In a very real sense all in modern popular music are Pete Seeger's children, as the fanzine writer Jon Pankake once pointed out.

And not merely those who got themselves a five-string banjo, lengthened the neck as Pete advised, and worked hard to get the audience to sing along with some folk song picked up from Africa, Indonesia or Middle America.

Eclectically cosmopolitan in his tastes long before the phrase "world music" had been coined, committed to radical causes long before the young activists of the universities joined the civil rights campaigns of Martin Luther King, turned on to the blues when it was still stuck in the ghetto, hitting the charts when most folk balladeers were trying to be John Jacob Niles or Peter Peers, he ploughed and planted a furrow that has nurtured more branches of pop than any other single musician, songwriter or singer.