Peggy Seeger purist queen of folk

Peggy Margaret Seeger, the queen of folk revival has released an album of electronic dance versions of her songs in 2012.

Peggy Seeger, born in the New York, USA in 1935, is the daughter of the modernist composer Ruth Porter Crawford and musical folklorist Charles Seeger.  After studying at Radcliffe College, in 1955 Peggy left to travel the world. She spent most of her life in Britain, after auditioning for a folk group and moving in 1956. She grew up with Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and went on to become the most powerful woman in folk.Peggy’s life is mixed with art and passion, family and separation, tragedy, celebration and force of love.

“At 10:30 am, banjo in hand, I tottered in  on high heels to meet my next thirty-three years, a future awaiting with Ewan MacColl.” She writes in First Time Ever.

First Time Ever is named after a song MacColl wrote for Seeger in 1957, “The first times Ever I Saw Your Face” – a love affair which has changed the significance for her over time, passing through embarrassment, grief, and even celebration.

“Never bored as a child, never bored in pre-teens,” She recalls.

The attraction between MacColl (41)  and Seeger was instant.  Seeger was multi-instrumentalist with a strong sinuous voice.  At their London folk club “Rock Island Line” that led to a controversial policy that singers should only perform music to which they had a cultural link.

She and MacColl toured the nation in the 1950s and 1960s making a series of programmes about traditional music for the BBC, The Radio Ballads.

In the 1980s she was living in Beckenham, London with three children, a Scottish mother-in-law and an ailing MacColl, with series of mini-strokes towards death in 1989.

Even now at 82, despite the health problems she  continues to performing,

“Music creates meaning each time it is heard,” an impressionistic and enthralling tour of the “strange country of Myself”.

 First Time Ever: A Memoir by Peggy Seeger Faber £20/$29.95, 464 pages.