It would be difficult to think of two people better equipped to edit The Pete Seeger Reader than Ronald Cohen and the late James Capaldi. Cohen is universally recognized as the dean of American folk music scholarship, particularly that of the latter twentieth century; his Rainbow Quest (2002) is still the definitive study of the folk music revival of 1940–70. In my own archival research on Woody Guthrie I came across a letter from Seeger in which he admits, “Ron Cohen knows more about me than I do.” Capaldi was the webmaster of peteseeger.net, the major Internet source on Seeger, from its inception in 1995 until Capaldi's death in December 2013. Fortunately, both Seeger and Capaldi were able to see this book in print.

The Pete Seeger Reader takes us through a wealth of writings both by and about its subject. Some have been previously published in sources well-known and obscure; others are writings – letters, unpublished essays – from the vast collection mostly held by Cohen. The selection covers the sweep of Seeger's public life, from 1939 (when the twenty-year-old is first mentioned in a Daily Worker article) to 2009, when Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sing the complete version of Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land” for the first Obama inauguration. (A brief Afterword takes the reader through later profiles and interviews, up to the death of Seeger's wife Toshi in January 2013.) The selection is organized straightforwardly and chronologically, with comprehensively introduced sections on “The Early Years,” dominated by Seeger's work with Guthrie, the Almanac Singers and People's Songs; “The 1950s,” covering the Weavers and the beginning of Seeger's trials with the House Un-American Activities Committee; and “The 1960s,” taking in Vietnam, the folk revival, Seeger's global emergence, and, increasingly, his environmental activism centred on the Hudson River and the Clearwater project. The final section, “The 1970s and After,” engages significantly with the paradox of Seeger's national stature and celebrity – summed up not only in Bill Clinton's eulogy of him as “an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them” but also in the title of Marc Fisher's Washington Post profile: “America's Best-Loved Commie: Even a Radical Can Become a National Treasure.”

Merely two weeks before his own death, Seeger sent Cohen a congratulatory postcard, which Oxford University Press have posted on their blog (http://blog.oup.com/2014/01/a-postcard-from-pete-seeger). In it, Seeger confesses to Cohen, “I had to skim it at times because today was a day I had set aside to memorize Wm. Shakespeare's 65th sonnet, and I couldn't delay that any longer.” The sonnet itself, a meditation on “sad mortality” and the “beauty … / Whose action is no stronger than a flower,” is posted in full, below one of the last writings of a legendary activist who bestrode the American musical landscape like none other.