Pete Seeger - Wimoweh and other songs of freedom and protest (1968)

In 1961, Pete Seeger, long the flagship artist of the tiny independent Folkways Records label, signed to the major label Columbia Records. This did not, as it turned out, mean that he actually left Folkways, which retained the right to issue not only previously unreleased recordings dating from before the Columbia deal, but also new recordings if Columbia didn't deem them sufficiently commercial to constitute competition.

Nevertheless, Moses Asch, head of Folkways, couldn't have been very pleased at the development, and when Columbia issued its first Seeger album, a live LP called "Story Songs" in August 1961, Folkways countered the same month with its own live album, "Sing Out with Pete!", which turned out to be a cobbled-together set of tracks that had been left off earlier Seeger live collections.

In 1968, Folkways was in a flurry of releasing Seeger compilations (the others were "Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie", "Pete Seeger Sings Leadbelly", and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"), and this one takes eight of the 12 tracks from the "Sing Out with Pete!" album, re-sequences them, and adds a few other stray tracks ("Wasn't That a Time," "What a Friend We Have in Congress," and "Hymn to Nations"). The recordings also seem to have been re-edited and remixed, with some extra waves of applause overdubbed. Although it contains a couple of Seeger's greatest hits, "Wimoweh" and "If I Had a Hammer (Hammer Song)," as well as some interesting performances of spirituals, with such collaborators as Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Willie Dixon thrown in, the album is still a hodgepodge. In fact, it's even more of a hodgepodge than the original version was seven years previously. 

The album features protest songs as well as old spirituals sung by legendary folk singer Pete Seeger. With Seeger's modern interpretations the folk process is truly at work, "making past experience meaningful for present-day life." Liner notes include background information on each of the tracks.
  

Tracklist:
101 I'm On My Way to Canaan's Land       4:20
102 Wimoweh      2:48
103 Wasn't That a Time           2:59
104 Freiheit           3:06
105 Study War No More (Down By the Riverside) - Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy 5:28
201 Hold On - Pete Seeger, Memphis Slim, and Willie Dixon 3:27
202 If I Had a Hammer (Hammer Song)           2:21
203 We are Soldiers in the Army           4:05
204 Mrs. McGrath           4:19
205 What a Friend We Have in Congress           1:58
206 Hymn to Nations (Beethoven, Ludwig v.: 9th Symphony)           2:06    


Pete Seeger - Wimoweh and other songs of freedom and protest (1968)
(192 kbps, cover art included)