Seeger was honored with several Grammys and was made an honoree of the Kennedy Center by President Bill Clinton. He died at age 94. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Seeger with Bruce Springsteen, right, at an event for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. Seeger continued performing and fighting for the causes he believed in, including the Occupy movement, well into his 90s. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Bob Dylan, left, and Seeger onstage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. An advocate for other musicians, Seeger played a role in getting Dylan noticed by producer John Hammond. Weinstein Company/Everett Collection

Seeger harmonizes with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963. One of his most popular songs, “We Shall Overcome” grew into an anthem of the U.S. civil rights movement. It was introduced at the founding meeting of the SNCC in 1960. Adger Cowans/Getty Images

Seeger performing at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1964. He was the author or co-author of countless popular songs, including “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” all of which became hits for other artists. Brian Shuel/Getty Images

Seeger, left, next to Alan Lomax, a folklorist who devoted his life to making live recordings of American vernacular music. Adept at banjo and guitar, Seeger played a critical role in popularizing blues, gospel and other vernacular genres. John Cohen/Getty Images

Seeger perfroms in California in the 1950s in a photo from the documentary “Pete Seeger: The Power of Music.” More than just a performer, he believed that songs could help people achieve political goals. For his entire life, he promoted civil and labor rights, racial equality and opposition to warfare through his songs and actions. Weinstein Company/Everett Collection

In the 1950s Seeger had a string of hit records with the Weavers, here in 1952, from left: Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Halterman and Ronnie Gilbert. Among the songs they played was Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene,” which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Everett Collection

Seeger's grandson Kitama Cahill-Jackson said his grandfather died peacefully in his sleep around 9:30 p.m. at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been for six days. Family members were with him.

Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and starstruck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk-music heritage, died Monday at the age of 94.

Folk hero

His musical career was always braided tightly with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River.

"Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger," Arlo Guthrie once said.

Seeger also was credited with popularizing "We Shall Overcome," which he printed in his publication "People's Song" in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from "will" to "shall," which he said "opens up the mouth better."

With the Weavers, a quartet organized in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group — Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman — churned out hit recordings of "Goodnight Irene," "Tzena, Tzena" and "On Top of Old Smokey."

"Be wary of great leaders," he told The Associated Press two days after a 2011 Manhattan Occupy march. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders."

Seeger — with his lanky frame, banjo and full white beard — was an iconic figure in folk music. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters, leaning on two canes. He wrote or co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," “Turn, Turn, Turn," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his banjo strapped on.

Blacklisted

"The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones," he told The Associated Press in 2006. "And I showed the kids there's a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio."

Seeger called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the that music he, Guthrie, Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter and others had created or preserved.

He was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal.

He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Repeatedly pressed by the committee to reveal whether he had sung for communists, Seeger responded sharply, "I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American."

Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.

Return to the spotlight

His scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and Seeger accused the network of censorship.

He finally got to sing it five months later in a stirring return appearance, although one station, in Detroit, cut the song's last stanza, "Now every time I read the papers/ That old feelin' comes on/ We're waist deep in the Big Muddy/ And the big fool says to push on."

Seeger's output included dozens of albums and singles for adults and children.

He also was the author or co-author of "American Favorite Ballads," "The Bells of Rhymney," "How to Play the Five-String Banjo," "Henscratches and Flyspecks," "The Incompleat Folksinger," "The Foolish Frog," "Abiyoyo," "Carry It On," "Everybody Says Freedom" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone."

He appeared in the movies "To Hear My Banjo Play" in 1946 and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in 1970. A reunion concert of the original Weavers in 1980 was filmed for a documentary, "Wasn't That a Time."

By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small "c," Seeger was heaped with national honors.

Official Washington sang along — the audience must sing was the rule at a Seeger concert — when it lionized him at the Kennedy Center in 1994. President Bill Clinton hailed him as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them."

Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honored him with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger. While pleased with the album, he said he wished it were "more serious." A 2009 concert at Madison Square Garden to mark Seeger's 90th birthday featured Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Emmylou Harris among the performers.

Seeger was a 2014 Grammy Award nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which was won by Stephen Colbert.

Seeger's sometimes ambivalent relationship with rock was most famously on display when Bob Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Witnesses say Seeger became furious backstage as the amped-up band played, though just how furious is debated. Seeger dismissed the legendary tale that he looked for an ax to cut Dylan's sound cable and said his objection was not to the type of music but only to the guitar mix, which drowned out Dylan's words.

Seeger maintained his reedy 6-foot-2 frame into old age, though he wore a hearing aid and conceded that his voice was pretty much shot. He relied on his audiences to make up for his diminished voice, feeding his listeners the lines and letting them sing out.

"I can't sing much," he said. "I used to sing high and low. Now I have a growl somewhere in between."

Nonetheless, in 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album, "Pete."