Their commercial success was dampened, however, when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet that named performers with suspected Communist ties, appeared in June 1950 and listed Mr. Seeger, although by then he had quit the Communist Party. He later criticized himself for not having left the party sooner, though he continued to describe himself as a “communist with a small ‘c.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/arts/music/pete-seeger-songwriter-and-champion-of-folk-music-dies-at-94.html?_r=0
His reason for wishing he'd left the Party sooner was the gulag, etc.
He didn't stop characterizing himself as a communist.
Seeger, like other party members, came to regret the illusions he held about the Soviet Union. He apologized for thinking that “Stalin was simply a ‘hard-driver’ and not a supremely cruel misleader.” But he never abandoned his commitment to organized radical politics. Along with Angela Davis and other prominent former Communist Party members, he helped form the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a democratic socialist group, in 1991.
Remarking on Seeger, Bruce Springsteen once said that “he'd be a living archive of America's music and conscience, a testament to the power of song and culture to nudge history along, to push American events towards more humane and justified ends.”
In stark contrast to the role played by state socialists abroad, that’s a good way to describe the legacy of the Communist Party at home, a legacy Seeger never recanted.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/peet-seeger-communistpartyactivism.html
Seeger joined the Young Communist League in 1936, when he was 17. Without his involvement in the CP, there is no Pete Seeger as we knew him.
= new reply since forum marked as read
