“My Dirty Stream”: Pete Seeger, American Folk Music, and Environmental Protest

In the aftermath of World War Two, American folk music began to engage with topical concerns over the health of the environment.The nuclear arms race was the most immediately pressing focus for the protest song.Stephen O'Leary observes that the American nuclear bombing of Japan in 1945 marked an epochal division in history, in that for the first time fear of planetary destruction appeared to be matched by the technical means to carry it out."The rationalist world view of scientism," he writes, "seemed to have reached its limit with an invention that threatened the ultimate negation of the dreams of technological progress" (O'Leary 209).West coast journalist Vern Partlow wrote "Talking Atomic Blues" (or "Old Man Atom") in 1946, using black humor to register both this distrust of scientists and the fear that human history was on an irrational course.Recorded by Sam Hinton in 1950, and later by the Sons of the Pioneers, the song questions the undemocratic Faustian power of the "science boys," who have "hitched up the power of the goldurned Sun" and "put a harness on old Sol."The world faces a stark choice: either we "stick together" or "All men / Could be cremated equal" (Hinton; Sons of the Pioneers).After scientists discovered the presence of Strontium-90 in cow's milk in 1959, anxieties over nuclear war began to focus in particular on the environmental effects of atomic bomb testing (Boyer 352).In 1963, Pete Seeger sang "Mack the Bomb," a parody of Kurt Weill by Nancy Schimmel, in which the threat of invisible nuclear fallout is matched by the secrecy of the Atomic Energy Commission.Compared to a shark, whose threatening nature is at least visible in its white teeth and in the blood of its victim, Strontium 90 "leaves no trace," while the AEC "has figures /