Pete Seeger
US folk legend Pete Seeger has died.
The 94-year-old musician, who inspired Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen among a host of others, died yesterday (27.01.14) in a New York hospital after a short illness, his grandson Kitama Cahill-Jackson confirmed to BBC News.
Pete's success initially came with the band The Weavers in the late 1940s and he wrote or co-wrote a number of political and protest anthems including 'If I Had a Hammer', 'Turn, Turn, Turn' and 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone'.
The singer, whose wife of 70 years Toshi died last year, inspired the folk revival in America in the late 50s and early 60s, which produced New York's Greenwich Village scene and launched Dylan's career.
In the 1950s he was stopped from broadcasting for his left-wing activism, which led him to tour American college campuses to perform his music and spread the ideology of the folk protest movement.
Pete said: "The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones.
"And I showed the kids there's a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio."
In 1996 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and he was nominated in the Best Spoken Word category at the Grammy Awards on Sunday.
A concert at Madison Square Garden in 2009 marked Pete's 90th birthday and featured Bruce, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Emmylou Harris, among others.
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