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Peggy Quotes

You might say Peggy is an artist who needs no introduction. Yet, here she revisits many traditional songs from her vast repertoire with finer voice and deeper appreciation than any of her previous recordings. She can make a traditional song sound timeless, yet as current as if written yesterday. She also includes one moving, bittersweet original song about growing old. This is the recording you want to play for a younger singer and say: "This is the way traditional music remains alive." - Rich Warren, WFMT

 

Peggy's Madison Avenue Square Letter to Pete

This is a printout that I read from stage, complete with piano instructions for myself and possible deletions if I should over-run my time."

May 3, 2009

Dear Pete: Dear Brother:

I have an entire gallery of nourishing pictures in my head, snapshots from the past 74 years.  You are in so many of them  There's only time for one. I've chosen a summer in Beacon when I was 16 and you and Toshi were building the cabin..

Friends, fans and family come to help. New York City greenhorns and tenderfeet arrive, unprepared  for copperhead snakes ... bears .. mosquitos and clouds of biting insects. No eency-weency spiders here! Beacon spiders were gargantuan. Not one of them less than 6" across. They crept into your tent during the day and fell out when you shook your sleeping bag. Clump clump clump clump (etc) the spiders fall on the wooden pallet floor. They make dents in it. Rat-a-tat-tat that's  the spiders' feet, running away. I swear they wore boots, those spiders.  You sweep the flashlight around in the dark (descending fifths) There they are, staring at you balefully with eyes like signals on a railroad line. (train music)

Some of the newcomers leave on the morning train. Another lot come on the afternoon train. (train music) Lots of them stayed and stayed and stayed. Toshi's feeding everybody, cooking in an enormous pot over an open fire, her children around her feet. Tree felling, log scraping, ring of axes, buzz of saws, hammer-hammer-hammer, the work didn't stop even after you couldn't see what you were doing.

Dear Pete: thanks for the speakers you put all over the hillside so that we could have music while we worked. Mostly Folkways records, lots of what's now called WORLD MUSIC. But you also had WORLD NOISES .

Dear Pete and Toshi: Do you remember the night you put on a record of the sounds of the African desert and the Amazon jungle at 3 o'clock in the morning? You turned the volume up to maximum. Howler monkeys, tigers and lions, bird calls reminiscent of pteradactyls?  We pour out of our tents, terror-stricken .. and there you are, with your banjo, singing "Wake up, wake up, lazy people, what makes you sleep so sound?" Course, we all joined in 'cos---

[Omit if over time: Four years ago at my 70th birthday concert in London you apologised onstage, saying your voice was gone - then got a thousand people singing Where Have all the Flowers Gone.  Pete, you could get a rock to join in the chorus, you could!]

 

---  when you sing with Pete
's like the angel choir is sittin' in your seat
It's the absolute truth, I don't tell a lie
He'll make you wanna sing till the day you die
Cos I knew this guy thought he couldn't learn
The tune and the words of turn turn turn
Well he died.  Just the other day
They buried him in the usual way
Six feet down, grass on top
The way they do when your clock has stopped
Well, I passed his grave, that one with the urn
And he was underground singing turn turn turn
Bet he's down there singing it yet
Pete Seeger songs are hard to forget.


Dear Pete: Brother ... You didn't change my life - you were a deep, formative part of it, a guiding force. You helped set me on a good path and walked a good part of it beside me. You are what brothers should be.  I'm proud to be your sister, privileged to have been part of YOUR life and to help carry the message on. 

I love you, Pete.  I love you. The glorious indelible memories are my thanks.
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