SOUND & VISION
Legendary folk singer Peggy Seeger, 86, on what she would say to her mother and the role models who shaped her love of music
The first record you bought?
I hardly bought records, they were given to us. The first one I really remember was Harry Smith’s anthology of American folk songs, a wonderful collection of bits and pieces of American folk song.
If you could have a drink with anyone dead or alive who would it be?
Good heavens. My mother (the American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger). We didn’t drink, but I lost her when I was 18 and I would have given anything for her to have seen what her children have done.
Which book had the biggest impact on you?
Human Comedy by Balzac. I have all 52 volumes and I have read through them twice in my life. Balzac, from the 1700s into the 1800s, documented whole sections of French society and the same characters run through all 52 volumes. It’s the most wonderful piece of writing, and it took me a year and a half to read through it the first time. The other would be A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, which is fabulous. I cried all the way through.
Who are your musical role models?
I learned my vocal style from a number of American role models like Texas Gladden, Molly Jackson and the Carter Family (above). I listened to them and also my brothers Pete and Mike. And Ewan Maccoll of course. I don’t just have one role model, I’ve learned from so many of them.
What was the first gig you ever went to?
I was seven, at a Washington DC boxing ring the singers were Pete Seeger and Lead Belly.
On The Pogues
(Of all her late husband’s many songs, Dirty Old Town is among the most famous but Seeger doesn’t rate the most famous version by The Pogues) To my mind only one or two have done it properly. The Pogues bawled it. It needs the loneliness and the sorrow of what we’ve done to the earth. I think that song’s time is going to come up again.