Peggy Seeger’s formal music education was interwoven with her family’s interest in traditional music. Her mother was Ruth Crawford Seeger, the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music, and who became one of the United States’ foremost female composers. Her 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.
Seeger began to play the piano when she was 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. When her fiddle was stolen, her friends discouraged her from buying another.
Seeger majored in music at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she began singing traditional songs professionally. From there she went to Holland in 1955, and then took off on a mammoth world tour that included Russia, China, Poland, most of Europe and part of Africa.
In 1959 she became a British subject and settled in London with Ewan MacColl, the British playwright/dramatist/singer/songwriter. (Seeger is the face of MacColl’s song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.)Together they toured Britain for 35 years, singing, lecturing and pontificating on the role of folksong in the modern world. For seven years they ran the controversial London Critics Group and produced a yearly political theater show, "The Festival of Fools." For three decades they ran one of England’s best known folk clubs, The Singers Club, and formed their own record company.
Seeger has made seventeen solo LPs, collaborated on books of folksongs with Edith Fowke, Alan Lomax and MacColl, wrote music for and took part in films, television programs and radio plays. In 1989, after MacColl’s death, she formed the duo No Spring Chickens with Irene Scott. The duo toured for four years. Seeger moved back to the U.S. to live and tour in 1994. She now makes Asheville, North Carolina, her home and tours the country regularly.
3/16/02: Peggy Seeger
