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Peggy Quotes

For decades, Seeger has been one of the most authoritative voices in American and English folk...While she is acknowledged as an esteemed interpreter of traditional material and a gifted instrumentalist, she is perhaps best known for her observant and caustic original songs about women. - Chris Morris, Billboard

Peggy Quotes 2

My husband, Marky, teaches maths to  a group of very intelligent Further A Level students (they are about 17 - 18 yrs old and those super-intelligent whizz-kid types).  Yesterday they were getting a bit overloaded and fraught with the 'hard sums' so he played them the One Plus One video as a bit of a breather! They loved it!  Marky said all the frowns disappeared and they were all smiling and ready to go at the complex numbers again!
- Anon

 

Set into Song

Set into Song: Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, Peggy Seeger and the Radio Ballads

240 x 160mm, 304 pages, 45 b/w photographs
978-0-9551877-1-1 Hardback £20
Labatie Books, 91 Hertford Road, London N2 9BX, 0208 883 6952


USA - order from Peggy Seeger
England - order from www.setintosong.co.uk

 

Read the Reviews and Excerpts


setintosong coverCoinciding with Peggy's UK tour in May 2008, was the publication of Peter Cox's new book Set Into Song - Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker, Peggy Seeger and the Radio Ballads. In it he tells the story of a remarkable collaboration, one which produced a groundbreaking series of eight hour-long radio programmes for the BBC. The first, The Ballad of John Axon, was originally broadcast on 2 July 1958, so this year is its 50th anniversary.

Uniquely, the programmes took the speech of working people, until then almost always voiced by actors, and allowed them to tell their own stories. They told them into the new 'Midget' mobile tape recorder wherever they lived and worked - in railway yards, on fishing vessels, down pits, on bulldozers, in Traveller encampments. Their stories were woven together by Ewan MacColl with songs that he wrote specially for the programmes, after listening intensely to the language and rhythms of the voices, and by the young Peggy Seeger, who designed the musical setting and directed the performers. The programmes were rehearsed and recorded under the overall direction of the visionary Birmingham radio producer Charles Parker, a pioneer of the new painstaking art of tape splicing.

The book tells the story of the making of the programmes, and of the lives of their begetters - three very different people, whose complementary talents created brilliant radio programmes which were hugely influential on subsequent documentary makers. Begun in 1958, they were ended by the BBC in 1964, as radio lost its popularity and its money to television.

In researching the book, Peter scoured the archives, but above all tracked down every living participant, from singers to jazz musicians to radio engineers, to record their memories. Names that form a roll-call of the early folk revival, such as Ian and Lorna Campbell, Bob Davenport, Ray Fisher, John Faulkner, Stan Kelly, Louis Killen, Gordon McCulloch, Jimmie McGregor, Colin Ross, Elizabeth Stewart and Dave Swarbrick - as well as Peggy herself.

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