 |
|||
|
Family and Friends Some of the following material is taken from The Peggy Seeger Songbook.
PEGGY SAYS: My mother, Ruth Crawford, was short and round in stature, a fiery, creative woman. We called her Dio. She was an avant garde composer but her mind was open to music of any kind. Dio was a superb piano player and a full-time piano teacher...she was intrigued by the connection between mathematics and music and transmitted her excitement to me. I remember spending several challenging weeks learning to play one tune right through the circle of fifths. Then I would take the tune through every mode in every key - and unless you've played The Irish Washerwoman in C# in the Lydian mode at the age of 10, you haven't lived...
PEGGY SAYS: Exciting people were always dropping in - Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, Bess Hawes, Henry and Sidney Cowell, John and Alan Lomax, Lee Hays, composers and writers, assorted refugees from Hitler's Germany...and, of course, beloved Pete, our tall exotic half-brother, with his long, long-necked banjo and his big, big feet stamping at the end of his long, long legs. Dio said Pete was better for us than our teachers and she kept us home from school whenever he turned up. He'd sit and talk and sing and we'd stay up late and toast marshmallows and bawl out the choruses and try and lay our hands over the strings and de-tune the pegs while he played...
PEGGY SAYS: At the age of nearly 21, on March 25, 1956 at 10:30 in the morning, I entered a basement room in Chelsea, London, and sealed my fate. Ewan MacColl was sitting on the other side of the room. Twenty years my senior, he was a singer and songwriter par excellence... We were together 24 hours a day for three decades, two people rolled compatibly into one... We had three children: Neill (1959), Calum (1963), and Kitty (1972... In 1979 Ewan's heart trouble - and my stress problems - began... His voice and his courage were superb--it was his heart that betrayed him, as it had in 1956. He died in hospital on October 22, 1989. PEGGY SAYS: I first met Irene Pyper-Scott (then called Irene Scott) on a concert stage in Belfast in 1964 ... she has become my partner and friend. We began as friends when she moved to England in the late 1960s and began to sing together when we formed the women’s group JADE. We attended demonstrations together at Greenham Common, South Africa House, Trafalgar Square ad infinitum, and began to sing together regularly when Ewan was ill and wasn’t well enough to take part in our duo concerts. After Ewan’s death, she picked me up and dusted me off and we became more than friends. I owe her an incalculable debt of gratitude for her friendship and support since Ewan's death. PEGGY SAYS: It took me a long time to really get going again. I had to clear my mind and heart and avoid being a professional widow. In 1994 I swept through the family house in Beckenham, Kent, and sent more than sixty boxes of Seeger-MacColl work materials off to an archive at Ruskin College in Oxford where the Ruskin angels have catalogued them. I am in the process of depositing my post 1994 materials in an archive at the Library of Congress in Washington. Got to get rid of all this stuff - problem is, I’m still using most of it.
PEGGY SAYS: For years life was stable and consistent. The years since Ewan died have been years of change, insecurity and adventure, of rediscovering myself as a solo entity. It hasn’t been easy.There were a number of other friends who picked me up and dusted me off. Josh Dunson, my agent, has been one of those. He goes way beyond the sense of duty in his work and those who believe the words ‘honest agent’ to be an oxymoron should meet Josh. Judith Tick is another new comrade. As biographer of my mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, she has turned out to be a sister-in-arms. I ploughed up the garden in Beckenham and turned it into a wildlife sanctuary, then sold the house and bought one in Asheville. Killed off the lawn there too and planted a “dinner plate for animals”. There’s a groundhog living underneath the deck now, eating everything in sight. As for other friends - I have never had so many in one place. Asheville is relatively small but growing larger - but I can meet half a dozen friends, acquaintances or familiar faces every single time I go out. There is music here, banjos-guitars-double-bass and singing. Sometimes I think I have lived here either forever or in my dreams. The only reason I would leave is because of the pollution in the air and the noise of traffic on the highways-and they are still building them. They are also Walmart-mad. I am rediscovering the pleasure of singing with Mike and Pete...with the attention that Judith Tick’s book brought to my mother, there have been a myriad of events which involve the family. I treasure these for I was so long in England that I lost touch with the dynamics and personnel of my birth family. Members of the clan are spread out all along the east coast of the USA and I drop in on them, their inlaws and their inlaws’ families whenever I am up that way. My friend Irene (Pyper-Scott) and I sang together for four years (1990-1994) under the name No Spring Chickens and made one of my favourite albums, Almost Commercially Viable (see CD section). She came to the United States in 2001 and opened a restaurant/cafe in Asheville (PYPER'S PLACE, mentioned in What's New 2004). PP shut down in 2003 and we have once again become commuter partners. She's down in New Zealand at present and I've moved to Boston (see What's New 2007). It's still working - just differently. Have I mentioned recording with my sons, Neill and Calum, my favourite musicians and work-mates? The most recent albums, mostly consisting of folksongs and birthday concerts, have been supervised, recorded and directed by them. Artwork and editing by my one and only favourite daughter Kitty. All three are, along with Irene, my best critics. And then there's Babou-the-Cat ... This is not a complete list of family and friends. That circle expands every day.
|
||
|
Related Links: |
|||
|
| Home | Songwriter
| Singer | Activist
| Family & Friends | Itinerary
| This page updated August 8, 2007
|
|||