American folk singer Pete Seeger, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, tells a Voice of America News interviewer of a youthful desire built of rebellion:
As a teenager, Seeger says, he didn’t aspire to music, but to live in the woods. “I said I’m going to be a hermit. That’s the only way you can be honest in this world of hypocrisy. And I really meant it. I remember wondering, could I be a forest ranger? I went to a school where you learned to use an axe. And three days a week I was out there chopping trees.”
He returned to what his parents had surrounded him with in youth: music, musical instruments, and singing — and the rest is history. But Seeger still chops wood everyday and still lives in the log cabin he and his wife built in 1949 in Fishkill, New York.
URL: http://www.voanews.com/english/Entertainment/2009-05-12-voa14.cfm