Pete Seeger

‘Climate change is going to cull us as a species’: folk hero Peggy Seeger on Bob Dylan, the ultimate love song and touring at 90

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The musician and activist answers your questions about her marriage to Ewan MacColl, being the inspiration for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and her mother’s legacy

As told to Dave Simpson

Touring at 90 is amazing. What was a career highlight?
When I was 60 the thought of touring when I was 70 was anathema and the thought of touring at 90 seemed dreadful! The hardest part is sitting in the car. We’re gonna be away six weeks and I’m a walking hospital case. I have meds, a step stool so I can put on compression stockings, and arthritis in both hands. My family treat me like glass, but as soon as I get on stage all these things melt away. I can only tour because I have my crew – my sons Neill and Calum, my daughter-in-law Kerry Harvey-Piper and an excellent sound engineer, Stefan Care. Or rather, they’re not my crew, I’m their singer. I don’t think in terms of career highlights because I could yet muck it up.

What’s it like being the subject of one the greatest love songs ever written [The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face]? 
In my memoir First Time Ever I devote an entire chapter to it! I was estranged from Ewan MacColl, who had been pursuing me when I came to England. It was a very passionate encounter, but I fled back to America because a married man with a five-year-old son he adored wasn’t my ideal. It turned out that both he and his wife had been unfaithful during their marriage, which made it a bit better later on. They are both gone now, and so are their issues.

When Ewan sang it to me over the phone I thought it was a nice love song, but I didn’t connect it with him and me because he was infatuated with me, and while I got to love him, I wasn’t “in love”. I felt exposed when I sang “the first time ever I lay with you”, because I was singing it as if I was him. Our first night together was disastrous! The second was what the first should have been. Then after I fell “in love” with my second life partner, Irene Pyper-Scott, I started to sing it as Ewan must have felt it.

Ewan McCall & Peggy Seeger
‘Our first night together was disastrous!’ … Peggy Seeger with Ewan MacColl. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns


It’s been covered by over a thousand singers and Ewan and I hated most of them. We had a section of our record collection devoted to them called “the chamber of horrors”. When it became a huge hit for Roberta Flack I didn’t like the way she sang it, but I’ve come to like it a lot. A digital composer called Broadcaster has done it as a dance track, using my vocals, which is on my Bandcamp. If you listen to it as a song, it’s the worst version ever, but as a dance track, it’s wonderful.


Did you watch [Bob Dylan biopic] A Complete Unknown? If yes, what did you think? If no, why not? [ThankYou,John/

I haven’t had time to see it yet but I want to after the tour. I met Bob Dylan when he was Robert Zimmerman, a student. I remember him very clearly because the event organiser said: “You know that little fellow who followed you around with his briefcase? He’s Bob Dylan.” At that point I said, “Who’s Bob Dylan?”, but more power to him. He’s like me in that he hasn’t got a “good” voice but he’s got a character voice and he created the character Bob Dylan out of Robert Zimmerman. It makes me wonder if I created myself, because I’m much more of an entertainer now than I was when I was just a singer of folk songs. I do little jokes and monologues and all kinds of things I never would’ve done as the Peggy Seeger of 1962.


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A Complete Unknown: A Listening Companion from Smithsonian Folkways
		

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By Elijah Wald


From the moment he took an interest in folk music, Bob Dylan was intimately engaged with Folkways Records, and that engagement continued throughout his early years in New York and on to the present day. He learned songs from Folkways LPs, wrote songs based on material he’d heard on Folkways, had friends who recorded for Folkways, and eventually, he and others recorded his own songs for the label.


This playlist touches all those bases and, while following Dylan’s journey, gives a sense of the breadth of his influences and the Folkways catalog. Much of the material is from Black tradition, a reminder that before Dylan turned to acoustic folk styles, he was deeply immersed in the rhythm and blues he heard on late-night radio shows, and he first impressed New York audiences and tastemakers as a distinctive young blues artist, a white singer who channeled the spirit of that tradition while reshaping it to fit his own voice and experiences.


When he reached Minneapolis, Dylan discovered a wide range of traditional styles, most notably the Southwestern tradition of Woody Guthrie, which was being carried on by younger artists like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He was also attuned to the music of the rural South that was being collected and explored by musicians like Mike Seeger of the New Lost City Ramblers. They inspired him to head for New York, where he was befriended by local leading lights like Dave Van Ronk, and, on a side trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Eric Von Schmidt. For a while, he worked as a harmonica sideman, reworking Sonny Terry’s licks and collaborating with everyone from Harry Belafonte to the Delta bluesman Big Joe Williams.


Dylan’s early repertoire was a dazzling mix of styles—his first albums, released on Columbia Records, included versions of Jesse Fuller’s “Crazy ’Bout a Woman,” Booker White’s “Fixin’ to Die,” old southern standards like “Corrine, Corrina,” and songs learned from Guthrie and the Carter Family. He soon began adapting and reworking those songs, melding his own lyrics and experiences with traditional tunes and themes: the wistful ballad of “Scarborough Fair” became an evocation of his past in the “north country” of Minnesota; an Irish rebel song, “The Patriot Game,” became a meditation on nationalist exceptionalism, “With God on Our Side.”


When Broadside magazine sparked a new wave of topical songwriting, Dylan leapt to the forefront of a generation of young songwriters, people like Len Chandler, Phil Ochs, and Peter La Farge, who were inspired by the earlier protest songs of Guthrie and Seeger and the new wave of songs coming out of the Civil Rights movement—and he even recorded for Folkways’ Broadside compilations under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt. Other singers quickly picked up on his compositions: in 1962 the New World Singers made a first recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and soon his songs were traveling around the world, sung in myriad styles and languages.


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