeger was quite simply the foremost popularizer of American folk music of the twentieth century. While others engaged in field work or labored in dusty archives, Seeger recorded over 100 albums in a half a century of performing. An evangelizer with an inborn sensitivity to crowd techniques, Seeger excelled in concert and had few musical peers in working a crowd. An intimate, casual, and charming performer, he often successfully invited his audience to sing along with him. The stringbean performer, bent over his long-necked five-string banjo, dressed in an old work shirt and denims, completely reshaped American musical taste in folk, topical, and protest music. Seeger's banjo read, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender," and if some segments of America reviled him as a Communist sympathizer, others perceived him as standing for peace, equality, and decency...