“It Was A Natural Voice”
PEGGY SEEGER expands on the unique gifts of Anne Briggs.
“SHE HAD A brilliant voice,” says Peggy Seeger as she tries to get to the heart of Anne Briggs’ lasting appeal. While playing with her then husband Ewan MacColl, Seeger first saw Briggs on-stage in Nottingham in 1962, and while she could sense the then 17-year-old’s acute distress at being in front of an audience, she also noticed a steely resolve. “She didn’t try to engage with us. I could feel her nervousness. And she did what the real folk singers do when they sing songs that are close to themselves. She just stood and looked out into space.”
That sense of distance is crucial to Briggs’ art.
“It was a natural voice,” Seeger explains. “It wasn’t trying to interpret emotionally. One of the strong things about folk songs is that you sing them straight. You don’t try and tell people how to respond.
You’re presenting a skeleton of a story, and each listener can put their own story onto that skeleton, and that’s the way Annie sang. She looked into the distance and threw the skeleton at you.”
That astringent, unaccompanied approach was crucial to Briggs’ appeal but Seeger felt that times changed in the early ’70s, with audiences hipped to Bob Dylan and Fairport Convention unable to deal with folk in its purest form. “Unaccompanied singers didn’t have it easy once the guitar made it,” she says.
However, in the context of the early folk revival, the direct line that Briggs seemed to possess to her material was something wondrous.
“The voice carried it because the voice was non-committal and lovely, it really was,” Seeger says. “And that’s the way an awful lot of field singers sang, the ones that we collected songs from. They just sat there solidly, sometimes with their hands on their knees and looked into the distance like Annie did, and just let the song out.”
“Unaccompanied singers didn’t have it easy once the guitar made it.”
PEGGY SEEGER