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The Clearwater, Pete Seeger’s 100-foot sailboat, continues to spread the gospel of clean water.
As I watched the Acela train rumble along the Hudson River, heading south to the big city, I couldn’t help but feel a bit slow. I was aboard the sloop Clearwater, where a gentle breeze had faded into a dead calm, and even the giant mainsail struggled to generate forward motion. But for this old wooden boat and her passengers, speed isn’t the point. The river is the point — and today, the stillness of sky and water were just another opportunity to appreciate it.
When Pete Seeger organized like-minded enthusiasts to build this 100-foot sailboat in the late 1960s, the folk singer had already come to fame as a member of the Weavers, had already been blacklisted by the the House Un-American Activities Committee along with that band, and was deeply enmeshed in the Civil Rights movement. He’d weathered a white supremacist riot alongside Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie and helped push “We Shall Overcome” into the canon of American protest songs.
But Seeger’s idea for the Clearwater, a teaching ship that would turn its passengers into advocates for a badly polluted river, came before the first Earth Day, before the Clean Water Act, and before the modern environmental movement. With his help, the historic sailboat would go on to play a role in all of that. Even now, more than a decade after his death in 2014, the boat continues to bring generations of people out onto the dirty water of the Hudson and recruit them to help clean it up, bit by bit.
The Hudson is technically a fjord, with steep sides and deep water. In the 19th century, sloops would pile up in its narrows, waiting for a fair wind, then stream through en masse in a parade of sails and flags. This wasn’t idle spectacle. Those ships carried the economy on the river with them, all the way up to Albany. Finished goods from the cities, raw goods from the countryside.
It was a lifeblood river, home to billions of spawning fish, and all the wild animal and bird life that followed. Sturgeon were so plentiful they were known as “Albany beef.” The sloops themselves were a testament to the raw abundance of this landscape, and they were framed and planked with the forests of New York, black locust, red cedar, and white oak. In those days, a ship’s carpenter could find the beginnings of a sturdy keel by going for a walk.
Clearwater is a replica of these boats, which enjoyed a revival in part thanks to Seeger’s curiosity about the river along which he spent his life, from his early concerts in Greenwich Village to the home he built in Beacon. He was a second-generation ethnomusicologist, a field not so different from the study of old boats — both melodies and watercraft arise in the context of their region and their specific function, and in both fields, people preserve the originals when possible and help the old folkways find purchase in the current moment.
I first heard about Pete Seeger in college, when someone showed me his short-lived television show, “Rainbow Quest.” In black and white, Seeger hosted lengthy, relaxed sessions with foundational musicians of the American folk revival like Elizabeth Cotten, Doc Watson, and Mississippi John Hurt. He also brought huge stars into his low-budget UHF orbit, broadcasting unusually candid glimpses of people like Johnny Cash and June Carter — Johnny strung out, shoes kicked off, telling stories and pressing Seeger for a rendition of “Cripple Creek” on his century-old fretless banjo.
It was clear Seeger had studied many old songbooks; in the sailing world, he would find their counterpart in a book from 1908 called “The Sloops of the Hudson.” Working from these old lines, the Clearwater was built at the Gammage Boatyard in Maine, alongside a class of ships that included the schooner Mary Day and the Shenandoah, both still plying their trade as charter boats in Camden, Maine, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, respectively.
It’s tempting to imagine that it was just a gaggle of folk singers and hippies behind the Clearwater, but the founding committee was more of a Hudson Valley cross section, according to Betsy Garthwaite, a former captain and the unofficial historian of the boat.
“There were yacht club types,” she says, and also people who worked at IBM, “people who wore a suit and tie everyday.”
Still, the colorful characters of Seeger’s milieu were ever-present. The folk singer Don McLean was on the crew for the Clearwater’s maiden voyage and wrote part of his first album on board. People sometimes complained that the “hippie types” caused too much trouble — like in 1971, when the ship’s captain was accused of taking a nude shower “under a tall fire hydrant” in Bear Mountain and was arrested along with the first mate.
More seriously, Seeger’s image and his past association with the communist party caused friction in both directions. To some people in the Hudson Valley, Seeger seemed dangerous, and to some of Seeger’s friends, the Clearwater seemed frivolous.
“Mary Travers from Peter, Paul and Mary was like, ‘Are you kidding me? You're building a sailboat? Like, there's a war going on,’” Garthwaite says.
But the sailboat was just one of many projects in Seeger’s life, a life overflowing with concerts, rallies, and impromptu singalongs. With plenty of help from Toshi Seeger, his wife, he recruited everyone he met into a mission that would be whimsical if it wasn’t also serious: making music together, especially songs that carry the egalitarian values of everyday people. And he carried that energy onto the boat.
“I think Pete had that gift,” Garthwaite says. “He saw potential in people. He saw potential in the river, and he saw potential in this idea of his, an idea that he admitted from the get-go was a pipe dream.”
On the day that I sailed, dozens of people had lined up to grab thick lines on either side of the Clearwater as the crew led them in a sea shanty. This time, it was “Pay Me My Money Down,” a song first documented in 1942 among the Black stevedores of the Georgia Sea Islands, popularized in the 1950s by the Weavers and then the Kingston Trio, and eventually, by Bruce Springsteen. As they sang, they pulled, the gaff halyard on one side and the peak on the other, until the giant mainsail was fully aloft.
Pete delivered his songs by getting the crowd to sing with him. And his encouragement to not just sit and be an audience, but to be participatory in song, got people to then be participatory in protest.
– David Toman, Clearwater’s current executive director
“You're maybe hauling on this line over here, but you're not getting the whole big picture,” Garthwaite told me later. “But when you stand back at the helm, you can see exactly how everything works in concert together. I used to imagine that I was a performance artist, that I was re-creating a moment in history in the present time. And my greatest fantasy was that somebody would see us out there sailing from the Metro-North or the Amtrak train and decide, wow, that's the most beautiful thing.”
In the days when Seeger was living in his homestead on Mount Beacon, Garthwaite remembers sailing by the singer’s house with a friend who knew him well. “We would be sailing through Newburgh Bay, and you could look up and see where the Seeger homestead was. You may not have any idea if the Seegers were home, or if they were looking out on the water, but this guy could yodel, man, and it carries. Once in a while he’d yodel, and maybe Pete would yodel back.”
The Clearwater might easily have become a museum-ship, a floating Mystic Seaport with costumed crew, but reality intervened, according to Seeger, when the crew found themselves “sailing in a sewer.”
The river that the ship inherited was filled with waste and pollution — people like to say that you could tell what color General Motors painted its cars just by looking at the water. The Clean Water Act led to major improvements, but problems persist.
David Toman, Clearwater’s current executive director, says the mandate of the original act was admirably concise. “The three key points of that legislation were to have the nation's waterways be fishable, swimmable, and drinkable,” he told me. “Pretty simple target. If you hit those three, then the underlying ecological systems will survive and be stronger.”
Today, the Hudson is swimmable, but only if it hasn’t rained recently, since rainstorms overpower local sewage systems and send waste straight into the river. It’s drinkable, if treated, and several cities draw their water from it. And it’s fishable, except that the fish are loaded with polychlorinated biphenyls, which makes eating them a bad idea.
More than a million pounds of PCB, a legacy pollutant, were dumped into the river by General Electric plants until the 1970s, turning the Hudson into the country’s biggest Superfund site. Despite an expensive remedial dredging project a decade ago, PCB levels remain dangerously high.
“And PCBs bioaccumulate,” Toman says, which means they become more concentrated as they work their way up the food chain. Disturbingly, the carcinogens also get more potent as this happens, so that when a person eats a contaminated fish from the Hudson, it may be even more toxic than what a worker in the original GE plant was exposed to.
With all this looming in the rearview mirror, climate change is poised to create new problems ahead. “The Hudson River from New York City to Troy is tidal, it’s an estuary. Sea-level rise drives salinity further up the estuary,” Toman said. As the salt line moves north, it will affect the drinking water for cities like Poughkeepsie.
There’s also an increased risk of storms, which combined with sea-level rise could overwhelm shoreline infrastructure. “We need remediation of our marsh systems and shorelines and the riparian zones of the tributaries, so that they have the capacity to slow and absorb a significant amount more water,” Toman said.
It’s a lot for any one person to think about. But taking people out for a sail on the Clearwater, Toman thinks, is a place to start.
Seeger thought so too. On the first Earth Day, in 1970, the sloop sailed from New York to Washington, D.C., carrying thousands of petitions in support of clean water. When they arrived, Seeger told the New York Times, “The problems of American rivers can’t be solved by people like me who live on them. Only the Federal Government has the power to enact and enforce the laws that are needed.”
I think Pete had that gift. He saw potential in people. He saw potential in the river, and he saw potential in this idea of his, an idea that he admitted from the get-go was a pipe dream.
– Betsy Garthwaite
Seeger’s message, sobering as it is to those of us who cherish homegrown activism and local river cleanups, is as true today as it was then — the watersheds of our major rivers are vast, they cross state lines and sometimes international boundaries, and the lives of people, animals and plants are profoundly reliant on their well-being from source to sea. There’s no piecemeal way to keep them running clean and free.
“It literally takes generations to correct a one-time failure,” Toman says.
But for Seeger, as with music, so with activism — sitting around was not an option. “Pete delivered his songs by getting the crowd to sing with him,” Toman says. “And his encouragement to not just sit and be an audience, but to be participatory in song, got people to then be participatory in protest.”
In the absence of top-down improvements to the Hudson, there’s one thing Seeger’s legacy and the continuing voyages of the Clearwater can tell us for sure: There’s a joyful ruckus to be made.
What You Can Do
- Sign up for updates or … go for a sail on the Clearwater.
- The non-profit river-cleanup.org is a global network “on a mission to clean rivers by empowering people, preventing pollution, and accelerating change.”
- Listen to some music
“Pay Me My Money Down,” a song first documented in 1942 among the Black stevedores of the Georgia Sea Islands, popularized in the 1950s by the Weavers and then the Kingston Trio, and eventually,
Bruce Springsteen version
“We Shall Overcome” and other Seeger classics
Seeger’s banjo rendition of Cripple Creek
“The Weavers Ultimate Collection”
Key Takeaways
- The Clearwater as a Teaching Ship: Pete Seeger, the folk singer and activist, organized the construction of the 100-foot sailboat Clearwater in the late 1960s to serve as a teaching vessel, aiming to turn its passengers into advocates for the badly polluted Hudson River.
- Activism through Participation: Seeger channeled his experience in the Civil Rights and folk music movements — popularizing songs like “We Shall Overcome” — to promote environmental protest, encouraging people to be “participatory in song” to become “participatory in protest.”
- Legacy Pollution: Despite improvements from the Clean Water Act, major pollution issues persist in the Hudson River, including more than a million pounds of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) dumped by General Electric, which bioaccumulate and remain dangerously high, and sewage overflow after rainstorms.
- Climate Change Threats: The tidal Hudson River estuary now faces new challenges from sea-level rise (driving salinity and affecting drinking water) and increased storms (overwhelming shoreline infrastructure), necessitating remediation of marsh systems and shorelines.
- Need for Top-Down Action: Seeger recognized that while local efforts and “homegrown activism” are vital, the vast scale of major river watersheds — crossing state lines and international boundaries — requires the Federal Government to have the power to enact and enforce the laws needed for long-term correction.
