Peggy Seeger

American singer, banjo player, songwriter, traditional ballad interpreter, political campaigner. Peggy Seeger is one of folk music's most iconic figures. From a famous family of folklorists (father Charles Seeger was a musicologist, mother Ruth Crawford was a composer, while her elder brothers Pete and Mike Seeger also became important folk singers), Peggy was entrenched in America's folk heritage almost from the day she first drew breath. Some of the music's most legendary figures - including Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Alan Lomax and Rambling Jack Elliott - made regular visits to the family home and had a profound effect on her. On a trip to Europe in her teens she suddenly got a call from the collector Alan Lomax asking her to come to London to play banjo for a TV show he was making. It was there she met her close collaborator and life partner Ewan MacColl, with whom she went on to run one of Britain's first folk clubs, record many albums and make the hugely influential Radio Ballads BBC series which, by interspersing traditional and original music with actuality interviews on different industries, changed the way documentaries were made. The two of them were also renowned for their left wing politics, anti-war campaigns and controversial views about the way folk music should be performed (their Singers Club once introduced a rule banning performers from playing anything but music from their own cultural heritage) and they set up the Critics Group as a master class to analyse performances. It was Seeger who first sang the international hit The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - written for her by MacColl - but she also became an important songwriter in her own right, notably acclaimed for her song I'm Gonna Be An Engineer, which was adopted as a feminist anthem. After the death of MacColl in 1989, Peggy returned to live and work in the US for a decade before returning to the UK to continue her performing and recording career, which included an unlikely experiment with dance music with Broadcaster On Folksploitation (2012). She became seriously ill but recovered in 2014 to achieve a new career high working with her son Calum MacColl on an album of brand new songs, Everything Changes.

Please enable Javascript to view this page competely.