Part 1

Name: Peggy Seeger
Nationality: American
Occupation: musician
Current Release: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
Recommendation: Bach’s Orchestra Suite No.3. I can listen to that over & over again and listen to the way he makes all the parts mesh in, lead in, it’s like a community of melodies / Han Suyin’s autobiography of six books and is absolutely gripping. It takes you from 1885 to 1991 and it is incredible.

If you enjoyed this interview with Peggy Seeger, visit her website to stay up to date with releases, books and shows.

When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I was born in 1935, to a family of musicians. My mother was a modernistic composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and she played beautiful classical piano. My father was a professor of music and ethnomusicology at Julliard in New York City. And the house was filled with music, classical on the one hand, and on the other hand with very grassroots recordings of North American, mostly Eastern, and maybe southern Southwestern folk songs sung by the original people who made them and sang them as part of their traditional life. A lot of collectors went out in the 1930s to collect folk songs for Franklin D. Roosevelt's new programme of trying to keep people at home, keep them from travelling west, because of the Depression, and the lack of work. So, my mother was working with John and Alan Lomax to help the collectors who wanted to put these songs into books. The songs were gospel, chain gang songs, sacred harp singers, murder ballads, ballads of women who had been left with a baby in their arms and daddy God knows where. And my mother transcribed them from large records on to staff paper. This was difficult, and she had to play them over and over. And as kids were in the corner, playing with what we played with, listening to these incredible songs of human grief, sorrow, hopes. And also, on the other hand, my mother playing classical piano.

As children, we absorbed these songs by osmosis, songs that would now be deemed unsuitable for children. Songs full of violence, revenge, murder, and we sang them, because our mother was transcribing them. These songs became the very basis of my musical self. I still sing songs now that I must have learned when I was 2 or 3 years old.

Some people experience intense emotion when listening to music, others see colours or shapes. What is your own listening experience like and how does it influence your approach to music?

I think it’s possible we all experience emotions of varying intensity when listening to music. For some reason, it hits parts of the brain that are very special, and the brain transmits this to the rest of the body. When you make music, it is the most intense, for me. Though that’s not to say I don’t experience intense emotions when say listening to a particular kind of classical music, but it’s a different type.

I learned to play classical piano when I was very young, my mother gave me my first lesson when I was 6. She didn’t teach me scales, she just played around on the piano, and I connected what I was playing to the stories she would tell, some of which were Aesop’s fables.

My approach to music? It depends - what I’m playing and when. I can improvise on the piano endlessly, I’m very comfortable on that. When I sing I’m very aware of listening to myself, of what range I’m in, that kind of thing.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I was a folk singer in my own mind, until somebody told me I was a songwriter because I’d written a good song. I was a singer, I was an instrumentalist, but to call me an artist, somehow that didn’t apply. I always felt I was an interpreter of people’s songs, of their stories, and of a tradition I didn’t grown up in, that of the very working class.

I learned the songs because I thought the stories were fantastic. And that’s how I learned the guitar, the banjo, but I didn’t look upon myself as an artist. I tried to sing like Aunt Molly Jackson, like Hally Wood. My voice wasn’t beautiful, it was a character voice, but I sang the songs because I loved the stories and the music. I didn’t feel I had a responsibility to carry them on, until I developed a political interpretation of what folk music really is. So, searching for a personal voice, or breakthroughs, that doesn’t really apply to me, I was just trying to improve my skills, and that was a great pleasure. I practiced guitar & banjo often 2-3 hours a day when I was a teenager.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

The term identity is strange for me. In folk music, I feel I’m a representative of a tradition I’m trying to keep going. I’m not part of the level of society that made the folk music. I’m not a personage, other people tell me I am. I love listening to the original singers & players of folk music, they have an innocence, a knowledge, a patience, they know what pace to take the songs at. They have a social experience to them, so my listening to a folk song by Basil May or the Carter family is very different to my listening to Glenn Gould playing the piano.

As for my creativity as an artist, I think I’m probably quite an unusual songwriter. Chiefly as I have a good musical education in the classical sense, and I understand a huge body of North American folk music. So, to have both of those parameters - since classical music is considered something for the elite to consume, folk music was created by the lowest economical class, and it was the only music they had. I try to respect that when I sing it, and perform it pretty much the same as I heard it. In terms of my own creativity, I’ve made music which sounds both like classical and like folk. And my identity is just me with my music history, and I try to produce songs with that width of understanding and ability.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Music is an art, but not all art is music.

It would depend on whether I’m singing and playing, or who I’m playing for, and where. If we’re talking about songs that I write myself, that’s different. Let’s just keep it to folk music here - the main idea is to be a part of a transmission of an oral tradition from the past, into the present and the future. It’s easy for these songs to die, if no one sings them. A lot of them feel like historical pieces, a lot of them apply to industries that we’re trying to get rid of, for instance mining, and whaling, hunting - I don’t sing most of those songs, but if I do, it’s with an introduction to say ‘we’ve ruined the world through mining!’

But my idea behind singing folk songs as a middle class, comfortable, North American white female is that the songs are works of art in themselves, brought forward by people who loved them and felt they were expressions of their identity, not mine. We recorded a gypsy woman in Dorset once, and we were talking about the big long story ballads, and she said ‘Oh, we call those our legends. Thems our history, without them we’re nothing’. And for people who were illiterate and chased from pillar to post, and are now unable to camp pretty much anywhere, the songs that had been passed down to them were more precious than gold.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

This is very difficult to answer, I’ll try to be brief. I don’t regard originality & innovation as opposing perfection & timelessness. When you consider ‘music of the future’ versus ‘continuing a tradition’, music is so interwoven these days. Composers like Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart who have created ‘timeless music’ have borrowed endlessly from traditions, and even used whole sections of folk songs. Timelessness is only achieved if the creation continues to grab people’s attention in the future, and you can’t prescribe for music of the future. People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

I don’t aim for timelessness or perfection in my music, and I don’t know how original I may or may not be, and I wouldn’t go in for innovation just for its own sake.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

My education in music has been in classical and in folk, but I’ve not ever considered myself in development. I never had a strategy - I play six instruments, each of which do different things. I consider myself an accompanist, not a soloist, so if there’s a strategy, it’s to learn the song first, then figure out which of the six instruments is going to be best to accompany it.

Regarding development - I think I’ve learned a lot over the years, and what I’m learning most at the moment - particularly with ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, which I’ve just re-recorded in a way that’s incredibly satisfying to me - is in my old age reconsidering the ways I approached songs & songwriting in my younger days. In some ways its un-developing, because I’m becoming more simple in what I do, it’s more satisfying to me as a solo artist. It helps my arthritic hands do something that is acceptable. When I sat down at the piano and started singing ‘First Time Ever’ a couple of months ago, about an octave below where I used to sing it & with a piano accompaniment, I found that thrilling.

All of my instruments are important to me, but some I can’t play anymore due to my arthritis. I play the piano a lot more now because that is easy for me, rather than the string instruments.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

A day in my life! If I’m going out on the town, or to the supermarket, or on a Zoom meeting then the day is slightly different, but essentially it goes like this…..

I don’t sleep well, I have to get up every hour and a half due to my ailments, that and I just don’t seem able to sleep straight through the night. So I wake really tired and don’t want to get out of bed! I’m high maintenance so I spend half an hour getting washed and ready etc. Then I lie down on the floor and do stretches whilst I talk to my partner, who lives in New Zealand. After that, I go down and make a tea, and whilst that’s brewing I go outside and fill the bird feeders.

Then I will check my emails to see if anything important has sprung up. I’m involved in trying to save a green field in our village from a completely unnecessary housing development. We’re fighting it tooth and nail and that takes up a lot of time.

If the weather is good then I will go for a walk, then I’ll have some lunch. Then I go for my ‘Old Lady’s Snooze’ - after I promise myself something interesting - usually coffee and cake - to get me off the sofa around 3pm. Then I practice for an hour and a half, by which time it’s time for dinner. Which is really simple as I’m allergic to cooking - I spent years cooking for hordes of people when I was with Ewan MacColl. I dislike cooking - during lockdown I made sourdough bread and enjoyed it but cooking isn’t something I want to do anymore.

Then after dinner I answer a few more emails, or maybe call a relative or a friend. When I’m ironing or doing some other tasks, I’ll listen to an audiobook -  a mix of fiction, books about science, philosophy, the secret life of trees, some of Richard Dawkins’ books…

My last treat of the day is doing Wordle. As I said, I’m high maintenance so it takes me a while to get ready for bed, and when I’ve done that I call my partner again. If I’m lucky, I then fall asleep very quickly.