Peggy Seeger Interview (2023) - Folk Music Icon

In this episode of Vinyl Vibes, Jack is joined by Peggy Seeger, a folk music icon. Peggy grew up in a musical family with her mother Ruth being a modernist composer and her father Charles being a musicologist. The music she grew up with would be greatly made up of the blues and folk music recordings collected by Alan Lomax. One of the artists she listened to growing up was Leadbelly, whom she would meet in 1942 when he visited her house with Alan Lomax. She would record her first album Folksongs of Courting and Complaint in 1955 and It would be the beginning to a long career in music. In 1957 she would inspire Ewan MacColl to write The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and the year after Peggy would write her first song The Ballad Of Springhill. A highlight of Peggy's time in music includes her song I'm Gonna be an Engineer. The song was released in 1979 and begun Peggy's journey into feminism. More recent work from her includes the song (which Peggy's calls one of her best) "The Mother" off her 1996 album An Odd Collection and her brand new album The First Farewell which came out in 2021. Jack zoomed Peggy to discuss her early childhood, what it was like growing up in a musical family, the blues and folk music she grew up listening to, meeting Leadbelly in 1942, the beauty in not having music at your finger tips in the pre-internet days, her opinion on rock and roll when it started in 1955, the recording of her first album, the writing of I'm Gonna be an Engineer, her journey into feminism, the writing of The Ballad of Springhill, her song "The Mother" and her new album The First Farewell. "I was in the middle of doing the accounts and Ewan MacColl was upstairs writing a script for a theatrical show we put on every year and he came down stairs and he said 'this script needs a women's song, so would you please write a women's song', I'm in the middle of doing the accounts for god sakes and I wasn't very pleased at that...I dashed that song off literally in two hours." - Peggy Seeger on this episode of Vinyl Vibes talking about how her song "I'm Gonna be an Engineer" came to be Episode Hosted and Produced by Jack Hodgins