Leo Braudy, author of Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s, on the late Pete Seeger and the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, at the LA Review of Books:
Llewyn is the solitary fame seeker, doomed to be disappointed. Perhaps the Coens think he needs a brother to accompany him or be his manager, rather than his critical sister? Always he sings alone… and glares when the audience or even a friend tries to join in. For a story about the folk scene of the 1950s, there is little sense of the unconfined energies of the period, the sense of bonding and belonging that someone like Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, or a host of others could elicit in their audiences. Nor is there anything in Inside Llewyn Davis about the politics that the folk movement wore so explicitly on its sleeve.
Pete Seeger was nothing like Llewyn Davis. He was an emissary from the Popular Front of the 1930s, when leftwing politics was merged with American history and ideals through theater, art, and song. He had a long, rich life, long enough to see changes in American culture unimaginable in the 1950s, and he kept singing. And we, whenever we weren’t too cool to do so, sang along with him.