Peggy Seeger at the Mainstay, March 14

Peggy Seeger, a singer of traditional Anglo-American songs, songmaker and member of the musical Seeger family comes to the Mainstay in Rock Hall, Maryland on Friday March 14 at 8:00 pm. Admission is $20.

Peggy Seeger plays six instruments: piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and English concertina and is probably best known for her feminist songs such as “Gonna Be an Engineer” and for “The Ballad of Springhill”, which is rapidly becoming regarded as a traditional song. Her concerts are informative, entertaining and full of sly humor. Audience participation in choruses is routine. She’ll sing an unaccompanied traditional ballad, follow it with a tall tale, and then launch into a topical song.

Seeger is considered to be among North America’s finest folksingers. She took a leading role in the British folk music revival, not only as a singer and instrumentalist but also as a theorist and songwriter. An excellent performer of traditional Anglo-American songs, she is also known for her songs on nuclear, ecological and feminist issues. She has collaborated on books of folksongs with Edith Fowke, Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl.

Seeger has recorded 23 solo albums and participated directly in more than a hundred others. She lived in England for 35 years with the singer/songmaker Ewan MacColl (who wrote “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for her) and has three children and nine grandchildren. She moved back to the USA in 1994 but returned to England (Oxford) in 2010. She has published a songbook with 150 of her 200+ songs (“The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Forty Years of Songmaking” Oak Publications, 1998).

Born in 1935 in New York, Peggy Seeger’s mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a composer and piano teacher; her father, Charles Seeger, was an ethnomusicologist and music administrator. Peggy’s formal music education was interwoven with the family’s interest in folk music. She is sister to the late Mike Seeger and the late Pete Seeger’s half-sister.

She began to play the piano at seven years old. By the age of eleven she was transcribing music and becoming conversant with counterpoint and harmony. Between the ages of 12 and 35 she learned to play guitar, five-string banjo, autoharp, Appalachian dulcimer and English concertina. She tried the fiddle – and failed.

She attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she majored in music and began singing folksongs professionally. She went to Holland in 1955 (where she studied Russian in the Dutch language!) and then took off on a spontaneous world tour that included Russia, China, Poland and most of Northern Europe. In 1959 she became a British subject and settled in London with Ewan MacColl, the British dramatist-singer-songmaker, with whom she had three children (Neill, Calum and Kitty) and who wrote the classic “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for her.

The MacColl-Seeger work was seminal – its high point was the development of the innovative “Radio Ballads” tapestries of field recordings of speech and sound effects melded with new songs in the folk idiom and complementary instrumental accompaniments. One of these Radio Ballads, “Singing the Fishing,” took the 1960 Italia Prize in the radio documentary section. These extraordinary radio programs have now been reissued in an 8-CD set by Topic Records.

Seeger and MacColl initiated innovative work in the British folksong revival, incorporating folk techniques in film music and songwriting and emphasizing the connections between traditional artistic forms and political content. They formed their own record company (Blackthorne Records). Seeger started and edited a magazine of new songs (The New City Songster 1965-1985). They gave concerts and workshops throughout Europe and the New World, occasionally with Neill and Calum, both excellent musicians in their own right.

In 1983, Seeger began working on and off with Irene Pyper-Scott, an Irish traditional singer with whom, after Ewan MacColl’s death in 1989, she formed the duo No Spring Chickens. They toured for four years until Irene’s work as a veterinary administrator took precedence in 1994. Their company, Golden Egg Productions, issued their only CD, “Almost Commercially Viable,” an unusual album of political and love songs.

In September 1994, Seeger moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where she lived until she moved to Boston in 2006 to take up a teaching position at Northeastern University. She moved to Oxford, England in 2010. She spends a good portion of her year singing and lecturing throughout the UK, with one yearly tour of the USA and occasional tours of Australia. She has put out a book of her own songs – “Peggy Seeger Songbook” (Oak Publications, 1998) and a companion book of the songs of Ewan MacColl, “The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook,” ( Oak Publications, 2001).

Her 1997 CD “An Odd Collection” (Rounder 4031) is a collection of songs written solo and with Irene. In 1998 she produced “Period Pieces: Women’s Songs for Men and Women” (Tradition 1078), a compilation album of songs dealing expertly and compassionately with the major issues on the feminist docket. In 2000, she produced an album of old and new love songs, “Love Will Linger On.” In 2001, “Almost Commercially Viable” was issued in the USA by Sliced Bread. In 2003, she released “Heading for Home” (issued in the USA by Appleseed; and in England by Fellside Recordings) consisting of 12 North American folksongs and one song (the title) of her own composition. It was Seeger’s first recording of traditional songs in over 25 years and was the first of three comprising the “Home Trilogy.” The second volume, “Love Call Me Home” appeared in late 2004. The third and final volume, “Bring Me Home” appeared in 2008.

Appleseed also brought out “Three Score and Ten” a 2-CD distillation of recordings from her 70th birthday concert, held on May 29, 2005 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. It features Billy Bragg, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Calum and Neill MacColl, Mike and Pete Seeger, Norma Waterson and others. Appleseed has since issued “Fly Down, Little Bird” a recording of Peggy and Mike Seeger singing songs from their childhood, and “Peggy Seeger Live” (2012), her first solo live album. Her latest CD, “Everything Changes”, is due out in September 2014 (Signet Music).
In 2011 she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts degree by Salford University, UK. A biography by Jean Freedman is in progress, to be accompanied by a memoir by Peggy Seeger herself. Publication is planned for early 2015.

The Mainstay (Home of Musical Magic) is the friendly informal storefront performing arts center on Rock Hall’s old time Main Street. It is a 501(c)(3), non profit dedicated to the arts, serving Rock Hall, MD and the surrounding region. It is committed to presenting local, regional and national level talent, at a reasonable price, in an almost perfect acoustic setting. Wine, beer, sodas and snacks are available at the bar.

The Mainstay is supported by ticket sales, fundraising including donations from friends and audience members and an operating grant from the Maryland State Arts Council.

For information and reservations call the Mainstay at 410-639-9133. More information is also available at the Mainstay’s website https://www.mainstayrockhall.org.