For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Politics and Democracy page.

Peace activist, environmentalist, songwriter, and folk legend Pete Seeger died on Monday. He was 94.

Confirmed by family members, Seeger is reported to have died of natural causes at a hospital not far from his longtime home in the town of Beacon, New York along the Hudson River.

According to the
Associated Press:

Seeger’s grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days. Family members were with him.

“He was chopping wood 10 days ago,” Cahill-Jackson recalled.

A banjo and guitar player who once traveled the country with Woody Guthrie, Seeger was a giant of the folk music revival of the Twentieth Century, playing for audiences and children all over the world. As well known for his political activism and consistent voice against war, destruction, and oppression, Seeger was often shunned by the powerful but never wavered in his commitment to justice, beauty, and the power of music to bring people together.

Throughout his career, that spanned nearly eighty years of playing music for people, Seeger used his banjo playing and singing to support labor struggles, the civil rights movement, anti-war campaigns, and environmental causes.

“My job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”