Music
The best kept secret in music
Press
This band has no press
Discography
On over 100 lps and CDs. The most recent solo of are on Appleseed: Love, Call Me Home,; Heading for Home and Love Will Linger On. National airplay in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
PEGGY SEEGER
Born in 1935 into one of North America's foremost folk music families, Peggy was well schooled in the classic European music traditions. Between the ages of 12 and 35 she learned to play piano, guitar, five-string banjo, autoharp, Appalachian dulcimer and English concertina. She cut her first record when she was 18 and in her early twenties she became a professional touring performer. Her travels took her to the Soviet Union, China, Poland, Belgium, France, Holland and the Scandinavian countries. In 1959 she settled in London with Ewan MacColl, to whom she bore three children. The MacColl/Seeger duo were at the forefront of the British folksong revival for the ensuing three decades. Their innovative work in that revival incorporated folk techniques in songwriting and strengthened the ties between traditional and political music. The radio-ballads were a turning point in her life, when music and politics melded together, when she learned to arrange music for radio scripts and to direct musicians and singers in the studio. She and MacColl carried the lessons learned into work with Critics Group (see biography for Ewan MacColl). She began to write songs and train singers and instrumentalists.
Considered to be one of North America's finest revival singers of traditional songs, she has also written music for films, television and radio. She has collaborated on books of folksongs with Edith Fowke, Alan Lomax and Ewan MacColl. She has made 21 solo LPs and collaborated with other performers (Tom Paley, Mike Seeger, Guy Carawan, Ewan MacColl) on more than 100 total recordings. In the mid-1970s she began to concentrate on feminist and ecological issues. Her best known songs are The Ballad of Springhill and I'm Gonna Be an Engineer.
After Ewan's death in 1989, she joined with Irene Scott to form the singing duo No Spring Chickens. In 1994 she moved back to the USA where she now lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She now tours solo as a singer and lecturer. In 1995 she and Jim Lloyd (producer of the BBC program Folk on 2) won the Sony Silver award for a 6-part series of half-hour shows dedicated to Peggy's life. A seventh program was recorded in 1996. In 1998 she published a collection of 149 of her own songs (The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Oak Publications, New York). This songbook contains extended biographical materials, personal photographs and charming drawings by Jackie Fleming. She has also completed a comprehensive anthology of Ewan's songs (The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook (Oak Publications, November 2001).
She produces a new album every 18 months or so, the latest being a volume 2 in her HOME TRILOGY, Love Call Me Home. (Appleseed CD 1087 www.appleseedrec.com ) She also produces issues of contemporary songs, modest CDs in a series entitled TIMELY PRODUCTIONS. She has a website from which further information may be obtained: www.pegseeger.com. She is exclusively represented by Josh Dunson at Real Peoples Music.
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