a little picture I am a South Jersey Friend and dad with a love out of outreach and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. I am the publisher of Quaker Quaker, a community site for Friends, and write about online publicity, organizing and design on my business site at MartinKelley.com.

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Pete Seeger gets YouTubed

This morning I'm working on the Pete Seeger section of Quakersong.org, the website of Annie Paterson and Peter Blood (I'm their webmaster). Parts of their site are amazing--the Quakers and Music page has become a directory of sorts for all the many Quaker musicians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still mostly a collection of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.

So I was wondering what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and starting surfing around. There's a great fan page which is regularly updated but has bravely decided to maintain its original design since it was founded eleven years ago. And Wikipedia does its usual fine job at a biography. But the gold mine is YouTube.

A year ago a user uploaded three clips from Rainbow Quest, a short-lived TV program Pete put together for a low-wattage UHF station out of Newark in the mid-60s (it's now a Telemundo affiliate broadcasting recycled Mexican soaps for its prime time schedule). I don't know what kind of copyright issues there are on something like this but it's great fun to see these old clips. Making this material widely available is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watching recapturing the innocence of our over-commercialized youth). I'll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and Johnny "I'm soooo stoooned" Cash a few years before they married.