In 1960, Peggy Seeger was approached by a shy autograph hunter who wore a neat tie and carried a briefcase. The folk singer and her husband, the songwriter Ewan MacColl, were in Minneapolis for a concert: she recognised the kid as a fan who came to their shows whenever they passed through the city.
“I met Bob Dylan before he was Bob Dylan. He came for my autograph in Minnesota,” she says. “He was a [fan], but he hasn’t given me much attention as my being an influence. I don’t know if he talks a great deal about his influences.”
Seeger is speaking from her home in the UK, where the American singer has lived most of her adult life. Shortly to turn 90, she is chipper and thoughtful – and looking forward to coming to Dublin next week for TradFest. Before that she hopes to catch a screening of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, in which Timothée Chalamet portrays a young Dylan on the cusp of megastardom.
“The folk scene gave him his leg up,” Seeger says of the period covered by the film. “He borrowed mercilessly from the folk scene. He used folk tunes for some of his songs.”
Seeger had grown up in Washington, DC, but by 1960 she was living in London with MacColl, who had pursued her relentlessly despite being married to his second wife, Jean Newlove. (Kirsty MacColl, his late daughter with Newlove, would later become an acclaimed artist in her own right.) At that time MacColl and Seeger were running a folk club in Soho; in 1962 they brought Dylan over for one of his first concerts outside the United States.
“Dylan didn’t have an aura. I didn’t remember him until I was reminded the next time I went to that town in Minnesota when the organiser said, ‘You remember that little kid who used to follow you around, the one with the briefcase and the tie?’ And I said, ‘Oh yes, I remember him, because he was everywhere when we were there for two or three days, just following,’” she says.
“And he said, ‘You know who that is?’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t remember his name.’ And so my friend Norman Stockwell” – publisher of the Progressive, a left-leaning magazine associated with the folk scene – “he said, ‘Well, that’s Bob Dylan.’ And I said, ‘Who?’ I didn’t even know that Bob Dylan had become Bob Dylan, because he had a different name then.”
The artist born Robert Zimmerman may not have acknowledged his debt to her, but Seeger is widely regarded as one of the foundational voices of modern folk. Her father, the musicologist Charles Seeger, was a friend of Alan Lomax, whose field recordings of American folk artists would serve as an invaluable resource to later generations of musicians. Her mother, Ruth Crawford, was a composer and pianist. Her half-brother, Pete Seeger, achieved fame as an early folk singer and social activist. (He is played by Edward Norton in A Complete Unknown.)
Dirty Old Town to Ewan and to me was a lonely song – a lonely song of a lost teenage boy, with all of the lust and the longing and the confusion of teenage boyhood
Born into privilege in 1935, she grew up in a big house in a swanky Washington neighbourhood with servants and an expansive garden. But the glossy existence was built on a financially precarious reality – and after her mother died, when Seeger was 18, their gilded lifestyle crumbled.
The final blow was when her father was hounded out of his academic position for holding left-wing views. The McCarthyite witch hunt of leftists was in full swing, and the Seegers – liberal, artistic and outspoken – were an easy target. Unable to pay for Peggy’s college tuition, Charles arranged for her to study abroad – which is how she ended up in London.
“We lived on a financial tightrope. It was necessary for my mother’s piano teaching to live near where the money was, and it was necessary for my father to have an image of himself, of course, as [living in] a certain area. And so they owed money,” Seeger says.
“The tightrope was destroyed in 1953 when my mother died, and when my father was just about to be pursued by McCarthy, and that blew the family apart. And so we had to downsize very quickly and everything changed. That’s why I didn’t finish my college. That’s why I was sent abroad to live with my older brother. That’s why I met Ewan MacColl. So if my mother hadn’t died and McCarthy hadn’t existed, my life would have been utterly different.”
Seeger’s musical accomplishments span generations. She was MacColl’s muse, collaborator and inspiration for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the great anthem they wrote together – later famously covered by Roberta Flack (whose version Seeger does not rate). She and MacColl, who died in 1989, also wrote The Ballad of Springhill, about a 1958 mining disaster in Nova Scotia, which was subsequently reworked by The Dubliners as Springhill Mining Disaster, and then by U2, who played it on a 1987 Late Late Show tribute to the icons of Irish folk.
“I have heard it. I quite liked it,” she says of U2’s version. “I just wish they’d put it on an album. Because that would have gotten me some royalties. The Ballad of Springhill is now the anthem of the town of Springhill, and that’s probably one of my best-known songs.”
She and MacColl would also regularly perform Dirty Old Town, MacColl’s famed ode to his home city of Salford, which he wrote for his 1949 play Landscape with Chimneys, about the impact of the Depression on northern England.
The song was later given an “Irish” makeover by The Pogues when they covered it in 1985. Today it’s often mistaken as an anthem for Dublin, citizens of the capital taking a baffling pride in the idea of their city as dank and grubby. Seeger says that Kirsty MacColl didn’t like that jaunty version, believing it mislaid the sadness that rippled through the original. (Not that this would stop Kirsty singing with Shane MacGowan and The Pogues on Fairytale of New York.)
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“Dirty Old Town to Ewan and to me was a lonely song – a lonely song of a lost teenage boy, with all of the lust and the longing and the confusion of teenage boyhood, in the poverty and the drama of Salford of 1930, the Depression. It’s a lonely song. And we found that most of the people who were singing it ... they sing it as if it’s a dance song or a march. And that’s what The Pogues’ version did.
“Kirsty brought her manager, who was also the manager of The Pogues at the time, to our folk club. She asked us to sing Dirty Old Town. She turned to her manager and said, ‘So you can see how it really should be sung.’”
Arthritis means Seeger can no longer strum a guitar; instead, she plays the piano on stage. She will also shortly release what she expects to be her final album, Teleology. The title relates to the concept that things happen for a reason and that fate plays a guiding role in all our lives.
“It’s a philosophical idea that everything ... has worked out as it was supposed to be. So that we would be where we are now. One of the songs is called Teleology. [Its message is] that everything that happened in the past was because we were meant to be here.”
Seeger is upfront about the challenges of ageing – on her wry, resilient 2021 album, First Farewell, she talks about how you become “invisible” as you grow older. But, for all the inconveniences, she is grateful for having never lost her ability to sing.
“In the beginning, when I travelled with Ewan MacColl, there were no microphones. And so you had to reach the back of the hall. And if you didn’t have a stage you were singing into the bones of 200 people’s heads. I raised my voice very high. One person I shan’t name once called me a shrieking Cassandra. So I’ve moved my voice down, but there are some [songs] which are reasonably high on the new album. My voice hasn’t gone. Bob Dylan’s voice is gone.”
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Pete Seeger’s voice had gone by the time of his death in 2014, she says. She shrugs and smiles. “Mine, for some reason, hasn’t.”
Peggy Seeger will perform at TradFest’s Women of Note event, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin on Wednesday, January 22nd; she will also take part in a conversation at Áras Chrónáin cultural centre, in Clondalkin in Dublin, on Thursday, January 23rd
