Legendary folk singer and songwriter Peggy Seeger celebrates her 75th birthday and her final tour of North America with an Easter performance at CSPS Hall.
Born in 1935 into one of North America’s foremost folk music families, Peggy Seeger is a singer of traditional American songs and an activist songmaker who has written hundreds of songs, the best known probably “The Ballad of Springhill” and “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer.” She plays six instruments (piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and English concertina) and has recorded 22 solo albums.
Seeger’s father was Charles Seeger (1886–1979), an important folklorist and musicologist; her mother was Seeger’s second wife, Ruth Porter Crawford (1901–1953), a modernist composer who was one of the first women to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. One of her brothers was the late Mike Seeger, and the well-known Pete Seeger is her half-brother.
Her first life partner was the English songwriter Ewan MacColl, who wrote “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” for her, and with whom she bore three children. In 1959 she settled in London with Ewan. The MacColl/Seeger duo was at the forefront of the British folksong revival for the next three decades. Their innovative work in that revival incorporated folk techniques in songwriting and strengthened the ties between traditional and political music.
Considered to be one of North America’s finest revival singers of traditional songs, she has also written music for films, television and radio. In the mid-1970s she began to concentrate on feminist and ecological issues.
Laura Pellegrinellli of The Village Voice wrote: “Those who regard Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Laura Nyro as the first generation of singer-songwriters to craft material from women’s experiences should think again. Seeger is a missing link between the 1950s American folk-song revival and women’s liberation; the guitar-toting chanteuses of the 1970s could not have existed without either of those movements.”
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