EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Peggy Seeger
by Kris Wilkinson
June 2023
“So..Rocking Magpie? Why would you want to speak to somebody like me?” Peggy asks.
“What?” I thought, “Interview a living Folk legend and extraordinary crafter of songs?”
“Absolutely!”
Our website, The Rocking Magpie loves great music from many different genres and Peggy represents the Folk genre, although she most definitely cannot be pinned down in one simple genre.
She writes ballads, lullabies, ragtime, traditional folk, uptempo, political attention grabbers, heartbreakers…she is all things unto herself.
If an idea has sticking power, she writes about it.
Peggy: So! What do you want to ask me about?
MGTR: I have pulled together a couple of questions for you. I tried to think outside the box because I suspect you get asked the same couple of questions many times over.
Peggy: (big sigh) Oh, you bet.
I congratulate Peggy on her number one folk album released in 2021 called ‘First Farewell’. I draw her attention to a song I enjoyed ‘Gotta Get Home By Midnight’ (which I swear could have been written by a Ragtime great or a Blues legend).
I particularly love the lyric
‘…Eyes are the colour of time’
and so I mention this and ask Peggy if any artists have inspired her through the years or does she herself have a favourite lyric?
Her answer is no surprise – she is a steely eyed craftsperson when it comes to songwriting and has no time for ‘good enough’ lyrics.
But first she tells me where that particular lyric came from.
And I will say now that I suspect I could chat with Peggy an hour once a week, every week for a year and she would still have volumes of incredible stories from her time as a Folk singer travelling the world; and so she shares her story recalling it with clarity and fine detail.
‘Well, first of all, ‘my eyes are the colour of time’, that was said to me by an Israeli boy in 1956, it would have been in March, and I was in Denmark staying at a youth hostel and he was going away to the Finnish logging camps because that’s where the money was.
He was putting the touch on me and asking if I would go along with him.
He said ‘there’s good money there’ and I asked what would I be doing and he said ‘you would probably be working in the kitchens and the laundries’.
Here Peggy deadpans ‘Oh goodie’ and I have to laugh.
She continues, ‘‘That was what a woman would go to a logging camp for. He was eager to have me as his lover and he would say ‘your eyes are the colour of time’.
Fortunately Alan Lomax made me a better offer and I came to England instead.’
I comment that had she gone to the logging camp we probably wouldn’t be talking.
(Thank goodness Peggy had no dreams of working in a Danish logging camp laundry!)
She circles back to my question.
‘I haven’t necessarily been ‘inspired by’ other artists directly.
I am an intense critic of craftsmanship and of picking out weak lines and feeling that that one weak line just ruins it.
(I often tell students beware of the ‘weak line’ because it will haunt you. You’ll cringe when you hear that song and think you could have done better).
*Tune in soon for a future conversation with Peggy about the craft of songwriting!
Peggy continues, ‘That’s one of the reasons I love Paul Simon. I haven’t picked a hole in any of his songs. It really takes something to please me.
I do have favourite songwriters, but many songwriters, myself included, can produce amazing works of art and then they’ll produce something that is SIMPLY ‘not good’.
I have produced some songs that are not good and fortunately I had Ewan MacColl or I had my present partner to critique my writing, or I had some innate thing inside my head that said to me ‘why hasn’t anybody picked up on this’ and so I withdraw those songs.
I soon realised very quickly that songs tell me themselves that they’re worth finishing.
I haven’t found any of Paul Simon’s, I haven’t found any of Danny Ellis’, whom you probably have not heard of but I will tell you about the best overall CD.
For me, I don’t like superlatives. I think it’s a man thing.
They have to be better, they have to be louder, they have to be quicker, they have to be smoother, it’s always the best, the best, the best.
Women, I think we share more and realise there’s lots of us who are the best which of course is an oxymoron.
To me the one album that I can listen to all the way through without a single cringe moment is Danny Ellis’ album called ‘800 Voices’.
It’s the story in twelve songs about him being dumped in a Christian Brothers orphanage in Dublin when he was eight years old. His single mother took a new lover and this man didn’t want Danny around so she took him to an orphanage and said she’d be back at Christmas and he’s sixty and still waiting for her to come back.
It is an astounding and amazing album.
He knew how to construct it and sequence it. He takes you from his first sight of 800 boys playing in the playground, every song is different.
She goes on to tell me more about this album and of course I’ll be tracking it down because if it’s one of Peggy’s favourites it absolutely must be worth a listen
‘If I want to listen to a song more than once, that says something to me. Another one of my favourite songwriter’s is Peter and Lou Berryman.
In my travels as a touring Folksinger, I meet a lot of Folksingers.
Some that never make it but make it in their own circle.
Peter Berryman is one – I want his brain saved for prosperity.
If you get my previous album ‘Everything Changes’ there’s a song on that called ‘Do You Believe in Me’. That’s one of his songs.
The two of them, they were married at one point but they divorced but they still sing together.
She makes the tunes and plays the accordion, he plays the guitar, every single song either has one or both of them singing, but these songs are absolutely zany!
The logic of them or lack of logic is unbelievable! (she laughs).
I also like Flanders and Swann. They are so English. They are so musical and so clever.
I haven’t heard a bad song of theirs. And then there is the odd one offs and I have collected a database of 5000 songs and I have collected them from EVERYWHERE.
So as a song crafter, I’m writing for the new album, and I’m writing with my daughter-in-law and we work very well together.
There’s one song that has taken six months to perfect between the two of us.
We work differently. She’s a trained musician and absolutely superb and her input is different to mine as a Folksinger.
I spent the last week trying to pick out one note, a final note in the penultimate verse and I think I’ve finally got it.’
We continue talking about craft and come full circle back to Paul Simon in which she adds ‘he knows what to leave out.’
I bring up the song The Invisible Woman. I ask her amongst all the ‘new talent, young talent, emerging talent’ what inspires her to keep writing?
‘Other people, and things that are happening (in life, in the world).
I could not have written ‘The Invisible Woman’ without my older son, Neill.
We had never written a song together previously. So he came up and laid on the sofa and neither of us had an idea.
So he’s lying there and he says ‘You know mom, I’m sixty, I feel invisible.’
Now, I never met a sixty year old man that felt invisible.
I think he meant in the way people pay attention to him, especially younger women.
I’ve felt invisible for twenty five years but chiefly invisible to young people and especially to men. I’m so happy to be invisible to men!! (she laughs)
So I said if you want invisibility try being a woman of eighty or eighty five. So he quite happily just turned it over to being an invisible woman.
So we both worked on that song. So I wanted to mention that he started that idea and we both worked on it.’
She continues about inspiration. ‘What does inspire me is different song forms. For this new album I’m working on I desperately need a funny song. I’ve got the subject – but I’m no spoiler. It’s something that I feel very strongly about but I’m going to treat it with humour.’
Peggy does not hide her feelings when it comes to political views or anything else, for that matter. We spoke more about Paul Simon’s writing and his ability to write a song where it starts out about one thing and then turns a corner and is about something else.
Peggy calls these ‘wedge songs’.
‘On the album First Farewell, ‘How I Long For Peace’ is a wedge song.
It opens up with the chorus and you get an idea of general longing for peace. People don’t want to talk about capitalism, or hypocrisy or greed, they’re not expecting what comes in verse four.
We all want peace.
The wedge, you get to people who don’t want to talk politics but who feel that they want peace.
Then you have to go into why we don’t have peace. It even goes into the fact we will never have peace until men abandon fighting.
I sang it as a new song to several people, men and women, and there were a number of men who objected to that line.
They said what about Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher, yeah ok, you can pick them out because there are so few of them.
They felt the line should be ‘until WE abandon fighting…. No, absolutely not!’ she says emphatically.
We continue on this topic for a few minutes. Peggy says to me ‘Men are fighting and the hypocrisy and greed, both men and women, and I’m trying to write songs that are inherently political yet trying to keep hopeful.
I don’t write apocalypse songs anymore. We all know how bad things are.’
I tell her that her latest version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ with just her on piano is just wonderful and steals my breath away.
(If you haven’t heard it yet please stop reading and go listen to it now. Thank me later.)
She thanks me for the compliment. I tell her I can feel it all happening as she sings it.
Her voice is so rich and emotive. I ask her how this newest version came to be.
‘Well, I love the song. I’ve written a book, a memoir called First Time Ever, and I devoted a whole chapter to that song.
But you need to read the whole book to understand the context.
It’s an easy read.
So, when Ewan sang it to me, I know where he got the idea for the song.
It’s based on an old folk melody, which we can talk about another time.
I always sang it like a bird with a gentle guitar accompaniment and there was a great freedom singing it like that because my voice could do it.
My voice won’t do it now. I’m taking singing lessons now to adapt to my new voice.
So I hadn’t sung it for twenty years because I couldn’t.
I have a piano where I transpose it down and just idly play.
I took it down to A flat, and I found I could just settle into it and let my mind drift over the two life partners that I’ve had and I sing it to both of them.
There are different aspects to both of them.
My mantra is ‘been there done both’ in love. (Peggy has changed part of the last verse from ‘And I knew our joy would fill the earth and last ’til the end of time’ to ‘I thought our joy would fill the earth and last ‘til the end of time’…it’s a heartbreaking moment.)
I sank into playing the song and it was such a pleasure. And when Neill and I were talking about what we would do on our tour of last year, 2022, in Autumn, five of them were with Neill and the previous concerts were with my younger son.
When Neill heard it he said that it had to go into my concert, just me on piano and he on a little synth.
I’ll tell you what really hits me, this song is a warhorse. It’s been ridden by over a thousand other singers each in their own style.
I’ve heard it in gospel, reggae, heavy metal, as a rap, as fast country bluegrass banjo, and then there’s Roberta Flack, and others.
It’s amazing that a song can last through all of that.
Some of the pop songs have, I guess … Smoke Gets In Your Eyes for example.
Some are tied to their own accompaniment but mine wasn’t tied down so the other artists were able to put it in their own style.
For a song to last through all of that.
It’s amazing. I’ll tell you what hasn’t lasted since my version is that the melody of the first line and the melody of the last line are not the ones that Ewan MacColl wrote.
If you listen to my version, you hear the tune that he wrote. If you listen to Roberta Flack and to Peter, Paul and Mary, the first line and the last line and the cadence is different.
Maybe it just needed somebody with a new take of it?
And maybe a ‘face’ needed to sing it?
What I really would have liked would have been some kind of conversation between myself and Roberta where the voice talks to the face because we’re both invested in the song big time.
But that can’t happen now because she’s ill (For those that don’t know Roberta, very sadly, has been diagnosed with ALS and can no longer sing).’
I tell her that my hope for this new version is that a new generation will discover Peggy through it because of its simplicity and its power and to just hear a woman’s voice honestly sing.
She responds, ‘People hop into bed so easily these days. They didn’t when this was written. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice.
But people still fall hopelessly, helplessly in love and that’s what this song is about.’
With my remaining time I ask Peggy about modern technology and streaming (Peggy did a regular series during lockdown).
‘Well it took me a long time to learn how to do that. The new technology, for one, is putting on makeup.
I didn’t used to put makeup on to go on stage, I just got up on stage, that’s what you do as a Folk singer. But I put makeup on for those programmes, I think I did twenty of them, Peggy at Five on Sunday.
It was merely an attempt to give people who follow me something to look forward to at five o’clock on Sundays.
And it kept me in trim because I would be looking up songs.
I might start it again because I feel a bit like I’m on lockdown now because I don’t have any concerts. Right now I have conversations.
And just getting ready for that, with the merchandise, and I’m going by myself, and it’s heavy stuff. I’m 87 going on 88.’ (I can only hope to be as whip smart and capable at Peggy’s age!)
At this point Peggy graciously asks about me and what I do.
I mention I met a British man and listening to that accent charmed me.
Peggy says, ‘Tell me about it.’ and we both laugh.
So we have this in common; and writing and appreciating good songwriting too.
That will be part two of this interview, a chat focused mainly on the craft of songwriting.
I recommend you take notes because Peggy knows what she’s doing; and is still writing circles around people more than half her age.
Aren’t we lucky to live in the age of folks like Paul Simon and Peggy Seeger?
I absolutely think so.
And can we just touch on the fact that in casual conversation Peggy threw out the line ‘That song is a warhorse. It’s been ridden by over a thousand singers.’
Incredible with words, isn’t she?
*A follow up interview by Kris will be published by the end of June (hopefully)
Interview by Kris Wilkinson
http://www.supertinyrecords.com/
Peggy Seeger
http://www.peggyseeger.com/
The Rocking Magpie 