Peggy Seeger on bringing the first family of folk to Scotland

One thing it appears unlikely that she’ll ever do is write another book, having spent two or three years on her memoir, First Time Ever, but then that work, published last year, covered most of the things people might want to read about Seeger’s extraordinary life.

To say that she grew up surrounded by music would be an understatement. Her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music and composed modernist music during the 1920s and 1930s before becoming interested in folk music. Her father, Charles Seeger, was a musicologist, composer, teacher, and folklorist. And one brother, Pete, actually a half-brother, was one of the defining characters in American folk music, and the other, Mike, devoted his life to keeping American folk music, particularly from the Southern States, alive.

At various times, visitors to the Seeger home might have found house guests including Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie or song collector Alan Lomax and Bertold Brecht’s writing partner, Hanns Eisler. Even when the young Peggy became separated from her mother at the age of 11 in a department store, the family’s habit of drawing musicians into their circle came into play as Elizabeth Cotten, who wrote Freight Train, later popularised by Peter Paul & Mary, happened to be working in the store at the time and reunited mother and child. For this, Cotten was offered – and accepted – a job as a domestic help. Thus Mike Seeger, who died in 2009, would recall music sessions in the kitchen with the hired help that were mind-blowing precursors to Cotton’s music career revival in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.

Guthrie’s visits weren’t quite so enthusiastically received.

"He was a bit too rough for my mother, who was a piano tutor as well as being deeply creative,” says Peggy Seeger. “He'd put his guitar on the floor, pull it around by the strap and pretend it was a dog.”

Having folk music in the air like oxygen, it was probably no surprise when, with their daughter having been taken into hospital with strep throat only to catch whooping cough and be placed in an isolation ward, the two year old Peggy’s parents were able to locate her by her singing of folk standard Barbara Allen from down the hall.

Peggy began taking piano lessons with her mother at the age of six and needed little encouragement to practise. Indeed, until relatively recently, if a piano was to hand, she would include concert stage quality performances of classics alongside the folk songs with which she made her name. She was actually studying music at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts when she began singing folk songs professionally, sharing stages with Big Bill Broonzy and hanging out with Mississippi John Hurt. By this time she had learned to play the guitar and the banjo and was on her way to adding autoharp, Appalachian dulcimer and English concertina to her accomplishments. She later tried fiddle but it defeated her.

Having dropped out of Radcliffe before graduating and gone off hitch-hiking in Europe, she was in a youth hostel in Copenhagen when family friend Alan Lomax tracked her down and invited her to London to play banjo on a TV programme.

The face that launched “First Time Ever” was clearly working its charms by then as she’d escaped to Copenhagen from the clutches of a Belgian priest who had tried to persuade Peggy to take charge of a nunnery. Lomax’s call also saved her from a logger with whom she was about to go off to Finland because he’d told her that her eyes were “the colour of time.”

She wouldn’t escape the attention of her next admirer, however. Ewan MacColl was 20 years older than Peggy and he gave her a ticket to go and see him performing as a ballad singer in The Threepenny Opera. She wasn’t struck by his onstage appearance.

“He had a bit of a paunch by then and was wearing braces and dirty trousers for the role and makeup that made him look twice his age” she recalled. “But I was entranced by his voice. Two days later, he told me he was in love with me and was going to make love to me.”

This was a new term to Peggy, who was used to more earthy Americanisms, and she found it romantic. She later discovered that MacColl was married with a child, and another (the singer Kirsty MacColl) on the way but by then she was fascinated and despite having to put up with MacColl’s mother as a house guest (“a blessing and a curse”) for the next 16 years, she remained fascinated – and more – with MacColl up to his death in 1989.

The impact Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger made on the British – and wider – folk scene can’t be overstated. They caused controversy by declaring that singers at their folk club must only perform material from their own background but this actually caused singers to seek out long-neglected songs and ultimately aided the folk revival. And as well as Seeger contributing songs such as Springhill Mining Disaster to the folk song repertoire, the radio ballads series they worked on with BBC producer Charles Parker, telling compete stories in songs and the words of real-life participants, produced many songs, including The Moving On Song and Shoals of Herring whose significance has only increased with the passing years.

They not only produced music but also musicians. Sons Neil and Calum have worked in more popular circles, with David Gray and Ronan Keating and Boyzone respectively, but they toured with their mother in 2015 and are on the road with her again this autumn. Calum produced Peggy’s Everything Changes album, which was greeted as a revelation by the Guardian on its release in 2014 and appeared in many end of year best album lists.

“He refused at first, but I told him I’d pay him his usual rate and he said okay but if I was out of tune he’d tell me I was out of tune, and he did,” says Peggy, who has a reputation for being self-critical, and then some.

Arthritis has meant paring back her instrumental activities, although she says she was guilty of playing too much, too fast back in the day and she should have heeded Big Bill Broonzy’s “It took me a long, long time to learn to play simple” comment when she was working with him in Chicago’s famed Gate of Horn club in her youth.

On the dates that bring them to Scotland this weekend, she and her sons will be presenting some of her most treasured songs and there will be readings from First Time Ever and family recollections.

Among the songs is likely to be I’m Gonna Be an Engineer, which Peggy wrote for the Festival of Fools shows that “featured eight women wearing mini-skirts”. It thus wasn’t conceived as a feminist anthem but it was taken up by the feminist movement – a group of women lawyers in America subsequently asked Peggy to write something similar for them – and when she was invited to sing it at radical meetings, she would invariably be asked I she had any more where that came from, which she didn’t at the time.

“That’s why I started writing women’s songs because I only had that one,” she says. It was at one of these meetings, in 1964, that she met Irene Pyper-Scott, who became her partner following Ewan MacColl’s death.

Pyper-Scott helped her to get over the loss of MacColl and encouraged her to write First Time Ever. As someone with a reputation for speaking her mind in song and having got her memoir out of the way, she feels she should be writing more. There’s certainly enough going on in the world for her to comment on. Her job, she says, is to place a message that, were it in non-hummable form, might not be so easily remembered.

“It’s enjoyable to write songs,” she adds. “And it's rewarding to hear other people singing a song you've written, even though, as has happened a number of times, they attribute it to another songwriter."

Peggy Seeger and Family appear at Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh tonight [Saturday November 10] and Fraser Centre, Milngavie tomorrow [Sunday, November 11].