Cambridge will be twice graced by the Queen of Folk, Peggy Seeger, this summer – an ‘In Conversation’ evening on 10 May, and an appearance at the Cambridge Folk Festival in July in the ‘US Legend’ slot.
She’s certainly a legend, thanks to her output as a songwriter, as a performer, and through her incredible storied past as part of the Seeger family and through her marriage to folk titan Ewan MacColl, the architect of the English folk revival in the early 1960s, which was the scene of both Bob Dylan’s and Paul Simon’s early immersion in the folk tradition...
Born in New York into a much-loved American folk family – Pete Seeger was her half-brother – she’s been living in Iffley, a village a couple of miles from Oxford, since 2010. At 88, she continues to enjoy an incredibly productive life. She performed at the very first Cambridge Folk Festival in 1965, so what can we expect this time?
“There will be my oldest son Neil, my second son Callum [both with Ewan MacColl], Neil’s wife Kate St John, and there will be a bass player, John. There’ll be five of us on stage.”
And what sort of repertoire can fans expect?
“My sons have insisted that it be all my own songs, or songs that I am known for. They are both excellent songwriters themselves, but they’ve said this is my show and that’s what I was booked as.” She laughs gaily. “I was booked as a legend – well, yes, that’s alright, however they want to play it, that’s alright...”
The set list is likely to be defined somewhat by which instruments she is able to play: she had a fall earlier this year.
“I haven’t played properly for nine weeks,” she says in a video call, “because I can’t even lift the banjo, I hurt my back very badly, so basically I’m playing autoharp, a concertina, banjo guitar and piano.”
It says a lot about Peggy that she’s still playing four instruments at 88 even with a back injury, and this awesome work ethic surely stems from her childhood. Her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a pianist and the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship; her father Charles was a folklorist and musicologist.
“I love the piano,” Peggy says of her musical journey. “It’s the instrument I’m most at home on. And I play by ear, I improvise... I was brought up with folk music on one hand and classical music on the other because my mother was a modernist composer and she played incredible piano and she started teaching me when I was six. And on the other hand with folk, which is almost all aurally transmitted... I missed the middle ground of popular music – jazz, and blues and pop songs, I missed that.”
So folk music was bookended by classical music?
“Yes that’s right, bookended,” she replies. “Excellent. You’re the first one that’s said that... so well done.”
“Thank you,” I reply. “I have good coffee which helps!”
She laughs. For Peggy, folk music is one part of a social contract for working people’s voices to be heard.
“Not all folk music is what you’d call political but it’s quite class-conscious,” she says. “The idea of folk music is that it’s for the working class. Now, who are the working class? Ha! Yuh. They’re not just a bunch of farmers, or a bunch of people on the rural poverty line. They’re not just steel workers, or printers.
“Ewan MacColl would say that folk music comes from the lowest economic class. But folk music as we know it, so much of it came from a society that was illiterate, and it was aurally – with an ‘a’, and orally with an ‘o’, both of ’em – orientated, which is why it’s so singable, and sometimes describing things is as good as proscribing what you should do about it. I was brought up listening to the records of the real people singing those songs, who went out in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, and I was classically trained: I know how those songs should be sung. I don’t imitate, I sing as closely with the theatrical techniques that I learned from Ewan MacColl, I sing as closely as I can to what it might be if I was one of those people.”
This technique is among many topics explored in her hugely well-received book, First Time Ever: A Memoir, which was published by Faber & Faber in 2018. To my chagrin, I haven’t read it yet, and Peggy is not impressed by this oversight. When I ask her about how she got to Iffley, she says: “This is where I encourage anybody interviewing me to read the bloody book!”
She accepts my grovelling – and sincere, I love musical legends’ memoirs – apology and continues: “The book tells you how I got to Iffley and it’s a long story. I went back to America for 16 years after Ewan MacColl died [in 1989]. From 1995 to 2010 I lived in America, and then I got homesick for this cold, damp little island where my children live, and my grandchildren live, and I came back and I decided to come to Oxford.”
Peggy had already been with her current partner, Irene Pyper-Scott, for 20 years by this stage, but “Irene didn’t want to come with me so she’s in New Zealand, we hold it together from a distance”.
“Iffley is a small village,” she continues. “It’s one of the iconic Oxfordshire villages that Oxford City Council is determined to ruin by putting excessive housing on it. I believe in housing, I really believe we need it, but my belief in what we should do for housing is very different from putting 1,000 houses on the side of this little village, completely ruining the countryside the tourists come for and what makes Oxfordshire what it is. Make new towns! Make whole new towns with all the things that everybody needs, not just put yourself a carbuncle on a beautiful little village. The housing has even been deemed by the Environmental Agency as completely inappropriate.
“I’ve always had an activist thing that I was concentrating on and I’m concentrating on eco-feminism and ecology and climate change – chiefly climate change. So my job here in Iffley is to protect the last four ancient untouched virgin meadows in this village.
“It’s a beautiful field, it’s huge and it’s got endangered species on it, it’s got a white badger on it… The council says they’ll put the biodiversity somewhere else, but it’s not just the trees, it’s 600 species of insects, 12 major mammal groups, 100 badger setts. How are they going to recreate that somewhere else? The ignorance and the stupidity is mind-blowing…”
Peggy’s environmentalism is underpinned by eco-feminism.
“Women are more capable, in my view, of taking care of anything, than men,” she says. “The wars are being run by men. You don’t have armies of women marching into other people’s countries. Men are the ones that wage war, and they take risks that literally endanger everything. That’s what eco-feminism is – that women are closer to nature than men are.”
Peggy will be in conversation with Mark Walsh at the Golden Hind on May 10. Tickets, priced £15, available here.
