Labors of Love : Music: Folk singer Pete Seeger will join in tribute to 88-year-old San Diego social activist John Handcox.

At some point during a special program tonight honoring labor movement and folk music figure John L. Handcox, headliner Pete Seeger will lead the assembled voices in song. In so doing, the pioneering folk singer and social activist, now 73, will enact the defining gesture of a long, varied and controversial career.

Few in the audience at Laborers’ International Hall will realize, however, that the moment of unity will be rich in poignant irony for Seeger, who, with the late Woody Guthrie, “uncled” the modern folk movement by forging traditional music and populist politics into an instrument for social change.

Seeger’s placement on a bill that also features performances by Handcox himself, an 88-year-old San Diegan, as well as by Joe Glazer, Sam Hinton, Peggy Watson, Ernie McCray and others, is testimony to his stature in labor-folk circles.

But in a phone interview conducted between performances in Utah earlier

this week, Seeger admitted to a majordisappointment regarding his public work.

“I have to confess that the main thing I wanted to do with my life I’ve not done--namely, getting the country singing again,” Seeger said in even, avuncular tones. “More than anything, I wanted to put songs on people’s lips instead of in their ears. And, by and large, I haven’t succeeded.

“Of course, community singing remains an important part of church services across the country, and many ethnic groups have choruses,” he said. “And I believe that a number of families still get together and sing songs, and that countless individuals sing along with the radio or a recording. So I haven’t completely given up hope.”

Nonetheless, Seeger seems genuinely rueful of what he perceives as his failure to bring the nation together in song. It is a perception that would be loudly questioned by those familiar with his history.

Seeger, who was born in New York City in 1919 to a musicologist father and a violin teaching mother, developed musical skills early on, mastering the difficult five-string banjo while still in school. In his adult years, he participated in union politics, anti-fascist activities and folk-music organizations, and for a while even belonged to the Communist Party. (He quit in 1951.)

In 1940, with Guthrie, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell, he formed the Almanac Singers, a group that braved occasional violence to sing “Which Side Are You On?” at union gatherings across the country.

Seeger continued his musical rabble rousing while in the Army during World War II and afterward formed an organization that presented folk concerts that he and Guthrie called “hootenannies,” after a term they’d heard in Seattle.

In 1948, Seeger formed the Weavers, a quartet widely regarded as the most important and influential of the American folk revivalists. The group, which disbanded for several years during the ‘50s due to McCarthyist blacklisting, scored hits with Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” and with such traditional tunes as “On Top of Old Smokey,” “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.”

Seeger himself was blacklisted in 1955 after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He would not appear on network television for 17 years--not even on the 1963 show “Hootenanny,” which stole his sing-along concept and its name. In the ‘60s, Seeger expanded his activism into the civil rights arena and took part in a number of major events, including the 1965 march in Selma, Ala.

Mostly, though, while such of his disciples as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary were becoming household names in America, Seeger continued to work in the shadows, and remained something of an unknown to the mainstream music world. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“First of all, I don’t think of myself as having a career . Frankly, I don’t even like the word,” he said firmly. “I just think of myself as a simple man trying to do jobs that I felt needed doing. I couldn’t always do them, but I tried. I don’t want any special credit for that.”

Credit, to be sure, has been slow in coming to Seeger. Because many still maintain an image of him as a social shepherd, one who pops up at all the politically correct rallies to lead gentle sing-alongs, it has been easy to overlook the fact that Seeger has written or co-written some of the most stirring entries in the American songbook.

Among Seeger’s best efforts are “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “The Bells of Rhymney” (both recorded by the Byrds), the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “If I Had a Hammer” and the classic, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” first recorded by the Kingston Trio. He also is responsible for discovering or popularizing the civil rights hymn “We Shall Overcome,” “Guantanamera,” “Gotta Travel On” and the African song “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).”

At an age when most men are holding down porches, Seeger continues to tour, delivering the simple, righteous wake-up song that pleads faith in man’s ability to correct injustices. But he’s still unimpressed with his own efforts.

“I’m singing somewhere every week--sometimes two and three times a week. I don’t have much of a voice anymore, so I usually get the crowd singing and I just give them the words,” he said, laughing. “I look upon the big job today as not too different from what it was 40 years ago, and that is to bring different sectors of the populace to the realization that they have common interests, even though they might have different priorities. I find myself singing the same songs that I’ve always sung: for peace, for civil rights and for the right to speak out about things.

“But I have to admit that most songs are triumphs of oversimplification. Voltaire said, ‘Anything that’s too stupid to say can always be sung.’ ”

If he were so inclined, Seeger could take pride in the knowledge that he helped to effect change in one aspect of American life that was largely ignored until he began singing about it.

He was one of the first performers to warn us about the dangers posed by environmental pollutants. In 1969, he launched the Clearwater, a sloop built by volunteers to travel the waterways, raising consciousness and money to clean up the Hudson River, on the banks of which Seeger and his family have lived for the past 43 years. Seeger even got the ultraconservative Reader’s Digest to give a donation to the project. He fairly leaps at the question of whether it was a success.

“Oh, spectacularly so! We’ve been swimming in the Hudson for the past 10 years or so, largely thanks to Clearwater and other organizations that kept pushing,” he said. “Of course, it took the whole nation to push through various water-pollution amendments, and as a result there are rivers, lakes and bays all over America that are cleaner than they were in 1972 when the laws were passed--over Richard Nixon’s veto, I believe.”

For someone of his liberal-populist pedigree, Seeger is surprisingly loathe to engage in political baiting, especially of the knee-jerk variety. At the suggestion that conservative political elements remain windmills to be jousted with by such as him, Seeger takes the opportunity to examine the terminology.

“ Conservatism is a term that’s often used glibly, like radicalism ,” he said. “People don’t really know what it means. I consider myself a conservative person in the sense that I’m not in favor of fast change. If I’d been around when they were inventing the wheel, I would have said, ‘Don’t.’ Life might have been short and hard without it, but at least we wouldn’t be wondering if there was going to be a human race around in another hundred years. Right now, I think the human race has gotten itself way out on a limb, and we haven’t figured out how to get back to safer ground.”

Seeger expressed excitement at being a part of the tribute to Handcox, whom he sees, typically, as a much bigger hero than himself.

“John is one of the most extraordinary individuals I ever met in my life,” he said. “About seven or eight years ago, I thought he was dead. I published a book of his songs, tried to locate him, failed utterly and gave up. And then he rediscovered himself.

“A man named Mitchell wrote a biography about John called ‘Mean Things Happenin’ in This Land.’ A friend of John’s sees the book and tells him about it. So John and Mitchell had a reunion, and a friend of mine was there and gave me John’s phone number and I helped raise money to bring him east to a Labor Heritage gathering. Since then, he’s appeared at all sorts of gatherings.

“Anyone coming to Friday night’s program will be amazed and pleased to meet him and hear him talk about what it was like to be a sharecropper in Arkansas 55 years ago, to make up songs as a way of organizing the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and to be run out of the state by the Klan. He’s never quit being a very gentle but persistent activist, going around trying to persuade people to get together to do the things that need doing. I’m just one of his biggest fans.

“There are women and men like John around the world who work hard for good causes without getting much credit. People like that are the hope of the world.”

People like Pete Seeger.

“The San Diego Labor Heritage Tribute to John L. Handcox,” featuring Pete Seeger, Joe Glazer (who runs the national Folk Heritage office out of the AFL-CIO offices in Washington, D.C.), Sam Hinton, Peggy Watson, Ernie McCray (a local high school principal and actor, who will read original poetry and sing), the choir from Handcox’s church and other musical groups and speakers, will be held tonight from 7 to 11 at Laborers’ International Hall, 4161 Home Ave. (between Interstate 805 and California 94). For ticket information, call Grass Roots Events Inc. at 232-2841.