Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger, the Manhattan-born banjo picker and folk singer, had already lived a whole career by the time We Shall Overcome came out in 1963. He was a fixture on network radio in the 1940s, and with the Weavers he had a run of hits in the early 1950s, above all their version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight, Irene", which sat at the top of the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Then the McCarthy-era blacklist came down on the group.

He came back in the '60s as the movement's troubadour, singing for civil rights, disarmament, workers and an end to the war in Vietnam, and writing songs other people turned into hits: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", "If I Had a Hammer" (with Lee Hays of the Weavers) and "Turn! Turn! Turn!", which the Byrds rode to number one in 1965. He was one of the voices that carried the spiritual "We Shall Overcome" until it became the anthem of the civil rights movement, and he said it was he who swapped "will" for the easier-to-sing "shall". Plain, unvarnished and built for thousands of voices at once, it is folk music doing exactly what folk music is for.

The honors came later: a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996, the Kennedy Center Honors and the National Medal of Arts. He died in 2014.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.