It's a family affair

he whole idea of a dynasty is probably alien to the democratic values of folk music but when it comes to the Seeger family who could deny they occupy a central place in the way we perceive folk music in the modern world?

For centuries American folk music, and its European and African antecedents for that matter, had come down from player to player and singer to singer, shifting and adapting as songs moved from one place to another. Then as America hauled itself out of the Great Depression with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal John and Alan Lomax began to systematically record every folk song they could find across the Continental US.
Working in the same vein was Charles Seeger, who married composer Ruth Crawford (in her turn she assisted the effort by transcribing the recordings). These mid-century folklorists saw themselves as preserving a national treasure and as the developing century opened up a world of new forms of entertainment to rural poor they probably got there just in time, before the old way of life was swept away forever. Charles Seeger’s older son Pete and his siblings were adults by the time Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger had their own family, daughters Peggy and Penny and son Mike. Growing up in suburban Maryland they met singers like Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly who would visit their parents. Pete Seeger is widely regarded as the most significant figure in the folk revival and, along with Woody Guthrie, the man most responsible for the genre we’ve come to regard as protest music. He continues to perform even in his ’90s and one of his children, Tao, has gone on to be a respected performer in his own right.
Mike Seeger followed the path his parents had established producing documentary recordings. But he also made his own records and played with the influential New Lost City Ramblers alongside John Cohen (who eventually married his sister Penny). His wife Alice Gerrard made a number of bluegrass recordings with Hazel Dickens, the West Virginia singer who gravitated towards their house as a place where her country music background would be valued. Peggy Seeger moved to England during the McCarthy era in the US when she and other left-leaning musicians were blacklisted. While there she met and fell in love with British folk singer Ewan MacColl who wrote ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ for her. MacColl was already married and so when Seeger was threatened with deportation back to the United States as her work visa expired she got hitched to MacColl’s friend Alex Campbell (father of UB40’s Ali Campbell). It was a marriage of convenience which allowed her to continue her relationship with MacColl. The couple recorded together and separately making albums of children’s songs, the feminist tracks for which she is best known such as ‘Gonna Be An Engineer’, and politically charged compositions such as ‘The Ballad Of Springhill’ about the 1958 mining disaster in Nova Scotia and ‘Bring Greenham Home’ written when she visited the women’s camp at Greenham Common where protesters gathered to block American cruise missiles from being deployed on British soil.
With MacColl she set up the Critics’ Group which taught younger performers the mechanics of folk music composition and this eventually span off into its own ‘Festival of Fools’ in which satirical and political songs and theatre pieces would be performed.
There is a strain of humour running through her work; some of her album titles like Almost Commercially Viable poke a little gentle fun at how folk music is marginalised. As well as making over 20 albums (and counting) she is also a mother to Kitty, Neil and Calum MacColl, ensuring that the family involvement in folk music continues down at least one more generation.
Her 70th birthday back in 2005 was marked by a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London featuring an array of guests including Billy Bragg, Martin Cathy and Norma Waterson and their daughter Eliza Carthy. Keeping with the family theme there were also appearances by Pete and Mike, making it the first time all three had appeared on record together. The project was recorded and released in 2007 as Three Score and Ten.
The death of Mike in 2009 meant that the three would never make a proper album together but by that time the siblings had come together to record some of the songs they had sung together as children. The resulting album Fly Down Little Bird was released earlier this year and features songs such as ‘The Farmer Is The Man’ and ‘My Home’s Across The Blue Ridge Mountains’, revisited here by two siblings who first sang together as children some 70 years before. Some of the other song choices are less obvious, like ‘Bee Bee Suck The Pumpkin Stem’ which has a lyric of social injustice lurking within the children’s singalong and ‘Blood Stained Banders’, a 19th century spiritual which their mother had transcribed as part of her work with the Lomaxes.
Having moved back to the US for a spell as attitudes towards her politics started to soften somewhat in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR, she has now returned to Britain to be closer to her children and this I guess is why we can enjoy a visit from her later in the year as she plays a number of concerts around the country kicking off with a gig in Belfast’s Black Box (October 9), at the National Concert Hall in Dublin the following evening, at the Village Arts Centre in Kilworth (11), at the Courthouse in Sixmilebridge (13), at Galway’s Crane Bar (14), at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny (15) and at the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo (16).