His instrument of change is a banjo

It’s an election year, you might have noticed, and the air is filled with talk of new visions for America. But some of the old visions are still pretty fresh -- possibly fresher for having gotten so little use. I don’t mean the fictive golden past of cracker barrels and pigtails politicians have often dangled like a hypnotist’s watch before the electorate, but the old-fashioned idea that this land is your land, this land is my land, and that only by joining together can the many keep it out of the hands of the exclusive few.

“It’s his patriotism that’s been terribly misunderstood,” Danny Seeger says of his father, folk singer Pete Seeger, whose long and eventful life is recounted in Jim Brown’s all-access, music-filled biographical film, “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song,” presented tonight as part of the PBS series “American Masters.” Depending on how you feel about these things, you may choke up, or possibly just choke. I am of the former teary persuasion, to warn you now.

Seeger co-wrote “If I Had a Hammer” with Lee Hays, a fellow member of the folk group the Weavers, and he had a hand as well in “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes) and “The Bells of Rhymney” (a setting of a Welsh poem) and had some part in “We Shall Overcome” becoming the anthem of the civil rights movement. “I get too much credit for this song,” he says. “I added a few verses, but everybody adds verses.”

He’s paid tribute here by, among others, Dixie Chick Natalie Maines (another musician who’s caught flak for speaking her mind), Bruce Springsteen (who recorded an album of songs associated with Seeger), former New York Gov. George Pataki (who applauds Seeger’s spearheading the movement to clean up the Hudson River) and Bob Dylan, who says of Seeger’s fondness for audience participation, “Whether you wanted to or not you’d find yourself singing a part, and it would be beautiful.”

More than Dylan, certainly more than the comparatively little-heard Woody Guthrie -- who taught him to ride the rails -- Seeger was the voice of the midcentury folk revival. It was a homely voice, a good voice without being too obviously a great voice -- anyone’s voice, but better. His lack of affectation made all music available to him: Whether singing Appalachian ballads, blues, gospel sounds, country songs, Spanish Civil War songs, African songs or a bit of German to accompany his banjo version of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” he always sounds authentic -- that is to say, exactly like himself.

His family was not just musical, but musicological; a teenage Seeger was converted to the five-string banjo at a folk festival in Asheville, N.C., he’d attended with his father, composer and ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger. He would become a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the instrument.

As well as laying out the facts of a life, “The Power of Song” amounts to a brief history of 20th century American moments and movements -- the Depression-era labor movement, the Second World War (Seeger went off banjo in hand), the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and finally the environmental movement. He joined and later “drifted out” of the Communist Party (“I was against race discrimination and the communists were against race discrimination; I was in favor of unions and the communists were in favor of unions”), which led him in due course to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he simply said that his politics were none of their business. And he quit the Weavers, with whom he had known success, because he did not want to sing in a cigarette ad.

Through it all, Seeger, whose banjo reads, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender,” strove to make music an instrument of change. He says of wife Toshi, accounted by more than one person in and out of her family to have made possible Seeger’s non-careerist career, “Her running joke has been, ‘If only Peter would chase women instead of chasing causes I’d have an excuse to leave him.’ ”

At once a great American and a citizen of the world, for whom difference is a matter for curiosity and not contempt, he’s just the sort of fellow you -- by which I mean, me -- could wish for as president, except that he’d never want or take the job. (Perhaps the more accurate way to put it is, I wish the presidency were a job that would suit a guy like Seeger.) But if he had a hammer, he’d hammer in the morning, all over this land. And seen here straight and spry (and still singing) in his late 80s, he can still handle an ax pretty well.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Pete Seeger: The Power of Song’

Where: KCET

When: 9 tonight

Rating: TV-G (suitable for all ages)