Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: First Time Ever
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/17/1935
WEBSITE: http://www.peggyseeger.com/
CITY: Oxford
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: American
married to the singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl until his death in 1989 3 children.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 83021410
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n83021410
HEADING: Seeger, Peggy, 1935-
000 00773cz a2200241n 450
001 3349728
005 20130108164935.0
008 830318n| azannaabn |a aaa
010 __ |a n 83021410
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca00914182
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d PPi-MA |d UPB |d DLC
046 __ |f 1935
100 1_ |a Seeger, Peggy, |d 1935-
370 __ |a New York, N.Y.
372 __ |a folk music
374 __ |a folksinger
375 __ |a female
400 1_ |w nna |a Seeger, Margaret, |d 1935-
670 __ |a Folksongs of courting and complaint.
670 __ |a New Grove dict. of Amer. mus. |b (under Seeger: Peggy (Margaret) Seeger; b. June 17, 1935, New York; folksinger, song collector and songwriter; daughter of Charles Louis Seeger)
678 __ |a folksinger
952 __ |a RETRO
953 __ |a xx00
PERSONAL
Born June 17, 1935 in New York, NY; daughter of Charles Louis Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger; married Ewan MacColl, 1977 (died, 1989); children: Neill, Calum, and Kitty.
EDUCATION:Radcliffe College, attended; Salford University, Doctor of Arts award, 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Folksinger, song collector, and songwriter. Wrote music for documentary films and television; member of trio with Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker; music editor for anthologies; The New City Songster magazine, editor. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, part-time teacher, 2006-08.
AWARDS:Sony Silver Award, 1995, for BBC program “Folk.”
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born June 17, 1935, Margaret “Peggy” Seeger is a folksinger, song collector, and songwriter who recorded twenty-one solo albums and participated in hundreds of others. She is the daughter of musicologist and teacher Charles Louis Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music. She is half-sister to the late folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger.
Seeger wrote, edited, and contributed to numerous books about music makers and collections of songbooks; has written music for documentary films and television; was the music editor for two anthologies of folksongs by Alan Lomax and by Edith Fowke; and was a member of the musical trio with Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, which conceived of the BBC Radio Ballad format of the early 1960s. She often sang songs about women’s issues that were adopted for the women’s movement. The love song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” was written for Seeger by her husband Ewan MacColl.
She wrote, edited, and collected many song books. The Peggy Seeger Songbook: Forty Years of Songmaking, published in 2001, collects songs from her long career, many of which focus on everyday topics and political issues, including as “We Are the Young Ones.” She edited the 2009 The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook: Sixty Years of Songmaking describing MacColl’s role in the folk song revival in Britain and compiling 200 of his songs. For the 2010 edition of Journeyman: An Autobiography of Ewan MacColl, Seeger re-edited the original manuscript and wrote a new introduction. The book follows MacColl’s childhood and legacy as a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster. Seeger also edited the 2013 Of Words and Water, in support of the WaterAid charity, which collects short stories and poems by a group of international authors. Seeger contributed a poem and song.
Seeger is known as a purist of folk music. When she and MacColl ran a club in London during the early days of the folk revival, they banned anyone from performing material not of their own culture or heritage, which is why Seeger never played Scottish folk music in public. However, she’s not above reworking tunes to write songs about current political issues, such as abortion or inner-city violence. Seeger said in an interview with Colin Irwin online at the Telegraph: “People are surprised by my involvement, but they are just used to a stereotype of me that they heard from the early folk scene. Ewan and I churned out purist dogma to try to keep folk singing from being too damaged by contact with other musics that watered it down.”
In 2017, Seeger published her memoir, First Time Ever. In the book, she describes her childhood in her musical family, the left-wing politics they instilled in her, and her travels around the world in the early 1950s playing folk music in Holland, Germany, the Soviet Union, and China, the latter two against the American government’s wishes. A friend of her father, Alan Lomax, called her when she was in the Netherlands to ask her to play in London in 1956 which changed the course of her life. She became interested in the burgeoning British folk music scene, began an affair with the older and married English musician Ewan MacColl, and had three children with him. Together they helped initiate the British folk revival and collaborated with the Critics Groups and the BBC Radio Ballads series. Seeger and MacColl’s unusual relationship prompted MacColl to write the 1957 song, “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” later made famous by Roberta Flack. “Like the singer herself, Seeger’s prose is fluid and sharp, intimate yet measured,” noted Carol Haggas in Booklist and added that the memoir is profuse with exacting detail.
Seeger also writes about falling in love with fellow folk singer Irene Pyper-Scott. Calling the memoir quirky, unique, and fabulously memorable, a writer in Kirkus Reviews praised the book saying: “a personal evolution toward feminism and bisexuality, this free-spirited recollection of eight decades steeped in joy, sorrow, and harrowing tragedy celebrates Seeger’s experiences while reveling in the free-spirited ‘Of-Course-Why-Not’ philosophy.” A reviewer writing in New Yorker found Seeger wistful, and the characters that flit in and out of her memories colorful, adding that her “conversational prose has a flair for capturing the common” but also for the cataclysmic, as she remembers her mother’s early death and the influence it had on her.
Describing the range of memories in Seeger’s memoir, covering her idyllic childhood, reflections on race, experience with different cultures in Europe and Asia, her many folk music friends and fellow performers, and her identity as musician, mother, and activist, Library Journal contributor Rachael Dreyer noted how the chronological structure of the book zigzags in time, like memories do, but concluded: “An engrossing read for all, even those who don’t know their folk music history.” On the Irish Times Online, Anne Harris described the memoir as lyrical yet brutally honest, especially about her sexual identity, saying: “There are no sonorous signals of big moments, rather a series of chronological arabesques, which is why this amazing life reads more like a novel. I found it a slow read because it invites a Follow The Music adventure.”
Considering Seeger’s tumultuous relationship with MacColl and falling in love with Pyper-Scott, with whom she is still partners, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney remarked in Financial Times: “Folk music and activism tend to come freighted with connotations of earnestness. But Seeger’s writing goes against the stereotype. First Time Ever is funny, incisive, and affecting.” Hunter-Tilney also commented on the way Seeger writes well about music, community, and the oral tradition. According to Sukhdev Sandhu online at the Guardian: “At a time when digital hustlers burble forth about disruption and accelerated obsolescence, it’s all the more wonderful to read Seeger write about tenderness and tenacity, value and vitality, culture and continuity, about folk music being ‘like a cardiograph: the form being the graph paper and the content the heartbeat.’”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Carol Haggas, review of First Time Ever, p. 15.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of First Time Ever.
New Yorker, February 26, 2018, review of First Time Ever.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (September 29, 2017), Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, review of First Time Ever.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 27, 2017), Sukhdev Sandhu, review of First Time Ever.
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 7, 2017), Anne Harris, review of First Time Ever.
Library Journal, https://reviews.libraryjournal.com/ (December 13, 2017), Rachael Dreyer, review of First Time Ever.
Telegraph Online, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (August 2, 2012), Colin Irwin, “Peggy Seeger, Interview: There’s Always a First Time, Even at 77.”
Peggy Seeger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (November 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Peggy Seeger
Peggy Seeger Salford 2011.jpg
Seeger in Salford, England in 2011
Background information
Birth name Margaret Seeger
Born June 17, 1935 (age 82)
New York City, U.S.
Genres Folk
Occupation(s)
Musician singer
Instruments
Banjo guitar dulcimer concertina autoharp piano
Years active 1955—present
Labels
Folkways Rounder Argo Riverside Appalseed Tradition
Associated acts Ewan MacColl
Margaret "Peggy" Seeger (born June 17, 1935) is an American folksinger. She is also well known in Britain, where she has lived for more than 30 years, and was married to the singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl until his death in 1989.
Contents
1 First American period
2 Two social critics
3 In recent years
4 Selected discography
4.1 Solo albums
4.2 With Ewan MacColl
4.3 With Mike Seeger
4.4 With the Critics Group and Frankie Armstrong
4.5 With guests
4.6 Collaboration
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
First American period
Composer Ruth Crawford Seeger was Peggy Seeger's mother
Seeger's father was Charles Seeger (1886–1979), an important folklorist and musicologist; her mother was Seeger's second wife, Ruth Porter Crawford (1901–1953), a modernist composer who was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.[1] One of her brothers was Mike Seeger, and the well-known Pete Seeger was her half-brother. One of her first recordings was American Folk Songs for Children (1955).
In the 1950s, left-leaning singers such as Paul Robeson and The Weavers began to find that life became difficult because of the influence of McCarthyism. Seeger visited Communist China and as a result had her US passport withdrawn.[2] The US State Department, which had been opposed to Seeger's 1957 trip to Moscow[3] (where the CIA had monitored the US delegation), was vigorously critical about her having gone to China against official "advice".[4]
The authorities had already warned her that her passport would be impounded, effectively barring her from further travel were she to return to the US.[4] She therefore decided to tour Europe – and later found out that she was on a blacklist sent to European governments.[4] Staying in London in 1956, she performed accompanying herself on banjo. There she and Ewan MacColl fell in love. Previously married to director and actress Joan Littlewood, MacColl left his second wife, Jean Newlove, to become Seeger's lover.
In 1958, her UK work permit expired and she was about to be deported. This was narrowly averted by a plan, concocted by MacColl and Seeger, in which she married the folk singer Alex Campbell, in Paris, on January 24, 1959, in what Seeger described as a "hilarious ceremony". This marriage of convenience allowed Seeger to gain British citizenship and continue her relationship with MacColl.[5] MacColl and Seeger were later married (in 1977), following his divorce from Newlove. They remained together until his death in 1989. They had three children: Neill, Calum, and Kitty. They recorded and released several albums together on Folkways Records, along with Seeger's solo albums and other collaborations with the Seeger Family and the Seeger Sisters.
Seeger was a leader in the introduction of the concertina to the English folk music revival. While not the only concertina player, her "musical skill and proselytizing zeal ... was a major force in spreading the gospel of concertina playing in the revival."[6]
The documentary film A Kind of Exile was a profile of Seeger and also featured Ewan MacColl. The film was directed and produced by John Goldschmidt for ATV and shown on ITV in the UK.
Two social critics
Seeger's father was musicologist Charles Seeger
Together with MacColl, Seeger founded The Critics Group, a "master class" for young singers performing traditional songs or to compose new songs using traditional song structures (or, as MacColl called them, "the techniques of folk creation"). The Critics Group evolved into a performance ensemble seeking to perform satirical songs in a mixture of theatre, comedy and song, which eventually created a series of annual productions called "The Festival of Fools" (named for a traditional British Isles event in which greater freedom of expression was allowed for the subjects of the king than was permitted during most of the year). Seeger and MacColl performed and recorded as a duo and as solo artists; MacColl wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Seeger's honour (and did so during a long-distance phone call between the two, while Seeger was performing in America and MacColl was barred from traveling to the US with her due to his radical political views). None of the couple's numerous albums use any electric or electronic instrumentation.
Whilst MacColl wrote many songs about work and against war and prejudice, Seeger (who also wrote such songs) sang about women's issues, with many of her songs becoming anthems of the women's movement. Her most memorable was "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer".[7] There were two major projects dedicated to the Child Ballads. The first was The Long Harvest (10 volumes 1966–75). The second was Blood and Roses (5 volumes, 1979–83). She visited the women's camp at Greenham Common, where protests against US cruise missiles were concentrated. For them she wrote "Carry Greenham Home". Seeger also ran a record label, "Blackthorne Records", from 1976 to 1988.[8]
In recent years
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US authorities began to soften their attitude towards Seeger. She returned to the United States in 1994 to live in Asheville, North Carolina. Seeger has continued to sing about women's issues. One of her most popular recent albums is Love Will Linger On (1995). She has published a collection of 150 of her songs from before 1998.
In 2011, Seeger edited The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook. Her introduction gave a detailed account of her life with MacColl. She expressed some difference of political perspective between her and Ewan.[9]
As a budding eco-feminist, I find the subject matter of many of the songs in this book very hard to deal with. A developed eco-feminist would probably not have undertaken this book at all. Ewan was a Marxist, a militant, gut-political product of the tail-end of the industrial revolution. In most of his songs, men are digging, slashing, cutting, building, re-shaping, raping, controlling, humanising the earth and being praised for doing so for the good of mankind. Humanity and the class struggle were Ewan's main preoccupations but his songs deal with MEN: men's work, men's lives, men's activities and many veiled (and not so veiled) references to the power of the penis. Even where it is obvious that both sexes are being referred to, Ewan (like myself in my early songs and like most people in our patriarchal society) employs the masculine pronouns.
In 2006, Peggy Seeger relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, to accept a part-time teaching position at Northeastern University. In 2008, she began producing music videos pertaining to the Presidential campaigns, making them available through a YouTube page.
After 16 years of living in the United States, Seeger moved back to the United Kingdom in 2010 in order to be nearer to her children and now lives in Iffley, Oxford.[10]
In 2012, she collaborated with experimental dance producer Broadcaster on an album of her songs set against dance beats.[11]
Seeger identifies as bisexual and contributed an essay to Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World. In it she details a relationship she began with Irene Pyper-Scott after Ewan MacColl died.[12]
Seeger performed "Tell My Sister" on a live tribute album to the late Canadian folk artist Kate McGarrigle entitled Sing Me the Songs: Celebrating the Works of Kate McGarrigle. The album was released in June 2013.
Seeger's memoir, "First Time Ever: A Memoir" was published by Faber & Faber in October 2017. A double CD of songs to accompany the memoir will be released at the same time, available from her official website.
Selected discography
Seeger's older half-brother was Pete Seeger (1955), also a folk musician
Solo albums
Folksongs of Courting and Complaint (1955)
Animal Folksongs for Children (1957)
Folksongs and Ballads (1957)
A Song for You and Me (1962)
Peggy Alone (1967)
Penelope Isn't Waiting Anymore (1977)
Different Therefore Equal (1979)
The Folkways Years 1955 1992 Songs of Love and Politics (1992)
Familiar Faces (1993)
Songs of Love and Politics (1994)
Love Will Linger On (1995)
An Odd Collection (1996)
Classic Peggy Seeger (1996)
Period Pieces (1998)
No Spring Chickens (1998)
Almost Commercially Viable (2000)
Heading For Home (2003)
Love Call Me Home (2005)
Bring Me Home (2008)
Peggy Seeger Live (2012)
Everything Changes (2014)[13]
With Ewan MacColl
Second Shift - Industrial Ballads (1958)
Chorus From The Gallows (1960)
Popular Scottish Songs (1960)
New Briton Gazette, Vol. 1 (1960)
Classic Scots Ballads (1961)
Bothy Ballads of Scotland (1961)
Two Way Trip (1961)
New Briton Gazette, Vol. 2 (1962)
Jacobite Songs – The Two Rebellions 1715 and 1745 (1962)
Steam Whistle Ballads (1964)
Traditional Songs and Ballads (1964)
The Amorous Muse (1966)
The Manchester Angel (1966)
The Long Harvest 1 (1966)
The Long Harvest 2 (1967)
The Long Harvest 3 (1968)
The Angry Muse (1968)
The Long Harvest 4 (1969)
The Long Harvest 5 (1970)
The World Of Ewan MacColl And Peggy Seeger (1970)
The Long Harvest 6 (1971)
The Long Harvest 7 (1972)
The World Of Ewan MacColl And Peggy Seeger Vol. 2 - Songs from Radio Ballads (1972)
At The Present Moment (1972)
Folkways Record of Contemporary Songs (1973)
The Long Harvest 8 (1973)
The Long Harvest 9 (1974)
The Long Harvest 10 (1975)
Saturday Night at The Bull and Mouth (1977)
Cold Snap (1977)
Hot Blast (1978)
Blood and Roses (1979)
Kilroy Was Here (1980)
Blood and Roses 2 (1981)
Blood and Roses 3 (1982)
Blood and Roses 4 (1982)
Blood and Roses 5 (1983)
Freeborn Man (1983) [reissued 1989]
Daddy, What did You Do in The Strike? (1984) [cassette mini-album]
White Wind, Black Tide - Anti-Apartheid Songs (1986) [cassette album]
Items of News (1986)
With Mike Seeger
American Folk Songs Sung by the Seegers (1957)
Peggy 'n' Mike (1967)
American Folksongs for Children (1977)
American Folk Songs for Christmas (1990)
Fly Down Little Bird (2011)
With the Critics Group and Frankie Armstrong
The Female Frolic (1967)
Living Folk (1970)
With guests
Three Score and Ten (concert) (2007)
Collaboration
1964: Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot (Topic UK version); US version by Tom Paley and Peggy Seeger with Claudia Paley
The Unfortunate Rake (1960)
In 2009 Girl on the Green Briar Shore, track sixteen from this album was included in Topic Records 70-year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten as track five on the seventh CD.
References
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2224168?q=ruth+crawford&search=quick&pos=2&_start=1#firsthit
"Broadcaster featuring Peggy Seeger". Peggy Seeger website. Retrieved August 19, 2014.
"Peggy Seeger in Moscow 1957". Peggy Seeger website. Retrieved August 19, 2014.
Cox, Peter. Set into Song: Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, Peggy Seeger and the Radio Ballads, "Chapter 8 – Muck Shifting – Song of a Road". Labatie Books, 2008, p. 73. ISBN 0-9551877-1-0, ISBN 978-0-9551877-1-1.
Harper, Colin, Dazzling Stranger; Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival, Bloomsbury, 2006. ISBN 0-7475-8725-6. p.96
Stuart Eydmann, "The concertina as an emblem of the folk music revival in the British Isles", August 15, 2005.
Included in Henderson, Kathy, et al. (eds) (1982) My Song is My Own. London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-86104-033-3; pp. 159–162. "Composed 1972 .. the words take some fitting into this rather skeletal tune but if not sung too fast the song sings well."
"Blackthorne Records". 2015. Retrieved 16 June 2015. Page at the discogs website.
"Peggy Seeger's introduction to The essential Ewan MacColl songbook". Working Class Movement Library. 2001. Retrieved Feb 3, 2017.
Tim Hughes, "Protest singer Peggy Seeger is still a rebel with a cause", Oxford Mail, November 14, 2013.
Irwin, Colin. "Peggy Seeger, interview: there's always a first time, even at 77". The Telegraph. Retrieved 17 February 2017.
Jacobs, Ethan; Windows, Bay (2005). Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World. Archived from the original on 22 Mar 2006.
Robin Denselow, "Peggy Seeger: Everything Changes review – a revelation", The Guardian, August 28, 2014.
Further reading
MacColl, Ewan (1998) The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook: sixty years of songmaking; ed. Peggy Seeger. New York: Oak Publications
Harker, Ben (2007) Class Act: the Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl. London: Pluto Press ISBN 978-0-7453-2165-3 (chapters: 1. Lower Broughton—-2. Red Haze—-3. Welcome, Comrade—-4. Browned Off—-5. A Richer, Fuller Life—-6. Towards a People's Culture—-7. Croydon, Soho, Moscow, Paris—-8. Bard of Beckenham—-9. Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom—-10. Sanctuary—-11. Endgame)
Seeger, Peggy (2002) The Peggy Seeger Songbook: Forty Years of Songmaking. Oak Publications Catalogue no: OK65054 ISBN 9780825603440
Freedman, Jean R (2017) Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love and Politics University of Illinois Press (Summary)
Seeger, Peggy (2017) First Time Ever: A Memoir. Faber & Faber[1]
External links
Official site
Biography from Appleseed Music
Thesis Publication on Peggy Seeger
TheBanjoMan.com Peggy Seeger Page
Peggy Seeger's channel on YouTube
How Can I Keep From Singing?: A Seeger Family Tribute, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, March 2007 symposium and concert. All events are available as webcasts via the site. Retrieved August 25, 2009.
About Peggy - Did You Know?
seegerfamily1940-300dpi.jpgPeggy Seeger
Peggy's mother was Ruth Crawford Seeger, the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music. It enabled her to study in Europe (1930-31) and to visit fellow musicians and composers. She went on to become one of the United States' foremost female composers of this century. Her works have been widely performed and recorded. Peggy's father was Charles Louis Seeger, a pioneer of ethnomusicology at the University of California (Los Angeles), where he invented and developed the melograph, an electronic means of notating music.
Peggy's half-brother Pete is considered the father (now great-grandfather) of the American folk-revival since 1946. Her brother Mike was a virtuoso on several dozen instruments. The Seeger family has been involved in folk music in the USA for over a half-century.
Peggy learned to transcribe music when she was 11 years old. In her teens she studied guitar with Sophocles Pappas (one of Segovia's pupils). He dismissed her because she refused to read by sight. She listened to him playing a piece then played it back to him - by ear.
She went to Holland in 1955, where she studied Russian in the language of Dutch. She then hitch-hiked around Europe for a year and went to Russia and China (she was one of the first North American civilians to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution). Peggy has sat down to dinner with Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai ... she accompanied Paul Robeson on one of his British tours.
ewanandpeggy1971tompaley.jpgShe is the face of Ewan MacColl's song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
She has taken part in television documentaries, written music for documentary films, and had an entire television documentary made about herself (Granada," The Exiles", 1971). She was one of the trio (with Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker) who conceived and developed the innovative Radio Ballad form (BBC, 1959-1964). The Radio Ballads have been released in an 8-CD set by Topic Records (TSCD 801 to TSCD 808) and have once again received rave reviews.
In 1995 she (and Jim Lloyd, producer of the BBC program Folk on 2) won the Sony Silver award for a 7-part series of half-hour shows in which Peggy talked about her life.
She has acted as music editor for two large anthologies of folksong, one by Alan Lomax and the other by Edith Fowke. She has co-authored (with Ewan MacColl) two books of Gypsy/Traveler folklore and song. For twenty years she ran Britain’s best known little magazine of contemporary songs, The New City Songster.
4x6EwanMacColl1.jpgShe plays 5-string banjo, guitar, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp, English concertina and piano. She had a try at the mandolin and fiddle. The family celebrated when she lent the fiddle to a friend and it was never returned.
She has written several hundred songs of which the best known are Gonna Be an Engineer (which has become one of the anthems of the women's' movement) and The Ballad of Springhill (about the 1958 Springhill, Nova Scotia, mining disaster). 149 of her songs appear in her songbook, The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Warts and All (Oak Publications, 1998). The companion book to her own songs is The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, a complete and comprehensive anthology of the songs written by Ewan MacColl (Oak Publications, November 2001).
peggy recordingShe has made 24 solo discs and collaborated with Ewan MacColl on more records than she can count. She has also appeared on many recordings by other artists. Among her best known albums are a compilation of women’s songs entitled Period Pieces: Women’s Songs for Men and Women (Tradition 1078); Love Will Linger On (Appleseed 1039), an album of romantic love songs old and new; Almost Commercially Viable (Sliced Bread SB71204), songs of love and politics, made with her partner Irene Pyper-Scott. Her stunning HOME TRILOGY (three albums of traditional songs with an intense personal song as the title track for each album): Heading for Home, Love Call Me Home and Bring Me Home. Fly Down, Little Bird, songs from childhood, made with her brother Mike, appeared in 2010. Her first solo live album, Peggy Seeger Live was issued in 2012. A signal change in her artistic approach was seen in her latest recording Everything Changes, (2014, Signet Music) that received glowing reviews across the press. Her album of love poetry, Love Unbidden, is still in the wings.
She held her 70th birthday in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2005. The event is commemorated in a 2-CD distillation, Three Score and Ten (Appleseed APR CD1100).
As a Visiting Scholar, she taught songwriting at Northeastern University, Boston, for two years (2007 & 2008). She received a Doctor of Arts award from Salford University in 2012. She moved back to the UK in 2010 and is now living in Oxford.
She is a mother of three and grandmother of nine. Her two sons, Neill and Calum MacColl, have been playing music with her since their teens. They now produce, direct and play and sing on her recordings. Her daughter Kitty takes care of the graphics and occasionally provides backing vocals.
The one and only authorised biography, ‘Peggy Seeger, A Life of Love, Music and Politics’, by Jean R Freedman was published February 2017 (University of Illinois Press) and Peggy’s memoir, ‘First Time Ever’ will be published in October 2017 (Faber & Faber).
She is represented by:
Management: Kerry Harvey-Piper, Red Grape Music (e)
(t) +44 (0)7976 272139
Live booking agent: Sue Bradburn, Emerging Music (e) ,
(t) +44 (0)1237 451933
March 15-16, 2007, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
ABOUT THE SEEGER FAMILY
The Seeger family has been at the forefront of American creativity for nearly a century. Ancestors of the Seegers sailed to America on the Mayflower, and fought in both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. In recent times, the Seeger family has been known primarily for its contributions to music. As scholars, composers, performers, and musicians, Seegers have enriched American life, music, and scholarship. They have also been fiercely principled, following in the footsteps of their abolitionist forebears.
box
Image of Charles Seeger
Charles Seeger
box
Charles Seeger (1886-1979) was a pioneering composer and musicologist, teaching at Berkeley, Juilliard, and other leading universities and conservatories. Seeger's ideas about music and musicology were instrumental in founding the discipline of ethnomusicology. He also developed an enthusiasm for American folk music, which he passed on to many of his descendants.
box
Ruth Crawford Seeger, ca.1938
Ruth Crawford Seeger,
ca. 1938
box
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), Charles's second wife, is considered by many to be the most significant American female composer of the twentieth century. She composed modernist works throughout the later 1920s and early 1930s, her most celebrated work being String Quartet 1931. In 1932, Crawford married Charles Seeger, taking on responsibilities for his three children, including Pete. With Seeger, she had several children of her own, including Mike and Peggy Seeger. During the 1930s and 40s, her work turned to transcribing and arranging folksongs; she worked with her husband and with Alan Lomax on several books, and published her own book, the influential American Folksongs for Children, in 1948. She returned to composing in the early 1950s, but her resurgence as a composer was cut short by cancer, and she died in 1953.
box
Pete Seeger at home, 2006. Photo by Peggy Bulger.
Pete Seeger at home, 2006
Photo by Peggy Bulger.
box
Pete Seeger (b.1919), son of Charles Seeger and elder brother of Mike and Peggy, is known as America's most important living folksinger. He has authored or co-authored a number of important songs, including "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer," and "Turn, Turn, Turn." He became entranced with the banjo as a teenager attending the Folk Song and Dance Festival in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1939, Pete's friend Alan Lomax invited him to come to Washington to work at the Archive of American Folk Song, then part of the Library of Congress's Music Division. The following year, Seeger met folksinger Woody Guthrie at a concert in New York, and set out to travel west with him. On his return from several cross-country trips, Seeger formed the political group The Almanac Singers, who continued to perform until Pete enlisted to serve in WWII, sometimes featuring Guthrie as a member. On his return home, Pete formed the folk quartet, The Weavers, whose string of hits included a version of Leadbelly's "Goodnight Irene" that topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950. Due to his political beliefs and statements, Seeger was blacklisted, and the Weavers disbanded. Seeger later toured primarily as a soloist, singing mostly traditional American songs, including ballads, blues and spirituals, and playing the five-string banjo. Pete and his wife Toshi have also shot extraordinary ethnographic films of music-making in cultures around the world, which they have donated to the American Folklife Center's Archive.
Pete Seeger passed away on January 27, 2014.
box
Photograph of Mike Seeger.
Mike Seeger
box
Mike Seeger, Charles and Ruth's son, has devoted his life to singing and playing folk music of the American south on banjo, fiddle, guitar, trump (jaw harp), mouth harp (harmonica), quills (panpipes), lap dulcimer, mandolin and autoharp. Mike first learned folk songs from his parents and then from their collection of early documentary recordings. He learned to play from masters such as guitarists Elizabeth Cotten and Maybelle Carter, banjoists Dock Boggs and Cousin Emmy, and autoharpist Kilby Snow. As a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike helped revive interest in traditional folk music. He has recorded almost forty albums, both solo and with others, and has been honored with three Grammy nominations.
Mike Seeger passed away on August 7, 2009.
box
Photograph of Peggy Seeger by Irene Young.
Peggy Seeger
Photo by Irene Young
box
Peggy Seeger is the daughter of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, sister of Mike Seeger, and half-sister of Pete Seeger. A singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and an activist songmaker, she plays six instruments: piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and English concertina. She has recorded 21 solo albums and participated directly in more than a hundred others. She lived in England for 35 years with singer/songmaker Ewan MacColl and has three children and seven grandchildren. She now lives in Boston, tours regularly worldwide and puts out a new CD every 18 months.
Anthony Seeger, nephew of Pete, Mike and Peggy Seeger and grandson of Charles Seeger, is a leading ethnomusicologist, currently teaching at UCLA. His numerous publications include articles and books on issues of land and human rights for Brazilian Indians, issues of archiving and intellectual property, and ethnomusicological theory and method. He is the author of Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge University Press, 1987). The monograph was recognized as the most distinguished book in musicology for the year with the 1988 Otto Kinkeldey Award from the American Musicological Society. He also wrote five half-hour shows on American Folk Music that were broadcast on the BBC in 1998. Anthony Seeger served as Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the Smithsonian Institution from 1988 to 2000.
Peggy Seeger: 'I clearly remember the first time I came to Ireland'
Folk legend Peggy Seeger tells our reporter about the moment her estranged lover sang to her what would became one of the world's greatest love songs, and what life on the road is like in her eighties
Regular visitor: Seeger says she has long been drawn to the folk music tradition of this country. Photo: Robin Little
Regular visitor: Seeger says she has long been drawn to the folk music tradition of this country. Photo: Robin Little
John Meagher
John Meagher
November 19 2017 2:30 AM
It is one of the greatest love songs ever written, and it was penned for Peggy Seeger. Now 82, this icon of the folk revival, and stalwart of the protest song genre, remembers hearing 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' for the first time.
It was 1957 and she had moved back to her native US from her adopted home of England where she was making a name for herself as a folk singer of note. So her estranged lover Ewan MacColl sang the song down the phone to her. The Scottish troubadour had just written it - and he was trying his damnedest to win her back.
"We had fallen in love but I didn't see a future in it," she says. "He had a child, he was married, he was much older then me."
She would eventually go back to MacColl after a year's separation, although MacColl would have one more child with his wife Jean. That child was the future folk singer Kirsty MacColl. And yet, despite such a messy start, both Seeger and MacColl would remain together, inseparable, and - later on - married, until his death in 1989.
Seeger, who even then was demonstrating her own prowess as a songwriter, says she had no sense that she was hearing a song that would be adored by millions around the globe. "There was no sense of that then," she says. "Ewan was a very, very good songwriter but often it's very difficult to sense what songs would connect with people."
It's been covered innumerable times and there are versions from George Michael and Elvis Presley, but the one that made the song truly famous was recorded by Roberta Flack in 1972 and went on to win a Grammy for Song of the Year. Her version had been employed in Clint Eastwood's hugely popular movie Play Misty for Me, and it quickly connected with audiences.
"We didn't like it," Seeger says, plainly, of a recording that pulled in more royalties for MacColl than any other.
In fact, MacColl apparently loathed most versions of the song. "He hated all of them," his daughter-in-law once wrote. "He had a special section in his record collection for them, entitled 'The Chamber of Horrors'. He said that the Elvis version was like Romeo at the bottom of the Post Office Tower [in London] singing up to Juliet. And the other versions, he thought, were travesties: bludgeoning, histrionic, and lacking in grace."
MacColl and Seeger were visionaries in the revival of English folk from the late 1950s on. She says they worked well together, teasing out their new songs on each other, offering encouragement and criticism in equal measure. And, of course, besides their own solo work they released several joint albums, too.
MacColl was famed for his strict approach to folk music, drawing up a list of rigid rules about what songs could be and even the type of clothes folk singers should wear. Seeger says she abandoned such prescriptiveness a long time ago and yet her metier has not changed: she's still a folk singer, happy to tour as much as her age will allow.
"The singing is okay," she says, "but it is harder to play the guitar. You just aren't as dexterous as the years go by so what helps me is simplifying the arrangements and the playing. If the songs are strong enough, that sort of approach should work."
Seeger's childhood was steeped in music. Her father, Charles, was the leading musicologist of the day, collecting and preserving folk music from all corners of the US. Her mother, Ruth, was an acclaimed modernist composer. Her brother, Mike, is a respected musician while her late half-brother Pete is now regarded as a giant of American song.
Pete Seeger died in 2014 and Peggy misses him greatly. "And yet we spent much of our lives on different sides of the Atlantic," she says. "There were periods of time where we wouldn't see that much of each other, because we were busy doing what we were doing and getting on with our lives."
Seeger has just published a remarkable memoir. First Time Ever is an honest, engaging account of a life less ordinary and she credits her partner, the Belfast singer Irene Pyper-Scott, for the encouragement to write down everything she could remember.
"It was about 15 or 20 years ago," she says, "and every single day I wrote it down and then sort of left it. But years later I was talking to a fellow in Philadelphia - Brian Reece - and he helped me condense what I'd written. I'd got about 200,000 words down."
And, she says, she's got quite a memory. "I'm lucky," she says, "it's all like a gallery in my head and I can recall aspects of my life with great clarity. For instance, I distinctly remember the first time I came to Ireland [in the mid-1950s] and we went to a village that seemed as though it was still in the 19th century. There were thatched roofs, half-doors and such like.
"I was there with Diane Hamilton [aka the wealthy heiress and folk-music patron, Diane Guggenheim] and she had this big, expensive car. When we drove into that village, everybody gathered around because it must have felt like such a strange, exotic thing."
Seeger has long been drawn to the folk-music tradition of this country and visits whenever she gets a chance. She will be in Dublin as a guest speaker - and performer - at the inaugural Festival of Politics event.
She is a natural choice of speaker, having been a leading proponent of the power of the protest song. One of her most celebrated, 'I'm Gonna be an Engineer', railed against how women were straitjacketed in the society she grew up in and was adopted by the women's lib movement.
"My country is experiencing a rough time now," she says, "but we've been here before. Don't forget about Nixon and Reagan and the two Bushs. We've had very bad presidents in the past."
She says she is content with the way her life has panned out but misses MacColl every day. "We lived out of each other's pockets, but I was never bored with him. Maybe it's because he was with a woman who was 20 years younger and he didn't want to get complacent, but he always kept it interesting. And I really miss his creativity - he had such a strong fire within him."
Peggy Seeger will be in conversation at the Tailors' Hall, Dublin, next Saturday for the Festival of Politics (November 22-26)
Peggy Seeger, interview: there’s always a first time, even at 77
Peggy Seeger, purist queen of the folk revival, has released an album of electronic dance versions of her songs. She talks to Colin Irwin.
Peggy Seeger at home in Beckenham, London, 1965.
Image 1 of 2
Peggy Seeger at home in Beckenham, London, 1965. Photo: Collections/Brian Shuel
By Colin Irwin2:15PM BST 02 Aug 2012
It’s bizarre enough that a 77-year-old grandmother is picking up radio airplay and making her mark in clubs singing on an uncompromising dance record that hurtles at you in a blazing barrage of offbeats, loops and samples. It’s positively surreal when you discover the singer is Peggy Seeger, the American who became one of the seminal figures of the British folk revival and widely regarded as something of a firebrand purist where folk music is concerned.
When it becomes apparent that the track launching her into this strange, alien world is The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – a song written specifically for a then-21-year-old Seeger by her partner, Ewan MacColl – you think you must have entered some crazy parallel universe. The song took off on many ludicrous but lucrative adventures of its own a long time ago as it passed between Roberta Flack, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, George Michael and hundreds of others, but it has scarcely sounded as wild as it does now, back in the hands of its original owner.
Looking neat, dapper and extraordinarily youthful, despite having just completed a long drive home to Oxford from Cumbria and still gigging regularly, the softly spoken Seeger laughs at the apparent irony of it all.
“Have you seen the video? They sent a photographer round to take my picture for it. I’m 77 and he made me look 90! I didn’t like it but now I see why he did it like that. I’d always thought of it as a happy song, but they wanted to make it sad, the song of an older woman looking back. My son Calum got me to record it and he said, 'Sing it at the very bottom of your range’, so I did. And then he said, “Now sing it lower.’ I’ve never got down so low before.”
The track is the lead single from Folksploitation, a daring album that pitches Seeger’s still-potent voice with the electronic wizardry of a slightly mysterious DJ/producer operating under the name Broadcaster.
Related Articles
Proms 2012: World Routes Academy, Royal Albert Hall, London, review 02 Aug 2012
Cambridge Folk Festival, review 30 Jul 2012
Folk legend Nic Jones returns 25 Jul 2012
“It’s a dark and deadly secret,” says Peggy mischievously, when pressed on his true identity, “but he’s a friend of my daughter Kitty.”
It follows Broadcaster’s 2008 EP PrimaryTransmission, another radical dance record which sampled heavily from the Radio Ballads, the Seeger/MacColl/Charles Parker song-and-speech BBC documentary series with actuality recordings, which effectively revolutionised radio programming in the Sixties.
This time, though, Peggy went into the studio and sang 50 tracks anew, all unaccompanied, and Broadcaster then whipped them off to his lab to crush them up and reinvent them for the dance floor. The biggest surprise is that Peggy, with her strident reputation and long history of political causes, loves it.
“Broadcaster is a genius,” she says. “He does things you wouldn’t dream of. People think I’m a purist but I’m not. I’ve done classical music and pop music and I’ve written rap songs, so this is nothing new. It’s just allowing him free range – he has a very fertile mind and a nice sense of humour. But he holds the tracks together. They are not chaotic. I sell these things at my concerts and say, 'This is for your inner child.’ Annie, one of the tracks on Folksploitation, was originally The Judge’s Chair, a pro-abortion song she wrote in the style of a traditional ballad; Little White Grains includes the bones of a song about heroin addiction gleaned from words written on a lavatory wall; and the topic of Welcome to the Neighbourhood is inner-city violence. Not that you get a real sense of subject matter after Broadcaster’s makeovers.
“It’s what classical musicians have done for ages, taking tunes and making symphonies out of them. I’m intrigued by it. People are surprised by my involvement, but they are just used to a stereotype of me that they heard from the early folk scene. Ewan and I churned out purist dogma to try to keep folk singing from being too damaged by contact with other musics that watered it down.”
Doubtless contributing to that stereotype is the ban imposed by Peggy and Ewan at the club they were running in London in the early days of the folk revival on anyone performing material not of their own musical culture or heritage. Originally triggered by a heavily Americanised set at the club by Long John Baldry, it continues to inspire animated debate to this day. Peggy, who readily concedes that MacColl himself was singing American songs when she first met him, is unrepentant about their stance and sees no dichotomy in her current mash‑ups with Broadcaster.
“I sing Scottish songs in the bath tub because they are so beautiful but I wouldn’t sing them on stage because I don’t feel qualified. I can’t pronounce them properly. I’d have to live up there for a long time. I’ve heard enough English and Scottish people singing Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly – and I was brought up with those songs – to know that I mustn’t sing Scottish songs in public. It would be too painful for the Scots to listen to.
“This Broadcaster record is just one step further in what I’ve been doing for the last 50 years. The original intention of First Time Ever … has been completely abrogated on this, but it’s not pretending to be folk music. That’s the difference.” Even so, her willingness to submit the song to the Broadcaster treatment is a surprise. It is an iconic symbol of her 30‑year relationship with Ewan MacColl, who was married (to theatre director Joan Littlewood) when they met on her first visit to Britain in 1956.
“Alan Lomax tracked me down at a youth hostel in Denmark. He asked me to come to London, because he needed a banjo player who was female and American to play on a TV show. So I travelled 26 hours round the Hook of Holland with a knapsack and a banjo and went straight to Alan’s flat in Chelsea, where they were having a meeting. Ewan was in the corner and I thought he was very odd. He had a shock of black hair and a red beard and was smoking incessantly. He invited me to see him performing in The Threepenny Opera and came out onstage in a battered top hat, suspenders keeping up his trousers, poking out his belly as the street singer. It was not romantic!” The relationship seemed doomed. “I left him. I went to the States and I wasn’t coming back. He was married and you didn’t do those things – it wasn’t in my brief. A lot of really heartbreaking love affairs are down to that.” But she found herself in need of a short love song to include in a show in LA, and Ewan wrote her one: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
“He sang it over the phone and I put some accompaniment on it and did it in the show. I don’t think Ewan ever sang it again. It’s a beautiful song which he based on an old folk tune, something he did a lot, and the joy of it is that you can sing it to anybody. A man can sing it to a man. A woman can sing it to a woman. You can sing it to a dog.” The rest is part of revival folklore. Peggy returned to Britain and stayed, eventually marrying MacColl, although she is no fan of the institution of marriage. “We got married for tax reasons. A bunch of flowers and a bottle of champagne. We went home and got drunk afterwards, which we didn’t normally do. I think one in 10 marriages are made in heaven, a number of them are made in limbo and an awful lot are made in hell. What do they say? Marry in haste and repent at leisure. Make love, not war? “Hell, why not do both? Get married!”
And what would Ewan MacColl – with whom she stayed until his death in 1989 – make of what Broadcaster has done to his most famous song? Peggy bursts into laughter.
“Well, the Ewan of the Seventies would have thrown it in the fire! But the Ewan of the Eighties was coming to terms with a lot of things by the time he died. I think he would have been very interested in it.”
'Folksploitation’ is out now on Red Grape Records
Print Marked Items
First Time Ever
Carol Haggas
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p15+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
First Time Ever. By Peggy Seeger. Nov. 2017. 416p. illus. Faber and Faber, $29.95
(97805713367911.782.421620092.
The half-sister of Pete Seeger, the muse of English folksinger, activist, and writer Ewan MacColl, Peggy
Seeger is also a force to be reckoned with in her own right. Headstrong and determined, curious and adroit,
Seeger has been the perfect vessel for sharing and keeping vital the vast catalog of folk music indigenous to
various cultures. Her peripatetic life took her from the home of her famed musical family in America around
the globe, singing and studying her way through Holland, Russia, Germany, and China, ultimately settling in
Britain. Meeting MacColl I there would be a life-changing event, setting in motion a great, but complicated,
love story, one that grew even thornier when Seeger fell in love with fellow folk-singer Irene Pyper-Scott.
Like the singer herself, Seeger's prose is fluid and sharp, intimate yet measured. In a memoir profuse with
exacting detail, Seeger recalls the heady days when folk music ruled and shares the innermost doubts and
delights of a woman who never shied away from life or love. For more on Seeger, see Jean R. Freedman's
Peggy Seeger (2017).--Carol Haggas
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Haggas, Carol. "First Time Ever." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 15+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=16071a70.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776066
Seeger , Peggy: FIRST TIME EVER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Seeger , Peggy FIRST TIME EVER Faber & Faber (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 11, 1 ISBN: 978-0-571-
33679-1
A British-American musician reflects on her long life and colorful career as a folk singer.Seeger (b. 1935)
grew up in a musically gifted "family of left-wingers." Her father was a musicologist who regularly
consorted with the likes of Alan Lomax and Lead Belly; her mother was a music teacher, composer, and
Guggenheim Fellowship recipient; and her half brother, Pete, was a highly regarded folk singer and social
activist. As middle class as her upbringing was, the author also remembers it as "strangely free--few dos and
fewer don'ts." A lively teenager who played numerous instruments including the banjo, Seeger attended, but
did not graduate from, Radcliffe College. While a student in Boston, she took part in the emerging folk
music scene. In 1955, she left to live in the Netherlands. A phone call from Alan Lomax in England brought
her to London in 1956, where she immersed herself in the burgeoning folk music scene of which Lomax
was part. Almost immediately, she met and began an affair with English musician Ewan MacColl, who was
20 years older and married. Together, they formed an unconventional, peripatetic union that produced three
children; seminal documentary collaborations with the BBC called the Radio Ballads; the Critics Group, a
master class for young singers interested in learning the art of folk music; and numerous albums now
considered classics of the folk genre. Their intense, sometimes-difficult personal relationship also inspired
MacColl to write "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," a song made famous in the early 1970s by
Roberta Flack. Spanning the U.S., Europe, Asia, and a personal evolution toward feminism and bisexuality,
this free-spirited recollection of eight decades steeped in joy, sorrow, and harrowing tragedy celebrates
Seeger's experiences while reveling in the free-spirited "Of-Course-Why-Not" philosophy that has governed
her life. It's a remarkable life story well told. A quirky, unique, and fabulously memorable memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Seeger , Peggy: FIRST TIME EVER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192363/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e234a39d.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192363
First Time Ever. New Yorker, 0028792X, 2/26/2018, Vol. 94, Issue 2
Section:
THE CRITICS: BOOKS
First Time Ever, by Peggy Seeger (Faber & Faber). This whirling memoir follows the folksinger and activist through international tours, crises in her famous musical family, and a long, all-consuming relationship with the British singer Ewan MacColl. Seeger's conversational prose has a flair for capturing the common (a 1938 Chevy "had a vertical fish-mouth and a fat lady's rump") and the cataclysmic; remembering her mother's early death, she writes, "I try to see and hear things for her, to lure her spirit back from the lost body." Colorful characters flit in and out, and, remembering them, Seeger, who is now eighty-two, is often wistful. Of one friend, she writes, "He died, but he is still in my present tense."
First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger review – a memoir of folk royalty
She was from the American music establishment, he was born of Scottish socialism, and their love led to the 20th century’s most beautiful ballad
Sukhdev Sandhu
Wed 27 Dec 2017 02.30 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 10.08 EST
Shares
350
Comments
115
Peggy Seeger with Ewan MacColl at home in Beckenham in 1965.
Peggy Seeger with Ewan MacColl at home in Beckenham, south-east London, in 1965. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns
The song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, written in 1957 by Ewan MacColl, son of working-class Scottish socialists, for Peggy Seeger, an American 20 years younger than him and a self-proclaimed “spoiled middle-class girl”, is one of the most beautiful love ballads of the 20th century.
Seeger’s description of how they fell in love is far from starry or sweet. He had, she recalls, a “hairy, fat, naked belly poking out, and was clad in ill-fitting trousers, suspenders, no shirt, a ragged jacket and a filthy lid of stovepipe hat aslant like a garbage can.” [See footnote.] On their first night together he couldn’t get it up. The second time round there was time for a quickie. “I was discomfited but compliant.”
MacColl’s father was an iron-moulder with crippling asthma. His psoriatic mother worked 16 hours a day as a charlady. She had two late miscarriages and opened a penny-a-week burial insurance policy for her other children. Seeger, by contrast, came from folk royalty. Her mother, Ruth, was the first woman to win a Guggenheim fellowship for composition; her father, Charles, was a pioneering musicologist. Regular house guests included Woody Guthrie, who once brought with him, fresh out of jail, blues singer Lead Belly. Songwriter Elizabeth Cotten, who discovered a young Peggy lost in a department store, became a housekeeper, was befriended by her brother Mike, and was lured back on to the stage after a gap of 25 years.
Though she kept a diary, her most vivid memories owe less to notetaking than they do to her eye for telling details
Though Seeger has kept a diary for much of her life, her most vivid memories owe less to notetaking than they do to her eye for telling and exuberantly recalled details. In the Vermont of her youth, she writes of “moonlight caught in the xylophone of icicles on the cabin’s overhang”. Her mother “wore a stiff girdle which creaked if you hugged her”. Her overly traditional music teacher at school played the piano with theatrical flourishes she found embarrassing: “Slow has got to be soupy; fast has got to be like little mice gone mad on a wedge of cheese.” Most striking is her description of how MacColl devoured books “much as a whale sieves krill through its baleen comb”.
Peggy Seeger, Enterprise Public House, Long Acre, London, late 1950s-early 1960s.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Peggy Seeger performing at the Enterprise pub in Covent Garden, London, in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Photograph: Alamy
Advertisement
Seeger rarely goes easy on herself. She tells of how she was a “lolloping, spontaneous loner” as a teenager, and would flirt with houseguests such as folklorist Alan Lomax or the radical German composer Hanns Eisler. The latter, by then a balding 50-year-old, rebuked her: “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you? Don’t.” Of Charles Parker, the BBC producer with whom she and MacColl created the landmark Radio Ballads series from 1958 to 1964, she says:“His ascetic face bore such a look of longing that I nearly invited him into the bed for comfort.” It’s painful to read of her later days with the sick and ailing MacColl, whom she loves, while also arranging trysts with her female lover.
Their times together were rarely smooth. Her social milieu had been assaulted by McCarthyism. MacColl had previous wives and children. Until the royalties started coming in from soul singer Roberta Flack’s cover version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, they barely scraped by. Life on the road – popping Dexedrine pills to stay awake, having disgruntled patrons pour beer over her head – is both arduous and addictive.
Seeger and MacColl held fastidious, almost spartist beliefs about what was or wasn’t real folk music
Seeger and MacColl held fastidious, almost spartist beliefs about what was or wasn’t real folk music. You don’t have to be an anything-goes postmodernist to discern a trace of passport control in her boast that she can “easily spot a decayed version, a rogue word or an ill-fitting melody in print or performance”. This kind of sectarianism inspired one Lancashire folk club to forbid the singing of Yorkshire songs.
These days she readily admits to having doctored, pruned and tinkered around with traditional tunes, and even calls out her “vociferous and hypocritical purisms”, but claims that “we believed we were sticking as faithfully as possible to the style and intent of the original makers and carriers of the songs”.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
Read more
Equally, in an age when anyone wielding an acoustic guitar or sporting a long weekend’s facial topiary is said to belong to some new-folk movement, it’s moving to hear Seeger evoke, in profound and felt fashion, her relationship to history: “On stage, I become as the narrow neck of an hourglass, bringing stories and singers from the past to the present; a relay runner hoping that someone will take the song from me and carry it into the future.” These songs she likens to “human nutrition”, to “a community”.
At a time when digital hustlers burble forth about disruption and accelerated obsolescence, it’s all the more wonderful to read Seeger write about tenderness and tenacity, value and vitality, culture and continuity, about folk music being “like a cardiograph: the form being the graph paper and the content the heartbeat”.
• First Time Ever is published by Faber & Faber. To order a copy for £15 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
• This footnote was added on 5 January 2018. Peggy Seeger was describing Ewan MacColl’s appearance in a production of The Threepenny Opera.
Seeger, Peggy. First Time Ever. Faber & Faber. Oct. 2017. 416p. photos. ISBN 9780571336791. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9780571336814. MEMOIR
BY RACHAEL DREYER ON DECEMBER 13, 2017
The author, half-sister to folk singer Pete Seeger, is a force of folk all her own. In this lovely firsthand account, she shares memories of her idyllic childhood and reflections on race, as her family had African American domestic workers. She also explores cultural differences as she looks back on her travels through Europe and Asia as a young woman playing music; she delves into her identity as both a public performer and a woman, daughter, partner, mother, musician, activist, and feminist, crafting her narrative from recollections and her own diaries. Readers will find a constellation of folk music greats here, all linked by Seeger’s anecdotes. Now in her 80s, Seeger is enmeshed thoroughly in the search to know herself fully. One delightful aspect is Seeger quoting from biographies of her life, written by others. The chronological structure zigzags a bit in time, but it mimics the way memory works. VERDICT An engrossing read for all, even those who don’t know their folk music history.
Anne Harris is a former editor of the “Sunday Independent”
By the second paragraph of Peggy Seeger’s memoir, we have learned in a lyrical riff that typifies her style, that aged 20, boyfriend in tow, she left home for Santa Barbara, ditching the appendage soon after. Now in London, aged 24, eight months pregnant with the child of her married lover, Ewan McColl, then in the process of leaving his wife Jean, she pours tea as his mother Betsy announces;
“You’ll ne’er get him to leave Jean.
She’s wi’ bairn, due in October.
She’s a loyal lass.”
This is the kind of moment that most biographers and autobiographers would mark as defining . The only clue in Seeger’s case is that it is written as though set to music. And it is no accident that many years later she references the emotion of that moment to get through a ballad, 33 verses long, about a wife ousted by a young bride. It is typical of her brutal honesty that she is able to weigh the innocence of the young bride against the pain of the older woman.
Mike McCormack: “A lot of people had faith in me, to stick by me and listen to me, and put up with me during the difficult years.” Photograph: Chris Bellew /Fennell Photography Mike McCormack wins €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award
Solar Bones author Mike McCormack: “The heroes of the book, from the moment I finished writing it have all been women”. Photograph: Chris Bellew /Fennell Photography Mike McCormack: ‘A lot of people had faith to stick by me in the difficult years’
World Cup 2018: Ronaldo, Messi... and Dunphy – five great football books
One of Padraic Reaney’s illustrationsAchill, from Böll to Dawe and Reaney
Evie Gaughan: our fairytales and our folklore are important because they give us a sense of ourselves and where we come fromBritain made us ashamed of our ‘peasant’ and ‘uncivilised’ beliefs
She does not calculate what was seeded at that moment, though she later talks of the “teeth always missing from (our) heterosexual set of gears”. But a timebomb ticked through her three decades’ relationship with McColl which ultimately led to her great and equally enduring coup de foudre with Irene Pyper Scott: “I am not a lesbian. I just love a woman.”
She quickly displayed an instrumental virtuosity which was her entree to the folk worlds of America and Britain
There are no sonorous signals of big moments, rather a series of chronological arabesques, which is why this amazing life reads more like a novel. I found it a slow read because it invites a Follow The Music adventure. I spent hours and hours immersed in YouTube: like poetry, the music of MacColl and Seeger involves an overflow of powerful emotion and is ultimately cathartic.
Born into liberal American folk music royalty – her father was an archivist , her mother the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition – she quickly displayed an instrumental virtuosity which was her entree to the folk worlds of America and Britain.. Her legendary half brother Pete Seeger seemed to have spanned the entire history of civil right activism: his song If I had a Hammer resounded at Martin Luther King’s “I Had a Dream” rally in 1963.
Pete Seeger and Ewan McColl, from different continents, were diehard communists: Neither ever renounced Stalinism; Seeger braved the House of UnAmerican Activities; while McColl clung to the class politics of his native industrial Glasgow. They all – Peggy included – believed that music could change the world. In a lacuna between first meeting McColl at a folk club in London and the scene in the kitchen with Betsy, she attended what might be called “show tours” in the communist bloc in the late 1950s.
The book dwells on Peggy’s sharply observed recollections of these Utopian sabbaticals in the USSR and in China. But she was strangely unaffected by all this ultra-leftism. “I knew who I was: a suburban middle class female who’d had a superb exposure to folk song and classical music. I sang songs that I treasured, I was a link in the chain of oral tradition.”
Though at first astounded to find her folk songs anthemised by feminists, her stance against all injustice meant she was a natural feminist and enthusiastic Greenham Commoner.
This is a life viewed through the prism of music and politics. She loved McColl, she was fiercely loyal – her mother-in-law Betsy fertilised that seed well in her paean to his former wife, the “loyal lass” – but living with a man with a mission often leaves a void. She had three children and four, sometimes traumatic, abortions, before he agreed under duress to a vasectomy.
These men’s politics were rigid and atrophied: the irony is that their art . . . would not have survived a week in the totalitarian states they extolled
The story behind the hit The First Time Ever I saw Your Face, reveals the quintessential narcissism of men who want to save the world. Written by McColl for Peggy, it is not actually supposed to be about her. It’s a song to be sung by her to him.
These men’s politics were rigid and atrophied: the irony is that their art, rooted in individual freedom, joy, diversity and ordinary people’s lives, would not have survived a week in the totalitarian states they extolled. It’s almost as if they feared relinquishing their extreme beliefs would dilute their music.
And yet there was something very noble about them. Pete Seeger singing at Obama’s inauguration brought historic symmetry though Bernie Sanders – a Seeger without the songs – who carries their flame.
What would Charlottesville be like if it had Seegers and McColls?
That is the question this elegy for folk music ultimately presents.
First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger — roots and reinvention
A funny, incisive and affecting memoir tells the story of the British folk revival
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney SEPTEMBER 29, 2017
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/47b74358-a2b1-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2
Peggy Seeger is folk music royalty, although she would doubtless bridle at the description, contrary as it is to folk’s humble roots and her own egalitarian ideals. Born in the US in 1935, she is the daughter of the modernist composer Ruth Porter Crawford and the musical folklorist Charles Seeger. Among a distinguished clutch of musical siblings was half-brother Pete Seeger, architect of the 1950s folk revival.
Most of her life has been spent in Britain, where she moved to in 1956 after auditioning for a folk group. “At 10.30am, banjo in hand, I tottered in on high heels to meet my next thirty-three years,” she writes in First Time Ever. That was the future awaiting her with Ewan MacColl, the influential musician-activist with whom she played a crucial role promoting the British wing of the folk revival.
First Time Ever is named after a song MacColl wrote for Seeger in 1957, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. An account of a love affair, it has changed in significance for her over time, variously evoking sensations of embarrassment, celebration and grief. “Music creates meaning each time it is heard,” she writes. A similar spirit of roaming comes across in her memoir, an impressionistic and gripping tour of the “strange country of Myself”.
The book begins with her American youth, growing up in a bohemian household in Maryland where visitors included Jackson Pollock and Woody Guthrie. “Never bored as a child, never bored in preteens,” she recalls. But it was no apple-pie idyll. She never got to know her “dear, dear stranger-mother” properly, a distance made permanent by the latter’s death when Peggy was 18. A certain skittishness came to characterise relationships with others too (“my sad pattern — once I leave a location I leave its occupants”). Hints of neglect arise when she writes about a rupture in later life with her daughter Kitty, although the topic proves too raw, prompting the candid evasion: “I can’t write about that.”
The attraction between Seeger and MacColl was instant. He was double her age at 41 (although he claimed to be 38), married and with a child. Seeger was heedless about breaking up the family (“I was not a feminist back then” runs as a refrain throughout the book), although the pair also developed a deep professional partnership.
Classically trained, Seeger was a multi-instrumentalist with a strong, supple voice. She and MacColl, a dominating personality with doctrinaire communist beliefs, made for a formidable duo. At their London folk club a mangled Cockney version of the American railroad song “Rock Island Line” that reduced Seeger to tears of laughter led to a controversial policy that singers should only perform music to which they had a cultural link. Seeger partially recants this approach now — an emigrant herself, she personifies the fluidity of identity — although she plausibly defends “the Policy” as “largely responsible for the huge resurgence of interest in British material”.
She and MacColl toured the nation in the 1950s and 1960s making an innovative series of programmes about traditional music for the BBC, The Radio Ballads. Song-collecting among Gypsies is recollected in a rosy hue, while a woman in a housing estate complaining about a nearby encampment is presented with a tang of grande dame folk snobbery (“No books, a flock of ceramic ducks flying across her living-room floor”). But Seeger writes well about music, community and the oral tradition (“In the future, memory may be the one and only reliable ‘device’ to carry with us”), interpolating lyrics from songs into her text.
The 1980s find her living in the London suburb Beckenham with three children, a difficult Scottish mother-in-law and an ailing MacColl, declining through a series of mini-strokes towards death in 1989. Life as a jobbing folk musician, even a regal one, is a grind. Afterwards she writes an angry posthumous letter to MacColl, tasking him for failing to help her adequately through abortions she suffered. To her surprise, she falls in love with a woman, her current partner Irene Pyper-Scott.
Folk music and activism tend to come freighted with connotations of earnestness. But Seeger’s writing goes against the stereotype. First Time Ever is funny, incisive, and affecting. At 82, despite the health problems outlined at the end of the book, she continues performing. Both she and her vigorous autobiography are testament to folk’s tenacity in a modern world that is proving increasingly antithetical to its values.