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When Pete Seeger, the man Bruce Springsteen calls "the father of American folk music," walks on stage at Madison Square Garden on May 3 for his 90th birthday concert, 20,000 people will rise to their feet and roar acclaim--accompanied in spirit by multitudes around the world.

This will embarrass him no end. Although a lifelong performer, he is almost allergic to applause: a man whose collectivist political morality tells him he really can't be worth it, that life isn't about him or you or me, it's about us, the whole seething mass of us.

That's why, as ever, the first words his cracked old husk of a voice utters are almost certain to be something like, "Well, let's sing a song together. I'll teach you the words as we go along..." That's what he did in January at President Obama's pre-inaugural concert. A couple of plinks on the banjo, then a holler of "This land is your land..." and 400,000 voices sent Woody Guthrie's anthem rolling down Washington Mall.

Of course, he couldn't always count on such a welcome in his own country. In the ‘40s and '50s, as an American Communist, he stood against McCarthyite persecutors who hounded his traditional folk groups off the radio and almost jailed him for "un-American activities" (a one-year sentence was quashed on appeal).

No matter what they threw at him, Seeger carried on singing, campaigning and marching for decades' worth of left-liberal causes--Civil Rights, Vietnam, anti-nukes, the environment. Consequently, as biographer David Dunaway wrote, he "became the most picketed, blacklisted entertainer in American history...If Seeger had been made of soft wood instead of oak, he would have cracked and split."

But for all Seeger's muso-activist struggles, he told this writer in 2005 that "the most valuable thing I ever did was carry on the music of Woody Guthrie." The raggedy little Oklahoman genius of folk and the austere Harvard-educated political purist met at the start of World War II. Woody taught Pete how to make a buck as a barroom busker, how to sneak a ride on a freight train--and how to laugh at himself, admit errors (like temporarily mistaking Stalin for a good guy) and move on.

When Guthrie fell ill in the mid-‘50s, Seeger lovingly fostered his music so that it endured to inspire Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle and more surprising names on the birthday concert bill such as Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello.

In a year when mass audiences have come back to Seeger, it's worth considering one recent image of him standing alone except for his principles. Around the time Bush and Blair launched the invasion of Iraq, a friend of Seeger's drove up the Hudson Valley to visit him. A heavy snow fell. As he got near the turn-off he saw a tall, solitary figure at the roadside. Seeger. He held a placard towards the passing traffic. It carried one word: "Peace".

More on the legends of music--day in, day out--at MOJO4music.com