Ken Hunt f - Roots Magazine
fRoots Magazine - interview by Ken Hunt
Autobiographies are
curious confections, like biographies only different. Of all the
'protagonists' that lit the blue touch-paper for the British folk
scene's imagination - now that Shirley Collins has begun telling her
story in print - were it in my gift, the one I'd commission would be
Peggy Seeger's long, strange trip. She and Jim Lloyd delivered an
extensive oral biography for Folk On 2 ten years ago. Quite frankly I
want more. (During one interview, she remarks, "I've been writing up my
life recently". She straightaway goes into dream meltdown with a cheery,
"Just for my own enjoyment".) This sparky woman has done so much, lived
so much, crammed so much into her, so far, 70 summers. Most of all, she
has informed our appreciation of British and North American folk music,
like very, very few people have. Then factor in her multiple roles in
illuminating the folk, political song and feminist scenes and how her
songs have enriched the folk idiom, and you have somebody worth getting
amazed about.
Incidentally, if the reader wants to read the subtitles to her songs, most of them appear in her 1998 Peggy Seeger Songbook - Forty Years Of Songmaking,
while the aural evidence is scattered over a half-dozen or so CDs. When
we meet, she is in fine fettle, inquisitive about a discussion about
her life expressed through a selection of songs picked out, strobe-like,
to flash-image her life in song. (Strobes also leave a lot in
darkness.) This account draws observations out of the author of songs
such as If You Want A Better Life, Lost, It's A Free World, Gonna Be An Engineer, Primrose Hill, Thoughts Of Time and Autumn Wedding.
Not all of them appear in this mini-biography-in-song. (At one stage,
she remarks phlegmatically, "The big problem, I think, with songs right
now is to get to the people who really need to hear them.") Recorded
music can give the impression of partially filling the gaps, so put on,
say, AN ODD COLLECTION, LOVE WILL LINGER ON, PEGGY SEEGER THE FOLKWAY
YEARS 1955-1992, ALMOST COMMERCIALLY VIABLE, the first of her HOME
TRILOGY, HEADING FOR HOME or one of her limited editions like THE BALLAD
OF JIMMY MASSEY or SONGS FOR OCTOBER 2004
What follows is a
series of snapshots from several illuminating conversations. Count
what's included, not what doesn't appear. Camille Paglia has spoken
about popinjay reporters. Others are less eloquent. Peggy's main gripe
when it comes to journalists concerns the mind-numbing paucity of
imagination that she so regularly encounters. In Song Of Myself she lays
down her history and to me she talks about journalists asking her the
same questions over and over again. "I get sick of it. God, you get sick
of it! It's like they have to hear you say what they have read already.
You hear it on the radio in interviews. The interviewer asks a question
and then you 'so and so and so'. The person says, 'Oh yes, I did that'.
There's got to be a better way of interviewing people against past
events. Why not just give a capsule? Born so-and-so. Parents so-and-so.
Took up the banjo. Now tell us about who you really are. And get deeper
in, quicker. There's so much small talk with interviews. Often now I
will say I don't want to spend more than five minutes on family, Pete
Seeger and Ewan MacColl. They can read about that anywhere. Let's talk
about who I am now! Send readers and listeners to the website if they're
really interested. What we really need to share is feelings, responses,
attitudes, quirky things. Maybe things that are not quite as favourable
to you as a person but which take you off the pedestal."
Cue
plotting the contours of her Seegerishly hilly biographical topography.
The expression 'first dynasty' rather than 'first family' springs to
mind. Margaret 'Peggy' Seeger was born in New York in June 1935, the
second child born to the ethnomusicological pioneer, composer, inventor
and teacher Charles Seeger (1886-1979) and his second wife, Ruth
Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), a composer, arranger and musical scholar in
her own right. Peggy is little sister to Mike, big sister to Barbara
and Penelope, half-sister to Pete (from her father's first marriage),
partner/ wife to Ewan MacColl (1915-1989), mother to Neill, Calum and
Kitty, and partner to Irene Pyper-Scott.
A further frustration, she confesses, helped seed Song Of Myself.
"At the time I wrote that interviewers always went to Ewan first. He
talked and talked and talked and talked. Finally, they turned to me. By
that time everyone was interested but weary, so you wanted to be fairly
quick. They always began with my father, my mother, Pete, how I'd met
Ewan. The same questions over and over and over."
The first song that she wrote that she was happy with was The Ballad Of Springhill.
She was 24, stranded in France, the twin-bellied model of 1958's asylum
seeker unable to get into the country. (How she got into England is one
for the autobiography.) Sitting in "a bleak restaurant" she sat forking
"grey tripe" while watching French television pour out coverage of a
mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia. Some of the linguistic
niceties bypassed her French but the nail-biting horror of the raw
images grated her imagination. "I had made up a song recently, singing
about these hard times. I had three weeks before I went back to America.
When I made up this song, I kept saying the tune sounds so familiar;
and I'm not going to forsake the tune, even though I found out it was
highly derivative. Fortunately it was a traditional song and I hope
nobody's copywritten it. It's derivative in the way a lot of Ewan's
tunes are." With hindsight she feels that "actually seeing what you were
talking about" was the key. "I'm very, very susceptible to what I see.
This was live television. It wasn't a replay of anything. It was
actually happening. I remember it was - and it said it on the television
- the first time a disaster had been broadcast live. It hit me right
then."
It was a watershed moment. "I did already know some disaster songs that I sang. I made Ballad Of Springhill
before I'd ever been down a mine. I sang protest songs when I really
didn't know a great deal about protesting. Obviously I thought they were
well worth singing and should be sung. Ideas can be the sixth and
seventh senses that add to the melting pot. Ewan taught me about tasting
words and working with them like in a physical sense. That was a song
that appeared quickly. I didn't work at that one."
The next song in this musical mini-biography is On This Very Day. It is not quite her return to meeting Ewan MacColl, as he famously memorised in First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
It is a springboard into other realms. "It was a coincidence that Calum
and Kerry got married on the same day, 25 March [in 1994] that Ewan and
I met [in 1956]. They didn't know until they heard the song. The amount
that my kids don't know about me is rather nice. Now I feel I can tell
them things and I haven't been telling them those things throughout my
whole life." What she created was a template-song idea that combines an
occasion with events that happened that day in history. "The template
idea's nice. It works. You have to be a bit ingenious. And you have to
be silly; that's one of the nice things about it. So many silly things
happened in history and it's nice to mention them. Now I use this
template to make up songs for other people whose birthdays or whose
weddings are on that date."
Anyone whose spouse or life-partner
has died will get Lost. "We lose something every day, don't we? We find
something every day. It's a little hard to remember back to the state of
mind I was in then, when Ewan died, because I also had a delicious love
affair going. I was compulsively, deeply in love with someone else at
that time. But that wasn't a substitute. Nothing substituted for Ewan.
Shared memories? In lots of ways you want to lose those memories. If you
have nobody to share them with, what is the point? You're just
regretting. Your children aren't really interested because they have a
different version of what happened. My daughter Kitty told me recently
that I'd said at one point that Ewan was my perfect life-partner. I
still think he was. She said, 'But you argued all the time!' I don't
remember arguing all the time. I don't remember bitter arguments. Were
they bitter ones? When she told me about one, then I remembered it. I
tend to remember the good things."
Lost summons an observation
about ageing of another sort. "As I get older and have more emotional
memories in my head, I think I'm more capable of singing songs like Lost
and virtually literally sending thoughts out to people who have similar
experiences or who have experiences that are analogous to that. Because
that's quite an extraordinary song to sing when there are a lot of
older people in the audience. Then there's a space of three to five
seconds afterwards when nobody stirs. And you don't want anybody to
stir."
Primrose Hill is another of the songs that
emerged after MacColl's death. It marks, however, a rediscovery of love
in all its life-affirming vivacity as she discovers Isabella Plantation,
a haven of childhood-reminding tunnels through banked rhododendrons, in
Richmond Park and Primrose Hill, a pleasant stroll from Cecil Sharp
House. "Most of the love songs talk about flowers and birds. They don't
usually talk about space stations or internal combustion engines. They
talk about nature or gravitate inwards towards the person you love or
gravitate outwards towards feeling part of everything. Irene was the big
love affair of my life. Never felt like that about anybody. Including
Ewan. Totally felt complete trust. She took me there." By which she
means Isabella Plantation, Primrose Hill and maybe, for those who wish
to interpret matters thusly, higher heights.
"Ewan and I didn't
go out. Or if we did, we went out to the country, we didn't go into
town. We hardly went anywhere in town unless we were taking the kids to
the zoo or something like that. Maybe we'd sit on Crystal Palace Hill
and picnic and listen to the symphony. I knew nothing about [Isabella
Plantation]. I had a whole other agenda to places that Irene knew about.
She and her husband Philip went to a lot of places together. Isabella
Plantation was absolutely fantastic. Just walking. Seeing the flowers.
It was the classic courtship - which I didn't have with Ewan. In my
experience, I have not had a male-female courtship that was what I'd
call a courtship. [It was] 'Let's hop into bed'. With Irene, it was an
awakening of all the senses. I also wrote over a hundred poems for her
in the time. I'm recording those. Some of them are very short, some of
them I have turned into songs. Occasionally I do a set in concert where I
sing one of the love songs and then read one of the poems." Irene's
impact went beyond the geographical.
Irene and Peggy sang
together for three or four years, as NO SPRING CHICKENS. "Writing humour
into the songs," she admits, "is one of Irene's big gifts to me. Irene
says, 'You're far too serious on stage. Far too serious. And a lot of
your songs are far too serious.' I sang with her for three or four
years. Ewan and I were relatively serious on stage. Some of the songs
would be humorous, but many of the humorous songs were poking fun at
other people. They weren't humorous situations in and of themselves.
Humorous the way It's A Free World is humorous. Or humorous the way some of the ballads are humorous, like little sitcoms."
Making political points with humour is well instanced in her Give 'Em An Inch,
a little something that touches upon the transition from boyhood to
adultery represented by an inch of dangly flesh. "I do think in feminist
songs that you have to somehow make people laugh at what everybody
realises is a humorous situation like this little kid that's born with a
little inch of flesh. I got that idea from a cartoon where the mother
looks absolutely exhausted and the midwife is holding a baby up and
saying, 'Oh, this is why they're so powerful'. There's this little dick
sticking out. It was an excellent cartoon. You laughed at it
immediately. This is why cartoons put things into a capsule, in one
statement, something that you can then open out into a whole situation.
Both men and women laugh at that. They can't do anything else. The
average man does not think of himself with a willy an inch long. More
women, than men would like to believe, laugh at where the penis leads
men. Laughter apparently does all kinds of things to the brain and the
body that they don't even really know about. Laughing with somebody at
the same situation, rather than at somebody, works."
For me,
Peggy Seeger is a folk litmus test for conformity, non-conformity and
complications. She is not the stereotype I once perceived her to be. Our
conversations were punctuated with laughter, like when I corpsed while
asking about Give 'Em An Inch and had to admit that, unbidden, images of flying phalluses had entered my head. But that's a story for another time.
-- Sofi Mogensen Assistant Editor: fRoots Magazine