The Pete Seeger Tapes

For years, David Bernz taped the folk-music legend. In a new book, he shares his friend’s musings and memories.

Counting the number of music store owners who have published a book, passed the bar exam and won two Grammy Awards takes one finger.

David Bernz, the humble co-owner of Jake’s Main Street Music in Beacon, is a proficient musician with a distinguished pedigree in folk music circles who enjoyed a friendship and collaborative relationship with Pete Seeger, a familiar face in the city for 65 years until his death in 2014 at age 94.

Now comes a book, Chopping Wood: Thoughts & Stories of a Legendary American Folksinger, compiled by Bernz and scheduled for publication on May 3, Seeger’s birthday. That evening, Bernz and friends will celebrate Seeger’s legacy at the Towne Crier, 379 Main St.

The book, which is being published by Jawbone Press in London, includes Seeger’s musings on music, history, civil rights and the environment recorded by Bernz during the icon’s later years. Other bits and pieces from the archives include a letter Seeger sent to Bruce Springsteen in 2006 detailing his intent to give away his song royalties.

Festival Planned for 2025

After a three-year hiatus, the Clearwater Festival may return to Croton Point Park in 2025 to honor Pete Seeger, who founded it decades ago with his wife, Toshi.

A newly created nonprofit, RiverFest for Pete’s Sake, based in Briarcliff Manor, hopes to raise $950,000 to hold the Hudson River Folk Festival over Father’s Day weekend. Hudson River Sloop Clearwater canceled the festival in 2022 because of financial shortfalls.

The new group was created by Mitzi Elkes, a Clearwater board member; Hal Cohen, a Clearwater founder; and artist Roy Volpe. It announced its plan on April 14 and launched a website at riverfestfps.org.

Bernz wrote the preface and ample contextual material, which makes up about a third of the text. It reveals the pair’s close personal and professional relationship that began in the mid-1970s when the teenaged Bernz chauffeured Seeger to gigs.

“The recordings started because Pete knew I had a four-track device,” Bernz recalls. “I was a novice, but he’d call and say, ‘The BBC wants me to answer three questions,’ or ‘I need to record a song for a special occasion.’ He felt comfortable in my house.”

The requests grew more frequent and the projects expanded, which provided material for the book and the Grammies. 

“At one point, I figured the [spoken-word] tapes would end up in the dustbin of history, but then I thought, ‘It would be crazy not to work on this,’” Bernz says. “We need to get more of his ideas out there, especially with all the rancor these days. He was all about finding commonalities.”

In 2008, Bernz won his first Grammy, as a producer, for Pete Seeger at 89, which was named best folk album. Two years later, Tomorrow’s Children — a project initiated by Dan Einbender in the Beacon schools that features the Rivertown Kids singers — won best children’s album. 

Folk music is in Bernz’s blood: During a jam session at his shop on April 14, he played a song that turned “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into a Civil Rights manifesto.

He said his father, Harold Bernz, became radicalized during the Great Depression and viewed music as a way to foster social change. Harold worked with Seeger to establish the quarterly People’s Songs Bulletin in 1946. It evolved in 1950 into Sing Out!, which covered the folk and acoustic scene and was published until 2014, the year Seeger died and Main Street Music opened.

The younger Bernz grew up on Red Hill in Croton-on-Hudson, a magnet for left-wing artists and activists from New York City. He moved to Beacon in 1991 because of its affordability, proximity to the river and his job in the legal profession. He named the store after his son, Jacob, who is also a musician and songwriter.

The Bernz authorized to practice law still does so on occasion but mostly enjoys interacting with musicians at the store and playing banjo and guitar onstage with Jake, which they did April 6 at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon with a handful of guests. The show included several high-folk moments as people sang along to lyrics extolling the “shining light of love” and dreaming that “the world had all agreed to put an end to war.”