RSSAt Home With Peggy Seeger
From her first solo album in 1955 at 19 to her Last Farewell tour earlier this year at 90, Peggy Seeger has sung with effervescence, power, and a feminist edge.
by Georgia Christgau
My sister Georgia got her B.A. at fundamentalist Taylor University in 1971 and since then has worked as both a now-retired high school English teacher and a journalist—first at Creem, then at a journal called Nuclear Times, and finally at The Village Voice, where she was night editor for several years. She got interested in Peggy Seeger—half-sister of seminal folksinger Pete Seeger, full sister of longtime folk music activist Mike Seeger, and wife of the late U.K. folk titan Ewan MacColl—researching a paper on abortion songs that she delivered at the 2022 Pop Conference. Peggy Seeger's story, which Georgia boils down here, proved more complex than Georgia figured when she and her husband decided to organize a vacation visit to Great Britain that would include seeing Peggy perform some 95 miles southeast of London in New Milton. Seeger was so impressed with a Kitty Wells piece Georgia sent her that the interview on which much of this essay is based ensued. — RC
Peggy Seeger, who is 90, so reveres the American folk music she grew up on that by 1970, when she wrote "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," the song she is still best known for, she was an accomplished storyteller. In England, where she has lived most of her adult life, as well as the U.S., where she was raised in a renowned folk music family, fans clamored for another "Engineer," but she didn't have one. "My 'anothers' were folk songs featuring murdered women, girls left with babies in their arms, females complaining about men and parents—victims and self-pity all over the farm," she explained in her 2017 memoir, First Time Ever.
I'm not sure I agree. What I hear in the old songs Peggy Seeger has inspired me to track down—and consequently, to love—is their variety. They seem neither dated nor out of touch. For every "Poor Ellen Smith" "lying dead on the ground" there's another still-breathing female with her own tone and point of view. For instance, on Seeger's first solo album, Songs of Courtship and Complaint (1955), released when she was 19 to help finance her second year of college, there's a bored virgin tired of waiting in "Whistle, Daughter, Whistle," a woman who'd rather stay single than take up with a lazy "Young Man Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn," and someone who's holding out for a better-looking dude than the guy doing the talking in "All of Her Answers To Me Were No." In "The Wagoner's Lad" a young man's pride blinds him from seeing that the woman he loves wants him to stick around despite her parents' disapproval. There's a rumbling undercurrent of rebellion in this one and its premise is a knockout:
Oh hard is the fortune of all womankind
They're always controlled
They're always confined
Controlled by their parents until they are wives
And slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.
Seven hundred words and 100 lines long, "Engineer" hasn't dated much either, from girls who learn early to limit their expectations, to wives who get degrees and still do all the housework and childcare, to women for whom dignity in the workplace is a daily unknown. The lilt in Seeger's voice moves her long list of complaints along at a breezy pace. These sarcastic depictions of female stereotypes help me remember how liberating it was to hear them shouted out for the first time. Here's a mother to her young daughter:
Dainty as a Dresden statue, gentle as a Jersey cow
Smooth as silk, gives creamy milk
Learn to coo, learn to moo
That's what you do to be a lady, now.
And a boss to his employee:
You've got one fault, you're a woman
You're not worth the equal pay.
A bitch or a tart, you're nothing but heart,
Shallow and vain, you've got no brain
Accompanying herself with a handful of up-and-down guitar notes that only hint at melody, Seeger, clear and bright, sets sail on all those lyrics. She lands on top of the note, each word distinct—an essential talent given all that verbiage—and carrying the same weight with only the occasional slide, as on "moo." Her even delivery, buffeted by her warm soprano, is unnerving. How can she be so angry and sound so nice? That's her special sauce. And she knows when to back off—this time in deference to the character, who lands cheerfully on this sendoff:
I've been a sucker ever since I was a baby
As a daughter, as a mother, as a lover, as a dear
But I'll fight them as a woman, not a lady
I'll fight them as an engineer!
Around this time Peggy worked a couple of sentences she'd overheard—"I love you so much I'd do anything for you. Even marry you"—into a dialogue between a man and a woman that became the lyrics for "Darling Annie" (cf. Folkways Record of Contemporary Songs by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, 1973). An independent type with an old-fashioned name, Annie wants a commitment and her autonomy, too. It's a revisionist folk tribute—where the woman in love leads instead of losing out. Fifty years young, "Darling Annie," performed as a duet with Billy Bragg, held up well at a 2005 concert in London celebrating her 70th birthday and on the subsequent 2007 live album, Three Score and Ten. Organized by her sons Neill and Calum MacColl—"the best of the best of me, on stage," she's said—they're joined by their sister Kitty; English folk standard bearers Eliza Carthy and her parents Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson; Peggy's brothers Pete and Mike; her future wife, Irish folk singer Irene Scott; and eight grandchildren. It's a loose show, and a tight one. She opens solo with "Hangman," accompanying herself on banjo, her preferred instrument and the one for which she is most admired, for a generation-proof tale of family dysfunction—noting the irony on this special occasion. She picks up the pace and calls out the chords for a brisk "Logan County Jail" as surely as Norma Waterson and Liza Carthy belt out "Lowlands of Holland," about lovers separated by war and stormy seas. What's most striking, though, is Peggy's rapport with her self-effacing brother Mike. Just two years apart, they were close growing up, and their onstage banter is always affectionate. She starts by saying how much likes having peace and quiet at home these days. Did it bother him, she asks, that when they were children, "there was always music going on around the house?" "Oh gosh, I loved it," he replies. She tries again. "I mean, what about when you wanted to be thinking of something else?" His soft, chuckling finesse: "What else?" He introduces "When First Unto This Country"—in which a man, accused of being a thief, is beaten and jailed, as one of the "easier" songs they learned when they were very young, "before we started playing music [ourselves]," as he put it. For his solo, he avers that although he loves the songs written by both his siblings, "I can't do that." What he's about to play is different every time, he says, so here goes: a wonderfully strange, hoot-and-holler instrumental on quills (an African-American pan flute) called "Quill Ditty."
I came to know Peggy Seeger's compassion, politics, and sense of humor while writing about contemporary abortion songs some three years ago. Folk music was the last thing on my mind then, but not any more. By contrast, Seeger has never known a time when folk music was not important, a jumping-off point from which to spin five decades of composition. Included in the CD accompanying her memoir are two versions of "Cindy"—a contemporary one and a second clip probably recorded when she was around seven. Immortalized in dozens of versions and hundreds of stanzas, Cindy is womanchild who's often chased away with the couplet "Get along Cindy/I'll marry you someday." A clown, a dancer, and so sweet that "honeybees swarm around her mouth," Cindy is forever just beyond reach. As banjo player Frank Proffitt summed up in 1928, "Cindy in the summertime/Cindy in the fall/If I can't have Cindy all the time/I don't want her at all." She has an effervescence and a power that epitomize Peggy Seeger. When she announced her "Last Farewell" tour of the British Isles to celebrate her 90th birthday last spring, I felt the least I could do was show up. I bought two tickets to one of her gigs, planned a two-week vacation abroad with my husband like we hadn't had in 20 years, and requested an interview, which took place in September.
Peggy tells me she wasn't aware of feminism at the time she wrote "Engineer." She also didn't know back then that there were engineers in every branch of science. "To me, an engineer was somebody who worked with big machines, or who was a driver on Casey Jones' train, you know . . . " She was inspired by one woman in particular operating heavy machinery whom she and her future husband, singer, playwright and songwriter Ewan MacColl, had met on a field trip at an auto plant in Cork, England. She was 35 at the time—about the same age as the worker. "She was in charge of an enormous machine—one of these things that comes down and makes a template, and then the template moves and they jump, jump, jump down the assembly line. She was glorious. We talked to her and she said, 'I've learned to bring this machine down literally just to an eighth of an inch there, so that it doesn't whack on the bottom platform.' And she brought out her lunch, which had a hard-boiled egg in it. She put it right where the machine came down, and whack, she brought it down so that it was literally a sixteenth of an inch from . . . and I was absolutely gobsmacked! I'd been to steel mills and down coal mines, all kinds of things. But I'd never seen a woman doing this."
I reminded her of how many women's issues "Engineer" touches on—husbands who feel superior, the double standard on the job, sexual harassment—and wondered how long she had been thinking about such things before putting pen to paper. "Oh no, I was thinking about the accounts. I was doing the accounts, and I was not in a good mood at being interrupted," she recalled. "And I'm told to write a song." Told by MacColl, that is, who had realized that they'd prepared nothing about the growing women's movement for the upcoming Festival of Fools, an annual satirical review in theater and music that they had been running together for five years. McColl told her to write something, pronto, and she turned it out in two hours. "I'd read about these issues, but I was in a traditional relationship," she explained. "In our life together, Ewan and I, there were jobs I did that he wouldn't think of doing. He never cooked, unless it was an occasion. He never ironed, or laundered, or mended anything, or cleaned the toilet." "And he was 20 years older than you, so he had a different mindset growing up, I'm sure," I added. "Oh yes, extremely," she replied. "And his mother was with us from practically the moment we got together. She wouldn't see him pushing the pram. Oh, no. She wouldn't have him polishing the shoes. Oh, no." The welfare of Ewan, her only surviving child of four, preoccupied her, but it was equally true that, like the other caregivers in Ewan and Peggy's life—she devotes a chapter to them exclusively in First Time Ever—Ewan's mother gave of herself generously to these working parents and their two young sons. Although she had retired by the time Peggy's last child, Kitty, was born in December 1972—nine years after her second son, Calum—in her 1979 album Different Therefore Equal, Peggy would honor this difficult, beloved woman in two sensitive but direct lines of the housewife's lament "What Do You Do All Day": "I care for a lovely old mother-in-law/She's 87 and cranky." Peggy was finding her voice, and a pile of "anothers" started to accumulate.
"It always distresses me to hear the housewife put down. A good housewife is a genius. . . Nor, if she happens to be inefficient at it, should it reflect on her as a woman," wrote Seeger in the liner notes. It was one priority among many in Seeger's breakout album as a songwriter that includes "Engineer" and another favorite, "Nine Month Blues." The acapella "Reclaim the Night," a rallying cry inspired by the opening of rape crisis centers, compels us first with a single voice, then two, then many. In "Union Woman" Seeger's warp speed on the five-string banjo underscores but does not overwhelm the lyrics, taken from an interview with Mrs. Jaybean Desai, a defiant employee who became a strike leader representing 160 workers, most of them Asian women, in the 1977 West London Grunwick film processing plant strike that ended in defeat after 14 months. It didn't matter that they lost, she believed, because "the fighting is further on/The ladies take the lesson home to husbands and children." The parent union didn't support the strike: a story within a story of both the union movement and the women's movement.
Organized or not, workers figure large in Peggy's pantheon of heroes. In "Third Shift," from 1982's Where I Stand: Topical Songs from America and England, a woman who earns 27 cents more per hour working the lobster shift appreciates her crew that's "friendly and strong/as steady as heartbeats/the whole night long." From 1996's An Odd Collection, the jazzy "For a Job" asks why society places so little value on the lives of breadwinners—in this case, men—who get sick and die from environmental health hazards certain jobs entail. Remembering the Grunwick workers, in "If You Want a Better Life" she warns, "And if you want a union/You've got to learn to fight/Cause when you've got a union/You've got to make it fight for you."
When Peggy performed "Nine Month Blues"—a mere 600 words—at the concert we saw last June at a modest community center in small town New Milton, England, I was so happy I almost jumped out of my folding chair. It's about a woman who enjoys sex and motherhood in equal measure, who puts loving her kids alongside the failure of birth control. It feels lived in, familiar. Wikipedia's "list of songs about abortion," pro and con, precious and precocious, was the back door through which I met Peggy virtually in the months leading up to June, 2022, curious if pop culture history would provide any comfort as the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to overturn our constitutional right to abortion that had been guaranteed for 50 years. When I mentioned that her song was on the list, she felt there had been some mistake: "But it isn't about abortion," she said. That was my first thought also; most—but not all—of them have been written by women born post-Roe v. Wade and home in on a specific detail such as the clinic, the boyfriend, the family, the procedure, or the decision itself. Instead, at 40, Seeger scripted the biography of an imaginary marriage in her typical funny-not-funny style, from partnering to parenting, from the first blessed event to too many kids and not enough money. How much support did the woman receive when she visited her doctor, equivocating about pregnancy number three? Not a lot:
The SPUC* and the FDA
They said to keep that child
Don't fling it away
The doctor said he had the right to refuse
The law says if you want to beat the noose
You have to be rich, or near to your grave
So away I went again on my nine-month rave
*SPUC = England's Society for the Protection of the Unborn Childs
At her next appointment—birth control pills are making her sick—the wife brings her husband, who stands by, dismayed at doc's indifference towards her health. She "sees the worry on the old man's face/thinking of the future of the female race." Me too.
"I began reading feminist classics and familiarizing myself with feminist issues," she told me. One alternative magazine that focused on women's health, Spare Rib, now a classic digitized by the British Library, had a particular impact. So did the legalization of abortion in England in 1967. Peggy had had an illegal one in 1960, when her first son, Neill, was an infant. "I could have died on that toilet. I could have died. I flowed blood like a faucet." She used that experience 30 years later when Planned Parenthood asked her to donate a song. In the acapella chiller "Judge's Chair," a young Annie refuses to identify her lover and dies alone in her "childhood bed" after visiting a "backstreet woman." "They didn't like it," she recalled. "They wanted something they could march to." By that time Peggy, 54, had lost Ewan, who died of a chronic heart condition in 1989, and found Irene Scott, an Irish folk singer who had also been her singing partner. They'd grown closer on trips to Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in Berkshire, the six-years-long, round-the-clock, women-only antinuclear protest that led to the removal of cruise missiles stockpiled there in 1988. Not that she'd stopped touring—sometimes with Irene, but not always, and how much she's missed Seeger lovingly recalls in An Odd Collection's "So Long Since I Been Home."
Seeger had also begun volunteering at Forest Hill Refuge in Sydenham, where women were sheltering with their families and away from domestic violence and abuse. The lyrics to "Emily" came verbatim from a resident. Peggy asked for permission "to tell your story," which was poetry to her. Recited over a handful of repeating notes on guitar for six minutes, "Emily" describes 13 years of abuse in a 14-year marriage, as in the terrifying lines, "Each afternoon my heart would start trembling/I followed his journey all the way home/His step at the door would nearly dissolve me/When he walked in, my judgment was gone." Since finding safety for her and her children at the refuge, the speaker had had to move twice, but at least "Here I have friends, I'm no longer alone." "Emily" makes you bear witness. You might be glad you didn't look away.
The idea of making art from the words of others was not new. Seeger jump-started her career—at 23—to assist Ewan and producer Charles Parker to put together the award-winning "Radio Ballads," which aired between 1958 and 1964 in a series of eight shows based on interviews with railroad workers, fishermen, coal miners, and one or two of their wives. It revolutionized how the BBC portrayed working people—as themselves, rather than relying on third person summaries or voiceovers. MacColl composed some of his most memorable songs for this series, including "The Shoals of Herring" (for Singing the Fishing, 1959), and "Schoolday's Over" (for The Big Hewer, 1960), as well as additional background music. Seeger helped edit the interviews, played banjo and autoharp, and then, as if summoning a superpower, arranged and conducted musicians live in the studio, where everything had to come together at once. No multitracking or overdubs in those days; a single episode in one program went through 70 takes. In her memoir she cites this experience as one of her most creative, one that "tested me to my limits," adding, "I was as green as grass."
But was she, really? When asked to explain her craft Peggy credited the British for her sense of humor and Ewan for bringing her closer to the common man. But I demur: this is the work of an American woman born in 1935 to a storied family—or two families, if you count Pete's, who was 15 years Peggy's senior and one of three sons in the earlier, first family of their father, musicologist and composer Charles Seeger. He held on and off jobs teaching and worked for the FDR administration when he wasn't being accused of being a Communist. Ruth Crawford Seeger, a classically trained pianist, teacher, and archivist who was the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim in composition, was the breadwinner. She taught piano in their home full time while logging hundreds of hours with the researchers and archivists John and Alan Lomax to select, transcribe, and ultimately publish folk song collections. Hired in 1937 to work on Our Singing Country, in her introduction Ruth admitted that in meetings to finalize their choices for the collection she found herself "often very hesitant to cast my [vote.] What standards had I—a mere composer—for judgement? My basis for evaluation was that of written rather than unwritten music—of fine art, not folk art." The committee often sang together to determine a tune's accessibility. By the time American Folk Songs for Children was published in 1945, she'd grown more confident. Jean R. Freedman's comprehensive 2017 biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, cites a "mammoth battle" between Ruth and Alan over a single word in one recording they'd chosen. She played it "85 – or perhaps 86" times before finally concluding that she had been correct. Our Singing Country was a flop, but American Folk Songs for Children became a best-seller.
Mike put it like this: "Our parents' mission was to keep old time songs and some of the sounds alive. It really took hard with me." Discipline, patience, and getting it right was instilled in them from the start. As Charles explained in the liner notes to 1957's American Folk Songs Sung by the Seegers featuring the four children of his second marriage to Ruth—Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penelope/Penny—they grew up in a home that "resounded morning, noon and night to the nearly 1000 discs involved in their parents' occupations." He boasted, "By the time she was three, Peggy had a very respectable repertory of ballads, game, and love songs." She "was learning folk music as part of a rigorous study of classical music," Freedman observed. Or, as Peggy put it herself in the introduction to 1998's The Peggy Seeger Songbook: Forty Years of Songmaking, "Unless you've played 'The Irish Washerwoman' in C# in the Lydian mode at the age of ten, you haven't lived." She studied piano with her mother starting at age six, was helping her transcribe by the time she was 11 and first performed when she 13—to help promote her mother's books.
The Seegers were loving bohemian parents. Money came and went like their clothes on summer Sundays spent at home in a house they couldn't afford in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They sang together as a family after dinner, and daily routines were musical as well. "Cindy"—or "get along, Cindy," as the lyric goes—meant it was bedtime. How Ruth did it was to stop playing the piano if the children were slow in skedaddling upstairs. The vibe could be oppressive, though, especially for Barbara. Freedman reports that "she loved the things that the other Seegers disdained: high heels, makeup, television, ballroom dancing, popular music. In a family of gifted left-leaning intellectuals who learned music from field recordings, folk festivals, European emigres, and American vagabonds, Barbara wanted only to be a normal American teenager." In other words, she may not have been impressed when Lead Belly would accompany Alan on his visits to the family, or Pete would bring Woody Guthrie with him when they were both in town. Nonetheless, the Seeger children—with their children in turn—reunited to record a 1992 two-CD set of 58 tunes chosen from Ruth's Animal Folk Songs for Children. These gophers and rabbits, foxes and raccoons and alligators, wrote Peggy in the introduction, "set an example in an anthropomorphic world of survival, fun and exploitation, a world where everyone gets a chance." I've road-tested it with my grandkids, who give it a thumbs up.
As the eldest daughter of a working mother, once she was in high school Peggy would often shop for groceries on the way home, cook supper, and "make sure the homework was done." She "tolerated" school, she told her biographer, because "I had everything I needed at home." She and Mike had started performing together locally, too. Then in November 1953 Ruth, who had been diagnosed in January, died of cancer and the radiation treatment that was meant to cure it. When Peggy left for freshman year at Radcliffe that August accompanied by an aunt, Ruth's absence was the first indication Peggy had had that her mother was unwell. Her sudden passing so shocked Penny, who was nine, that she stopped speaking for six months. "Everything Changes," written decades later, is Seeger's deep reminiscence of the happy years that she and her siblings were "safe in the dark" followed by the time after they lost Ruth—that is, it's getting late and her mother hasn't called her home.
The disassembled Seegers reassembled. Conscientious objector Mike moved to Baltimore in 1954 to work at a hospital, his alternative to military service during the Korean War. Turning 18, Peggy completed the school year as per Ruth's wishes. Around Cambridge she was a not unfamiliar sight, gigging, playing hootenannies, even recording Songs of Courtship and Complaint. A bereft Charles, who was 67 and, Peggy soon realized, "becoming an old man," realized they could no longer afford their Chevy Chase home and asked Peggy to find a buyer. By the next summer it was gone. Barbara, 16, stayed in D.C. working as an au pair for family friends. When Peggy returned to Cambridge that fall Charles and Penny came with her, squeezing into an apartment so short on privacy that Peggy studied Russian in the linen closet. At night she resumed the tradition of their childhood and sang Penny to sleep.
Although Peggy's summation of this hard year typically accentuates the positive—"We thrived," she wrote in her memoir—this would be her last year at Radcliffe, and she wouldn't live in the U.S. again for a long time. Her father would soon remarry, move to California, and suggest that she stay with relatives in Europe for a year. It didn't work out. The following spring Alan Lomax paid her expenses to audition in London for a new quartet—an "English Weavers, junior style" —modeled on the successful American quartet started by brother Pete and Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, and Ronnie Gilbert. Present at the audition was Alan's partner in this endeavor, Ewan MacColl, a singer, playwright, and songwriter twice Peggy's age and already married. He drove her home after their second meeting and told her that he loved her.
Seeger was both smitten and freaked out by this relationship, which was on and off by definition. She was overdue for a visit with her family in California, but when she got there, she couldn't settle in. That summer she landed her first extended gig at the new Gate of Horn club in Chicago, first stop Albert Grossman, the agent who had hired her. He offered her lodging if she would "agree to be his girlfriend" during her three-month stay, before conceding that the Gate provided other accommodations. She'd promised Ewan she would come back to perform at the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, which drew 34,000 participants from 131 countries but the reunion was awkward for both of them. Peggy then bounced over to China on an invite to play more folk music from a government the U.S. didn't recognize. This was all with the support of Charles, who'd had his own run-ins with the Feds over his Communist connections, and with whom Peggy had figured out the exact wording of two telegrams—one from him, one to him—showing, they hoped, that they didn't know they were breaking any laws.
One constant during this rocky year was the platonic love of her life, Ralph Rinzler, a musician who would become a major producer, organizer, and caretaker of American folk music until his premature death at 59 in 1994. They'd met while she, Mike, and Pete headlined the Swarthmore College Folk Festival in 1955. Ralph was the sort of friend to whom you could send an urgent note requesting "a wool skirt—and mittens" when you'd arrived in Moscow absent the proper wardrobe. In the gently rocking "Old Friend," she observed, "As a woman among men/it was hard to find a friend/then you were there/and with you I was free." After her adventures as a world traveler Seeger learned that her passport would only get her back into the United States. Unwilling to break up with MacColl and unwilling to stay too far away, she landed in Paris. Ralph was there studying the language, his friend Diane needed her Bentley driven to Florence, and why not? For once Peggy took a spontaneous break just for herself as they embarked on a 10-day road trip, also remembered in that song, an endearing testament to things said and unsaid:
We traveled far by scooter and by car
From Paris down to Rome
In Germany we clowned
In Switzerland broke down
We were so young then
While Seeger remained in France, blacklisted in several European countries, McCall's sporadic visits continued. She was pregnant. Waiting for she knew not what for several days in October, 1958 she watched the rescue of 70 surviving miners in Nova Scotia on television—the first such disaster to be internationally broadcast—and wrote the excellent "The Ballad of Spring Hill." MacColl loved it but thought it should include a verse she couldn't have written yet—about being underground in a mine—and supplied it. Their conundrum as a couple was resolved when a mutual friend, Alex Campbell, agreed to marry her. Seeger became a British citizen just in time to give birth to her first son, Neill, in 1959. A brave, buoyant soul, she raised three children, partnered in two successive 30-year relationships—first with MacColl, then with Irene Scott. An anti-nuker, ecological warrior, environmentalist, and openly bisexual person who sings love songs and recites intimate poems she's written to Irene from the stage, but please don't ask her to be a poster child for the cause.
In concert Seeger introduces "Engineer" as her albatross before cheerfully charging through it one more time. It's Ewan's own "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" that's she's saddled with for better and worse. Royalties from Roberta Flack's 1969 hit cover version—and its use two years later by Clint Eastwood as a theme for his first movie, Play Misty for Me—enabled the MacColl family to buy some land, take vacations, and breathe a little. But it's weak stuff compared to his many sharply observed, beloved compositions, from which Kitty, Calum, and Neill selected their favorites for the two-CD Joy of Living tribute compiled in 2015 on the hundredth anniversary of their father's birth. To me the title track, written when Kitty was around 14, sounds like his love song to Peggy. MacColl, trailing behind their daughter on a hike, realized his legs were giving out. Afterwards he cast aside his frustration, reflected on his well-spent life, and thanked his family instead. "First Time" is a one-off he wrote for Peggy in 1957 when she was in California and they were trying to figure out their impossible affair long distance. It's a crowd pleaser—apparently no one but me minds that after their first kiss, the guy "felt the earth move in my hand/like the trembling heart of a captive bird/that was there at my command." So not the irrepressible Peggy we know and love, am I right? I much prefer her succinct, two-line capture of their bond from her autobiographical "Song of Myself," written in 1968 and included in The Folkways Years, 1955-1992: Songs of Love and Politics: "For the joys of a lover can equal no other/forever anew and yet always the same." Now that I can relate to.
Peggy and Ewan raised their family in Beckenham, England, but after he passed away and President Clinton declared amnesty for former citizens with revoked passports, Peggy wanted only to return to the U.S. with Irene. Mike, who lived only a couple of hundred miles away in Lexington, Kentucky, suggested Asheville, North Carolina, their home for 12 years. To qualify as a resident, Irene opened a coffee shop and hired American workers. After his military service ended, in 1958 Mike helped shepherd string band music into the present tense by co-founding the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen (who would marry Penny Seeger) and Tom Paley. They sounded as good as the originators they admired. No one knew how they did it; Bob Dylan, an early fan, called them "mystery men." In a funhouse mirror, Peggy and Mike would resemble each other closely. During their childhood, in contrast to the mastery passed down to Peggy by her mother—the modernist composer and groundbreaker who could "swing dissonances like a man," according to her Spotify biography—Mike refused to practice piano, quit guitar lessons after two months, and never learned to read music. When she was 13 Peggy consumed their elder brother Pete's classic 1948 How to Play the 5-String Banjo, but Mike scoffed, "You can't learn the banjo from a book!" According to Peggy, their mother replied, "Prove it." He mastered the autoharp, fiddle, dulcimer, mouth harp, mandolin, and dobro, too, and produced albums that brought new audiences to legendary artists such as Doc Watson and Elizabeth Cotten. A year before his death in 2009, Peggy and Mike recorded an album of duets, Fly Down Little Bird. He had one condition: one take per track, like in the old days. Their jubilant versions of "Cindy" and "Old Bangum" are standouts.
Many of her people are gone, but the 21st century has been good to Peggy recording-wise. The lilt and foreboding of "Swim to the Star," a collaboration with Calum using phrases from survivors, takes the schmaltz out of this 2012 assignment to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. It's on 2014's Everything Changes, Peggy's first recording with a band—a big deal for someone who admits in the notes, even at this late date, that backbeat drumming is "my nemesis."
A performer since her teens, a person who may be more comfortable on stage than off, Seeger's two live albums have a spontaneity and coherence that capture her big personality. Her second live album, Peggy Seeger Live, recorded in 2012 to raise money for a women's health center damaged by arson in Nelson, New Zealand, showcases songs that challenge sexual stereotypes more than 2007's more traditional Three Score and Ten. "Engineer" was not a folk song; she prefers to be called a singer/songwriter now. In "You Don't Know How Lucky You Are," a mature woman delights in seducing a novice. "Everyone Knows" dismisses the prejudice against menstruating women by comparing it to how indifferent we are about men's moodiness. "Give 'Em an Inch" makes fun of those who believe that being born with a penis entitles one to special treatment. She peppers her repertoire with personal ads she's saved to read aloud for laughs. One element of performance that's missing and that brother Pete excelled at—"he could make a rock sing," she told me—is the audience sing-along. That may be because of all those words, and a decision she made long ago to forego the chorus in much of her repertoire, because "half the people will agree with you, and half won't." She knows what she's singing about is not easy, but she also knows it's not hard. In "Different Therefore Equal," an acapella standard she's relied on for decades, a spirited romp amplified with spoons and a bodhran, she observes that "nature gives us equal chances/and to get 'em you shouldn't have to wear pantses." It's that simple—isn't it?