US folk singer and activist Pete Seeger dies aged 94

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

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

Official Washington sang along - the audience must sing, was the rule at a Seeger concert - when it lionised him at the Kennedy Centre 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, Seeger said he wished it was "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 Awards nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which was won by Stephen Colbert.

Seeger maintained his reedy 6ft 2in 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 for Pete.

Seeger was born in New York City on May 3 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to religious dissenters of colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin and taught; his father, Charles, a musicologist, was a consultant to the Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression. His uncle Alan Seeger, the poet, wrote I Have A Rendezvous With Death.

In 1940, with Guthrie and others, he was part of the Almanac Singers and performed benefits for disaster relief and other causes.

He and Guthrie also toured migrant camps and union halls. He sang on overseas radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information early in the Second World War. In the Army, he spent three and a half years in Special Services, entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific, and made corporal.

The Hudson River was a particular concern of Seeger. He took the sloop Clearwater, built by volunteers in 1969, up and down the Hudson, singing to raise money to clean the water and fight polluters.

He also offered his voice in opposition to racism and the death penalty. He got himself jailed for five days for blocking traffic in Albany in 1988 in support of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose claim of having been raped by white men was later discredited. He continued to take part in peace protests during the war in Iraq, and he continued to lend his name to causes.

"Can't prove a damn thing, but I look upon myself as old grandpa," Seeger said AP in 2008 when asked to reflect on his legacy. "There's not dozens of people now doing what I try to do, not hundreds, but literally thousands...The idea of using music to try to get the world together is now all over the place."