Happy birthday to singer Pete Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014), who’s done more to popularize American folk music than perhaps anyone else in music history! In the 1940s, he performed with Woody Guthrie, before forming “The Weavers” who had hits with such folk songs as, “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Goodnight Irene.”

Seeger was blacklisted by the US government in the ’50s. In the following decade, he would become a kind of father figure icon to the younger generation of hippies and rockers. “The Byrds” had a No.1 hit with Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn”.