Song Of Myself
THIS morning, Peggy Seeger has been out in her garden in Oxfordshire to inspect the bird tables. These, she explains, have now been squirrel-proofed and she was keen to see how successfully they were working. “Connecting with nature is something you do a whole lot when you get old,” she says, with a typically commanding blue-eyed stare. “I’m not a mature citizen, I’m not vintage, I’m old. Bloody old. You’ll soon be joining the whole of nature’s system and learning to understand it is what I’m doing now. And it is magical. Absolutely magical.”
A leading figure in the most politically radical stream of the UK folk revival, Seeger has not morphed into an earth mother. There are no dreamcatchers on her living room wall, no obvious crystals. However, the younger half-sister of Pete Seeger, and widow of Ewan MacColl, has a pleasingly cosmic outlook. “Everything is interlaced,” she explains. “No element of the earth, the galaxies, human thought, the natural systems – none of it is separated from the rest. Until we learn that, we’re doomed.”
If artists tend to stick to their fundamentals once they get past retirement age, Seeger is determinedly extending her range. Aged 85, she is increasingly out there.
Seeger’s place in the world may have been defined by the work she did in the 1950s and 1960s, when – as the loyal lieutenant to the Oliver Cromwell of the folk revival – she helped set standards for all folk singers, whether they wanted them or not.
“Peggy was my total role model,” says singer Sandra Kerr, who later made the music for Bagpuss. “She was everything I wanted to do. She sang, she wrote songs, she played three or four instruments, she had great empathy with people and she was a livewire.”
With and without MacColl, Seeger wrote important contemporary songs, including.
