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About two years ago, Sing Out! Magazine, my employer, hit a true rough patch financially. Staff was reduced dramatically, and the possibility of publishing again was unlikely. I had suddenly found myself at the helm of the publication, now as the 60+ year old magazine's managing editor, at age 24.
I was scared shitless, and I assumed my days at the magazine were numbered. As with all magazines, ad revenue was down, sales were down, and to add insult to injury, my predecessor wasn't around to show me the ropes of managing the publication.
About two weeks into this process, my office phone rang with the ID blocked, I picked up, hoping it wasn't another collections agency.
"Hello, this is Pete Seeger. I had called a few weeks ago regarding purchasing several copies of my book Where Have All The Flowers Gone."
I was scared shitless. Two weeks in my position, and I was speaking to Pete Seeger, who founded People's Songs in 1947, which went on to become Sing Out! in 1950, a publication that he held in such high regard, he could have called it one of his own children.
After a few awkward back and forths and meaningless smalltalk, we bonded over our mutual back pain problems. He had been suffering from a slipped disk -- years of chopping wood every day will do that --, I had screwed up my hip a few years before which resulted in chronic lower back pain.
Now, after 10 minutes of discussion I figured I'd muster up the courage to ask him for advice. I was green to this game, and who could possibly be better to ask than Pete, who had brought Sing Out! from the brink of extinction multiple times before. I asked:
"Pete, we're having some troubles here. Do you have any words of advice, or what I should do?"
Pete -- essentially the Gandalf the White of folk music and American culture, who had began alongside Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Alan Lomax, who had popularized "We Shall Overcome," who had a personal relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., who had spoken to people who knew Abraham Lincoln, and who had sung at Barack Obama's Inauguration -- this legendary man, he had this advice to give me:
"Keep drinking water, there's nothing better for you."
Wow.
It took me a whole year to realize that he thought we were still talking about back pains, not life in general. But I still hold that advice near-and-dear.
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