“He’s had one of the most perfect lives of anybody I know.”

That was filmmaker Jim Brown’s response when asked why he profiled Pete Seeger in a PBS “American Masters” documentary. Few would disagree with Brown’s assessment. In a career that’s spanned over 70 years, the 94-year-old Seeger has embodied the idealism that once defined the American spirit. A tireless crusader for social justice, world harmony and environmental causes, Seeger was even called, at the height of his activism, “America’s tuning fork.”

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It absorbs you for the first few minutes you see him. Framed by a thick shock of long red hair and a thatch of beard, Willie Nelson’s face is that of a lifelong storyteller. More specifically, it’s the face of a life lived long … and hard. It is weathered, tracked with troubles and adventures (more often than not the same thing), hits and misses, triumphs and, well, leaner times. It’s not something he cares much to call attention to, and I beg forgiveness in advance. But, from the early days when he sold the tune “Family Bible” for 50 bucks, through the Outlaw years with Waylon and Tompall Glaser, to today’s ongoing road exploits, golf stories and records—he’s worn it well.

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Over four decades and 25 albums, Richie Havens has used his music to convey messages of brotherhood and personal freedom. Cutting his teeth on the fertile ’60s music scene of Greenwich Village and interpreting tunes by Bob Dylan, he gained even more notoriety after opening the Woodstock festival on August 15, 1969.

The festival was off to a shaky start—several hours after the scheduled kickoff time, not a note of music had been played. Organizers convinced Havens to go on stage alone with his guitar and entertain the hundreds of thousands waiting for the music to begin. Each time he tried to finish his set, he found himself being talked into going back out. But after two hours and 45 minutes of playing, Havens ran out of material.

So he improvised. Over the intensely rhythmic strum of his own acoustic, Havens composed a festival-inspired song called “Freedom” on the spot (building on a snatch of the traditional “Motherless Child”). The tune was immortalized in the Woodstock film, and Havens has been performing it ever since. “I feel that it doesn’t belong to me anyway,” he said in 2002. “It belongs to everything that made it come out.”

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In 1939 celebrated African-American contralto Marian Anderson was denied rental of Washington, D.C.’s Constitutional Hall because of a segregation clause that only allowed concerts by white artists. Once this news circulated there was public outrage over the discrimination, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—among thousands of others—resigned membership from the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the hall. Roosevelt, along with Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, and Walter White of the NAACP, encouraged Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, and on April 9, 1939, Anderson performed a concert that included her memorable rendition of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” for 75,000 attendees and millions of radio listeners.

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