Pete Seeger was not so much a singer as a song leader. He sang well enough and long enough — “as early as 1925,” he told the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, by which he meant since he was 6 — that his voice became a great, unique, American sound. To him, this was a sorrow. He didn’t want you to listen to his voice; he wanted you to hear your own, singing. His modesty wasn’t artistic; it was political. “This machine kills fascists,” his friend Woody Guthrie scrawled along the hips of his guitar. Seeger in kind wrote in a tidy script around his banjo: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.” For both men, music was a weapon, though Seeger might have winced at the term. A tool, then: utilitarian, but its purpose nothing less than liberation, the deepest kind of pleasure.

We remember Seeger as a singer of songs beloved especially by children. Everything else — the Almanac Singers, the group he formed with Woody Guthrie in 1940; the Peekskill Riot of 1949, at which an anti-Communist mob stoned him and his kids; the Weavers, with whom he topped the charts in 1950 singing Lead Belly’s “Goodnight Irene”; the blacklist of the 1950s and ’60s, the investigations, the anger — fades. We forget the fact that his art and his politics were refined during the long years of the 1950s and ’60s, when he was rarely allowed to sing for anybody else.

Those were the kind of shows he liked best. An element of his radicalism overlooked by contemporary hagiographers, who mistake it for ordinary humility, was his conviction that artists are workers like any other, due no more or less praise than any other. Kids got that. Kids didn’t know who Pete Seeger was, but he knew who they were: He had a near-miraculous ability to communicate with children.

In the ’70s, he began making occasional appearances on “Sesame Street,” a program that owes an indirect but enormous debt to the Seeger ethos. His political songs became summer-camp standards, not just at socialist retreats but also for the bored children of middle-class suburbia. The “danger” of his most-sung song, “If I Had a Hammer” (I’d hammer out danger/I’d hammer out a warning), was understood not as fascism but as a bear in the woods, and “love between my brothers and my sisters” was no longer so much a racial message as one about getting along with campers of the opposite sex. There were hand gestures (put your hand over your eyes and look to the horizon; now hammer out that warning), and there were dances (shake your butt, little-kid-style, and pretend you’re ringing a bell).

“I sang for a sector of the population that didn’t think much of the House Un-American Activities Committee,” Seeger once said, with a depth of understatement that would have been bitter had he not thought he’d put one over on the judge who sentenced him to a year in jail for pleading the First Amendment instead of the Fifth when called to account for his Communist associations. His radical legacy, he hoped, would be a generation of kids who’d one day look up from their wiggle dances and say, “Hey, what is the danger?” He didn’t want them to hear him preaching. He wanted them to hear themselves, asking.

He may have underestimated the power of nostalgia to devour radicalism. It was made painfully evident to Seeger throughout the 1990s, when he accepted a series of the nation’s highest cultural honors: a Kennedy Center award, granted in front of a black-tie crowd that paid as much as $5,000 a seat; and a National Medal of Arts presented by President Clinton, who used a photo-op with the lanky relic — “an inconvenient artist,” he joked — to burnish his credentials with the liberal base even as he led the party rightward. Two social scientists, considering the event for a study of “reputational politics,” came to a blunt conclusion that Seeger “is not dangerous because he is not taken seriously.”

Seeger didn’t need to be dangerous. It wasn’t him he wanted you to hear, it was the songs; and they weren’t his songs, not even “Hammer” — “It’s not my song, you know,” he told me a few years before he died, taking reluctant credit only for the simple tune to which his songwriting partner, Lee Hays, put the enduring words. The song was improved upon enormously, he believed, by “that great jazz singer who died young.” He couldn’t remember the name. He meant Sam Cooke. The way Cooke sang it on a live album recorded at the Copacabana. A nightclub! “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t like nightclubs,” said Seeger, who never quite outgrew the awkward loner he was as a child. He didn’t need to like nightclubs. He didn’t need to be cool. He didn’t even need to be remembered, as long as you remember the songs he borrowed for a while.

Maybe that’s the best tribute we can offer to Seeger’s unique American voice — we can forget it was his; we can make it our own. By the end, he told me, he had to sing only one line. Less, even. “If I had a… .” He waited for me.

“Hammer,” I sang, after a pause.

“And justice and freedom and love,” Seeger said. “The audience sings all those lines. I just give them a few hints here and there.”