Folk royalty comes to Guernsey
THERE may not be a Sark Folk Festival next year but folk royalty will be visiting these shores.
Peggy Seeger, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, feminist, widow of Ewan MacColl, sister to Mike Seeger and half-sister to Pete Seeger, will be over for the Guernsey Literary Festival to talk about her new book, First Time Ever: A Memoir.
‘It is quite a coup,’ said festival director, Claire Allen.
‘A group of us went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival this year. I didn’t see Peggy but someone who is on the Guernsey Literature Festival committee did and thought she would be great. So we approached her.’
The festival takes place from Thursday 10 to Sunday 13 May next year.
‘Peggy is provisionally booked for 2.30pm at The Hub in the Market Square. We’re still in negotiations as to whether she will be doing anything else other than talk about her book. It would be fantastic to have a concert but, unfortunately, on the Saturday evening, St James has already been pre-booked. We do have the Fermain Tavern booked for the Saturday night, though we’re still in the ideas stage. But it’s whatever she is happy with.’
Margaret ‘Peggy’ Seeger was born in 1935 in New York City. Her mother was Ruth Crawford, a composer and piano teacher and her father, Charles Seeger, was an ethnomusicologist and music administrator.
Her formal musical education was entwined with the family’s love of folk music and she began to play the piano at seven years old. Between 12 and 35 she learned guitar, five-string banjo, autoharp, Appalachian dulcimer and English concertina.
After majoring in music at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she began singing folk songs professionally. She went to Holland in 1955 and then took off on a spontaneous world tour that took in Russia, China, Poland and most of Northern Europe.
By 1959 she became a British subject and settled in London with the British dramatist, singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl, who was 20 years older than her and already had a wife and family.
The couple would go on to have three children of their own, Neill, Calum and Kitty.
MacColl wrote the classic love song First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for Peggy and it has been covered by artists as diverse as Roberta Flack, Bob Monkhouse, ODB and Johnny Cash.
