RE: THE PEGGY SEEGER SONGBOOK, excerpt from a letter from Gene Shay,
Philadelphia folk promoter and radio show host.
Dear Peggy,
What a great section on songwriting. It should be required reading
for all the hordes of youngins trying to showcase at these Alliance
meetings. (Let 'em learn from a master). Thanks for the songbook.
Gene Shay
Telegraph Review 16/03/02 (England)
Five years ago, folk music had all the kudos of the real ale-soaked
beards and wafting, paisley caftans sorted by too many of its exponents.
But in 1999, Kate Rusby, a young singer-songwriter who sang traditional-sounding
ballads in a beguiling Yorkshire accent, was nominated for a Mercury
Prize and her CDs started appearing in the chrome racks of a new
generation. The stage - or soapbox is set for the publication of
songbooks by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger.
We tend to think of the folk movement as wilfully anachronistic
and cosily crafty. Folk songs are built around melodies that are
democratically
easy to sing and play. They include a lot of fol-di-rols and baby-talk
choruses but their apparent harmlessness was often a vehicle to
spread subversion. Many old songs were working-class complaints
about being sent out to till the fields or march off to war at
tuppence a week for the lord of them manor while he was busy claiming
his droit de seigneur in yon ivy-decked spinney. For Seeger and
MacColl, the folk song was more often than not a protest song.
The word "songbook" is a misnomer
for two unusual collections, which can be read as biography, social
document, political manifesto and testament to a 35-year love affair.
Ewan MacColl - nee Jimmie Miller - was born in Salford
in 1915. He educated himself at the Manchester Public Library during
the Great Depression and read compulsively to counter insomnia throughout
his life. He was involved in theatre and agitprop before turning
to singing and songwriting full time.
Seeger was raised in more middle-class comfort in America. Her father,
Charles, was a professor of music, and her mother, Dio, was an
avant-garde composer. Her folk-singing half-brother, Pete, ensured
that their house was visited by such earthy folk-stars as Woody
Guthrie. "Dio," she says, "would set the theme of the Moonlight
Sonata to
a sequence of folksong chords with a thumping bass, or would play
Barbara Allen in the style of a Bach invention. She was
intrigued by the
connection between mathematics and music
and transmitted
her excitement to me. Unless you've played The
Irish Washerwoman in C-sharp in the Lydian mode
at the age of ten you haven't lived."
Ewan was 20 years older than Peggy when they met in 1956 and he
was married to his second wife by whom he had two children, Hamish
and Kirsty. She was the inspiration for his most famous song, The
First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, which sold millions
when it was recorded by Roberta Flack. She returned to America but
came back to him in 1957. They had three children and spent 24 hours
a day together until his death in 1989.
Peggy says the publication of these large books, which include the
most "singable" of their songs,
is her final gift to Ewan. The photographs with which she illustrates
the MacColl book, capture the mood of the times and she has written
funny and passionate introductions to most songs. She explains
the events that sparked them off and laughs at herself and Ewan
when their arguments or language have become outdated. Sometimes
she repeats herself and her tone, like that of many folk songs,
can cloy.
Ewan was a Communist and his songs are often about men going to
work on the railroads or in factories. When it comes to love, he
is
often bawdy and refers to his "artillery".
But his love of words is still enormously entertaining and politically
powerful. He's at his best when he satirises
Margaret Thatcher practising her elocution on the cat and [lists]
the extra jobs for undertakers that will be generated by nuclear
power.
Seeger, as she admits, can at her worst be over-wordy, musically
frilly and preachy. But at her best, she produced such feminist
classics as I Want to be an Engineer and
she caricatured John Major's sinister smiling
response to on-screen criticism - like a "slow,
slow velociraptor". My favourite aspect of folk
music, though, is the way its narrative nature can mark in our
minds the small stories that make up the bigger picture, as in
the song Seeger wrote for the miners who were killed in the 1965
Cambrian Colliery disaster:
Thirty-one voices cried out in the darkness
Thirty one lamps blew out in the gale;
Thirty-one check discs are left in the lamp room
Thirty-one miners lie low in the vale.
By singing these songs, we remember those men, and MacColl and Seeger
too.
(Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph, March 16 2002)
DIRTY LINEN EM/PS review
THE ESSENTIAL EWAN MacColl SONGBOOK: Sixty years of Songmaking
complied and annotated by Peggy Seeger (Oak Publications ISBN
0- 8256-0321 (2001); $29.95)
THE PEGGY SEEGER SONGBOOK: Forty years of Songmaking,
by Peggy Seeger (Oak Publication ISBN 0-8256-0344-7 (1998); 429.
(excerpted:)
These two massive tomes are a testament to one of the first couples
of 20th century folk music, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. MacColl,
born Jimmie Miller, was the son of a Scottish iron moulder whose radical
politics forced him to leave Scotland in 1910 to find work. Young
Jimmie, therefore, grew up in Salford and nearby Manchester, towns
he later immortalized in songs like "Dirty Old Town" and
"The Manchester Rambler." He founded the well-known Theatre
Workshop and after World War Two, became increasing involved in folk
music. Seeger was born to a very musical family. Her father was the
musicologist Charlie Seeger and her mother the singer and musician
Ruth Crawford Seeger. Both became very active in folk music in the
1930's And brought their children along with them in recording trips
and study voyages of all kinds. Peggy, her brother Mike and her half
brother Pete are the ones most associated with folk music today. In
1956, MacColl met Seeger at a rehearsal for a TV production on which
both were singing . . .he remembered his first meeting with Seeger
as a life-changing moment and wrote about it in his most successful
song " The First Time I Saw Your Face. In 1958, the two met again
. . . and settled down together for 31 years until MacColl's death
in 1989.
. . . one of the very refreshing things about this book is Seeger's
unsentimental honesty about which songs are dated, which she never
liked, and which are pretty good. So for people who want the classics
of MacColl's repertoire, this book isn't strictly necessary. But as
a glimpse of the process of writing songs, this book is both fascinating
and instructive. How did MacColl transform old Irish songs into social
commentary, how did he apply Scots' lullabies to political demonstrations
and how did he convert the landscapes of Britain's inner cities into
places of mystery and romance? It's all here to be read, played, sung
and pondered and for that part it's highly recommended.
. . .MacColl's presence is as deeply felt in this book (Seeger's
collection) as Seeger's presence was in the MacColl book. Indeed,
the most moving songs here, like "New Spring Morning," deal
with their great love for one another. It's also interesting to compare
the two books and look at events in their lives through their songs
. . .Seeger's collection is just the sort of book to get you in touch
with your inner earnest, eco-feminist singer-songwriter.
Steve Winnick, Dirty Linen, August-September 2002
FOLK ROOTS PS/EM REVIEW August 2002
The Peggy Seeger Songbook - Warts & All: 40 Years Of Songmaking
(Oak Publications US ISBN 0 8256 0320 X. UK ISBN 0 7119 6291 X)
The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook - 60 Years Of Songmaking
(Oak Publications US ISBN 0 8256 0321 8. UK ISBN 0 7119 6292 8)
Peggy Seeger ranks as one of the most important people who ever graced
and shaped the British folk scene. Other Americans like Jack Elliott,
Alan Lomax, Hedy West et al came and went. She stayed. In so doing,
she raised standards like few others. Seeger belonged to a family
that was far more than her half-brother Pete or her full-brother Mike.
She talks about her parents, Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger
in detail. This collection is nothing like her 1964 collection for
Oak, Folk Songs Of Peggy Seeger, it's full of memorable songs, including
Primrose Hill, There's Better Things To Do (a read-it reaction to
arriving in England in 1956), her rewording of Lonnie Donegan's My
Old Man's A Dustman, Wasteland Lullabye, the very important I'm Gonna
Be An Engineer ("you'd think I'd been brooding on discrimination
and prejudice all my life," she remarks), Song For Charles Parker
and so on. Her explanations and memories of engagement capture the
mood of the times and provide a pr'cis of the energy and politicisation
of those various struggles and the folk revival. Much of The Peggy
Seeger Songbook is about the politics of living. It makes for a wonderful
book, but it does not compare with The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook.
She did better by him than she did by herself, which is a cause for
sadness and an indication of her graciousness. Peggy Seeger deserves
much praise and many readers with these two volumes.
Ewan MacColl was a man whose art reached huge numbers through the
folk clubs, untold millions through the wireless, and greater numbers
still, through the collusion between recording and radio. It was his
songwriting that brought him his hugest audience. First Time Ever
I Saw Your Face remains his greatest hit - and is the first song in
The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook - but with the act of singing
it down the phone to Peggy Seeger in Los Angeles, he effectively handed
it to her, no matter what the Berts or Robertas did for his royalty
statements. However much he was a heel, a schoolmaster and self-reinventor,
art poured from him. Some of it was of its time and sometimes it served
its time in the front line before being tactically withdrawn. Yet
as these scores of songs remind, his could be art of a high calibre.
An "amplifier for everyday speech", hope sprang eternal
for MacColl, even if it was the hope that he was hooking up with the
numinous, much like Shakespeare and Jonson did in their day.
I have no doubt that MacColl knew the value of his best work and
kept one mandarin eye cocked on posterity. Songs such as Sweet Thames,
Flow Softly (a title with the purl of Burns' Flow Gently, Sweet Afton),
30-Foot Trailer, The Moving On Song, Dirty Old Town - all represented
here - are the stuff of greatness. This anthology is instructive in
the varied insights it grants into MacColl's creative juices, whether
the facsimile draft of My Old Man or the mouth-rolled changes from
Famous Flower Of Serving-Men to Shoals Of Herring, his favourite mode
(Dorian, since you wonder) or his unwitting self-plagiarism. Peggy
Seeger does not dodge some of MacColl's unkinder attributes or spare
us his hammy side (after his autobiography Journeyman how could she?),
or his mysteries, such as the possibility that the Alfred Watts of
Newcastle, who 'furnished' Ivor in The Singing Island (1960), may
well have been MacColl himself. There have been earlier MacCollian
songbooks, collections like Shuttle & Cage (1954) and Songs For
The Sixties (1961) that used many mouths to feed them, but this is
the one to which I shall return and use when contemplating the lives,
times and works of Ewan MacColl. Consistency can be the hobgoblin
that paralyses the human mind. MacColl comes out of this volume as
somebody who never stopped learning and even learned how to change.
Ken Hunt, 2002 Folk Roots Magazine, August 2002
BBC Review - Roy Bailey - April 2002
Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger had a profound effect on their contemporaries
in the folk music world that can still be heard today. Oak Publications
have released songbooks that chronicle their lives and work and that
are inextricably linked together. Both deserve serious study as the
songs also selectively chronicle much of the latter half of the twentieth
century. They do much more than that though, they tell us something
of both artists, their co-operation and political commitment. From
Pete Seeger's foreword to The Essential Ewan MacColl, to the closing
pages of The Peggy Seeger Songbook, there is much to learn and wonder
at.
I'm tempted to treat both the books as one for as Peggy writes in
her introduction, "for thirty years their work was inextricably
combined". From reading Peggy's excellent introduction and discussion
of Ewan's life and work you are confident she's telling the truth
- she applauds and criticises; she tells of strengths and weaknesses
and above all, she loves him. There is no need for her to worry about
being biased for as she recognises there is no value-free position
from which to view Ewan's, or indeed, anyone's life!
In addition to their songs both books offer us a discussion about
song writing - looking for the 'right' rhyme, the 'right' word or
expression; writing and rewriting lines until you feel satisfied with
the effort. A condition rarely achieved one suspects, or if so, then
possibly short-lived as time can lead to discovering an alternative
way. I found both books very moving for their honesty. Peggy reveals
a co-operation that was indeed deep and lasting yet not without self
examination and criticism.
In relatively few pages, Peggy manages to convey the importance to
popular culture of the Radio Ballads in particular and their collaborative
work in general. As writers and performers Ewan and Peggy made an
enormous contribution to the emergence and development of the 'folk
song movement' and to the artistic lives of untold numbers of writers
and performers who might otherwise not have had the opportunity to
develop their talents.
These books present excellently crafted contemporary songs that are
a celebration of and a commentary upon Britain in the second half
of the twentieth century. The large coffee-table format features words,
music, song notes, drawings and photographs for around 150 and 200
songs from Peggy and Ewan respectively.
I've long held the view that Ewan MacColl was a leader of a resistance
to the 'Americanisation' of British culture. Britain had and still
has its own songs and music that came from and were sustained by,
a rural and urban working class. Ewan and Peggy are in that tradition.
In this 'struggle' it is ironic that Ewan's most important collaborator
was an American - Peggy Seeger. As she writes, "Ewan and I were
life partners, workmates, friends and lovers..."
I recommend them and their books to you!
Roy Bailey - April 2002
BBC
Online
The Folknik - Faith Petric - November 98
"The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Warts and All .... was some time
in the creation but is now in print! The joy of possessing this book
is enough to make one (me at least) cry. The 149 songs plus one poem
are arranged chronologically, showing the year in which each was written,
1956 through 1997. Some years only one or two, sixteen in 1990. There
is a temptation to skip some 30 pages of introduction - don't do it,
the songs are enriched by knowing of the family, the life and influences.
The book is of course excellently indexed: subject, titles, first
lines; there's even a glossary for translating English words to American.
Besides songs, the book is 'part autobiography, part social and political
history.' It's not our part to critique individual songs; it's assumed
that most folkies have heard some of them - and here they are with
information about the writing of each. Let's just say she is a consummate
song writer, absolutely one of the very very best. There are songs
of social concerns, love, ecology, women's and men's politics -- what's
to mention? If it's in our lives, Peggy has written a song about it.
"It seems to me difficult for anything to enhance the words and music
but the illustrations by Jacky Fleming manage to do this. They are
absolutely delightful!"
(Faith Petric, The Folknik, Vol XXXIV, No. 6, November 1998)
International Alliance
for Women in Music
The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Warts and All, by Roberta Stephen
This is a generous book in size and content (304 pages of music and
36 pages of text), yet it is the short essays by Peggy Seeger that
are the gems of the book. She writes about her childhood and what
music has meant to her throughout her life, and she relates personal
anecdotes and memories. She describes how her mother, composer Ruth
Crawford Seeger, taught her children music not with formal lessons
but with games and unorthodox ways of using familiar tunes, such as
playing a folk song using the entire circle of fifths. The story of
her relationship with her father, Charles, and his first family is
told with affection, charm and candor. The untimely death of her mother
affected Peggy's years at college, as she was responsible for caring
for her younger sister and her father.
Seeger also presents practical advice on song writing. She sometimes
uses traditional folk songs as a means of creating new versions or
borrows ideas from a variety of sources: books, conversations, advertisements
and cartoons. The essay, "In Particular," deals with compositional
problems as well as processes and techniques she has found interesting
or useful. Her account of composing "Guilty" serves as a
reminder that the process of creating any musical work involves self-criticism
and problem solving.
The songs, which are arranged in chronological order, are charmingly
handwritten, and they exhibit the painstaking care of a visual as
well as musical artist. Supplementary notes for each song are illuminating,
providing the work's history and musical roots. The Peggy Seeger Songbook
is stimulating and enjoyable. I highly recommend it to anyone interested
in contemporary folk songs, the Seeger family or song writing in general.
Roberta Stephen is a classically trained singer
who loves folk songs. She is an educator, composer and arranger, and
serves as president of Alberta Keys Music Publishing Company in Calgary,
Canada.
