As a folk singer and environmentalist, Pete Seeger gained fame.

But it is as a great American that I will always remember Seeger, who died Jan. 27 at age 94.

Seeger was as much a champion of personal freedom from autocratic government as he was an iconic troubadour.

We should hate injustice but be courteous to its purveyors, he taught.

Ideologically, Seeger was a socialist. Back in the 1930s, Seeger and many other Americans joined the Communist Party, briefly. But Seeger was an American first, last and always. He was in World War II’s Army; singing because that’s what Uncle Sam assigned him to do.

Later in the 1940s, Seeger and his folk group, the Weavers, soared to the top of the music charts of that era, singing “Good Night, Irene,” Seeger-written “If I Had a Hammer” and “Kisses Sweeter than Wine.”

In the 1950s, they had bookings for concerts, radio, and the emerging medium of television. They made money. They had fame. Their careers were soaring. Politically, Seeger matured, and left the Communist Party.

Then came 1957. Seeger was called to testify before Congress.

Here is how that went, synopsized by The Guardian:

Summoned to give evidence about his political leanings and contacts to the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities committee in 1955, Seeger refused to testify. He denied his views made him disloyal to his country. Asked repeatedly if he had sung for Communists, he retorted: “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.”

For that, they screwed him.

They put his name on a blacklist. They indicted him for contempt of Congress – the contemptible Congress of that era. They sentenced him to prison, for speaking his mind. Happily, an appeals court overturned that travesty. But they yanked his passport. He could not travel freely.

He lost money. He could not perform on TV.

What did he do? Anger, sure. But bitterness, no. He did what he had always done. He wrote and sang, anywhere, trading the thousands of listeners at concert halls for the dozens on small college campuses.

He kept on protesting against tyrannical government.

But he didn’t hate.

He confronted, amiably, those who persecuted him. He argued intensely, vehemently, for freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom from big government.

But he did not curse, condemn or damn. He argued ideas, not persons.

“It’s a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with,” he said.

In America, he believed, there is room for dissenters.

Last year, at age 93, he performed at the Farm Aid concert, his once mellifluous voice strained by age into a still enthusiastic “C’mon … everybody!” at the choruses, his foot still stomping out the beat.

He espoused a contrarian, socialist philosophy and a simple lifestyle – and he lived it.

“He was chopping wood 10 days ago,” said a grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson.

What made him a great American?

He didn’t leave. He didn’t quit. His government had squashed him, but his country … Ah, he still loved America passionately, shouting out our plebeian anthem, “This Land is Your Land,” written by his touring buddy, Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie and Seeger portrayed America as it is, rough edges and all, a rousing, broad-shouldered blast, not a weenie thing, spotted with injustice while reaching to transform “justice” from an abstraction into a lifestyle.

I saw him in concert just once, at Chautauqua Institution near Jamestown, N.Y. I liked his songs. I read what he had written, and listened to what he had said. I learned from him how to try to approach a part of my life’s work, the framing of editorial opinions.

Those opinions attempt to illuminate an issue so that readers can form their own viewpoint – which might agree with what I had written, might be 100 percent opposed, or somewhere in between.

Being right isn’t the goal. Oh, you don’t write hogwash. You craft an honest, informed opinion and put it out there.

The purpose is to be one American reaching out to other Americans in the quest for getting to positions that we all can live with to solve our problems and improve our lives.

Seeger taught that.

He drew bright distinctions between the despotism he hated and the human beings who had thrown the entire weight of government against him.

He taught me to remember that the people I whose ideas I might excoriate in editorials can also be patriots.

Despite having been royally screwed by the federal government, Pete Seeger stayed in America and stayed with America, enriching its environment and its music, never bitter, for almost an entire century.

As noted, Pete had been a communist and a socialist. My own political views are center-right. So what? This is America. We could disagree, but I could still learn from him. That’s Seeger’s great legacy as an American.

As a musician, ipse dixit.

Reached at home at 3 a.m. Monday with news of Seeger’s death, Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo synopsized: “Well, of course he passed away! But that doesn’t mean he’s gone.”

Make some space on the “Great Americans” pantheon, stretching back beyond Jefferson.

Pete belongs there.