“My Dirty Stream”: Pete Seeger, American Folk Music, and Environmental Protest

Abstract

God Bless the Grass (1966) was the first album dedicated to songs of environmental protest. Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds placed environmental issues within the tradition of proletarian realism, while revising its celebrations of the heroic industrial worker. Seeger became involved in environmentalism, notably the Clearwater project, when he felt marginalized within the Civil Rights movement. God Bless the Grass was recorded a month before the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, when Bob Dylan's performance of his new electric repertoire indicated that Seeger's turn to conservationism coincided with what, to the new rock audience, was artistic conservatism.