In 1961,
Pete Seeger, long the flagship artist of the tiny independent
Folkways Records label, signed to the major label
Columbia Records. This did not, as it turned out, mean that he actually left
Folkways, which retained the right to issue not only previously unreleased recordings dating from before the
Columbia deal, but also new recordings if
Columbia didn't deem them sufficiently commercial to constitute competition. Nevertheless,
Moses Asch, head of
Folkways, couldn't have been very pleased at the development, and when
Columbia issued its first
Seeger album, a live LP called
Story Songs in August 1961,
Folkways countered the same month with its own live album,
Sing Out with Pete!, which turned out to be a cobbled-together set of tracks that had been left off earlier
Seeger live collections. In 1968,
Folkways was in a flurry of releasing
Seeger compilations (the others were
Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie,
Pete Seeger Sings Leadbelly, and
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?), and this one takes eight of the 12 tracks from the
Sing Out with Pete! album, re-sequences them, and adds a few other stray tracks (
"Wasn't That a Time," "What a Friend We Have in Congress," and
"Hymn to Nations"). The recordings also seem to have been re-edited and remixed, with some extra waves of applause overdubbed. Although it contains a couple of
Seeger's greatest hits,
"Wimoweh" and
"If I Had a Hammer (Hammer Song)," as well as some interesting performances of spirituals, with such collaborators as
Big Bill Broonzy,
Memphis Slim, and
Willie Dixon thrown in, the album is still a hodgepodge. In fact, it's even more of a hodgepodge than the original version was seven years previously. ~ William Ruhlmann
![The Very Best of Peter, Paul and Mary [Warner/Rhino]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0081227316129_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "The Very Best of Peter, Paul and Mary [Warner/Rhino]")
