What's below isn’t published here as a plug but as a point. It's written by the highly respected Adelaide journalist and musician David Sly, who is kindly helping our family to promote a worldwide gathering we consider important to the conscience of humanity.

May 3 is being celebrated by music fans around the world in tribute to one of the great strident American protest voices, marking the 90th birthday of folk singer and social activist extraordinaire Pete Seeger – and Adelaide will join the celebration, with a rousing community concert bringing together the city’s great folk singers at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel.

Pete Seeger has stood tall as an unlikely hero since the 1950s, offering a passionate voice for reason, peace and understanding through furious, chaotic times. His clarion call for change and resolve has seen Seeger’s great songs inspire communities, from Turn Turn Turn and If I Had a Hammer to Where Have All the Flowers Gone? And his potency and poignancy as a performer still hasn’t waned, as proved by Seeger’s telling rendition of This Land is Your Land beside Bruce Springsteen at the recent inauguration ceremony of US President Barack Obama.

This is why the free Adelaide event from 3pm on Sunday May 3 at The Gov is so significant, aiming to foster and promote the powerful sense of community that Seeger has actively encouraged through his career. For this special 90th birthday celebration concert, The Gov has invited as many singers from Adelaide’s early folk club days (especially the Catacombs, which ran on North Tce from 1962-63) to join in the event – and in classic folk club style, it will be a communal floor session, with such singers as former Channel 9 presenter Roger Cardwell, Margaret Monks, Andy Becker, Doug Ashdown and Kate Battersby invited to contribute a few songs each.

The concert will be led by Adelaide’s folk songstress Irene Petrie – no small irony, as Seeger’s great initial hit with seminal folk group The Weavers in 1950 was a version of the poignant Leadbelly song Goodnight Irene, that sat atop the US charts for 13 weeks. Petrie is one of the great enduring Adelaide singers, having arrived among 902 displaced Europeans on the Goya that berthed at Port Adelaide on (ironically) May 3, in 1949. Her first professional gig was singing on an ABC-TV concert of peace songs in 1964. Following two hit singles in 1969, Does Your Mother Know and Really & Sincerely, Irene travelled to Vietnam in 1970 to perform for Australian troops. Later, having diversified through folk, pop, cabaret and jazz styles, she issued a successful album, If Wishes Were Fishes, in 1982, which was followed by national touring with Tom Paxton. In the years since, she has remained a loved performer on the club scene.

The local Seeger celebration adds to the tenor of other significant events being held in the great folk icon’s honour – especially in New York City, where some of America’s greatest contemporary songwriters will gather to pay respect to their 90-year-old mentor. Performing beside Seeger on stage at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on May 3 will be Dave Matthews, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, John Mellencamp and Emmylou Harris, among dozens of outstanding musicians.

It's no wonder that Seeger remains such an inspiration to musicians of purpose and conscience around the world. He was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups: The Almanac Singers and The Weavers. Although blacklisted and hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee in August of 1955, he became a figurehead of the Civil Rights movement, inspiring other folk singers to rise up with a national voice of potency. It was Seeger who brought the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome into the American consciousness, with his greatest compositions now at the bedrock of the popular folk songbook and his comments on social justice and equality serving as inspiration to many: “I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or colour of their skin, or situation in life.”