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.
‘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.