Something For The Weekend: Peggy Seeger's cultural picks

RTÉ News​

5 days ago

We're honoured to welcome a true music legend to these pages...
Peggy Seeger's 25th and final solo album, Teleology released this month before her 90th birthday, marks over 70 years as a working musician, feminist and activist.
Her 7-date Irish concert tour in June will be her very last.
After the tour, Peggy will retire from recording and live performance. This is no apologetic or quiet farewell – her voice and songwriting are still major forces to be reckoned with.
Peggy says: "It is unavoidable that at 90 I am preoccupied with life, love, loss, old age and death but I've never abandoned politics or the compulsion to speak up when something isn't right. How I got here is still a bit of a mystery, but I'm exactly where I should be right now, and I'm at peace with that."
We asked Peggy for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
My favourite film that I've seen six times is O Brother Where Art Thou?, directed by the Coen brothers. The acting is superb, the whole concept is superb, using creatures and storylines from Greek, Roman and folk mythology. The allegories are cleverly hidden within the three main characters. Even though it lasts for almost three hours, I could watch it again right now and see something that I hadn't seen before. It also uses music that I grew up with and I can just get lost in it.
MUSIC
I'm fixated on Grit Laskin's song My Turn. It's seven minutes long, and it's a story of a man during the Second World War who, because of his political stance as a pacifist, was sent to an internment camp far in the north of Canada where they sent dissidents and Japanese people. He makes a deal with the devil that if he lives for eighty years, he'll have no regrets. In the camp he meets and falls in love with a Japanese woman, but they were shunned by both his and her family. Despite that, they lived together and loved and laughed for 50 years. It's a philosophical song about how at every turn, he is thankful. No regrets, even at the end.
It makes me think of my brother, Pete Seeger, and his half-Japanese wife; all of her family were interned during the Second World War – they only let her father out because he was brilliant at decoding.
BOOK
I listen to audio books while I'm walking or doing my chores. I loved The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, which I would recommend to anyone of any age. I also loved The Covenant of Water. It follows three generations of one family in Kerala, India. It spans almost 100 years of the same family who are plagued by the curse of drowning. I kept wondering where the story was going, but it almost doesn't matter because I learned so much about the history of medicine, the hardships of segregation, the enduring nature of dignity and simple humanity. I won't give you a spoiler, but the ending is stunning.
TV
The Vicar of Dibley. Without a doubt, it's just a hoot. I watch it again and again on iPlayer as I don't have a television. The whole cast is superb, and Dawn French is wonderful. The opening episode is set in the council of a little town, where they're waiting for a new vicar. In flounces Dawn French, she sits down at the table, and the mayor says, "I'm sorry, that's for the new vicar". And she says, "Well, I'm the vicar. I'm the new vicar." As his face falls, she says, "oh, you didn't expect a woman" and hoisting her considerable breasts up onto the table says, "These do rather give it away." It's wonderful.
I'm a creature of habit and I'm happy to watch the same things that I love over and over. I've done it with songs all my life. I sung the same songs over and over and every time I sing them I see something different.
GIG
When I was about ten, my mother taught me to read orchestral scores. She took me to a classical recital and had obtained the score in advance. Now that score was about fifteen inches high, because it has all the instruments and what they're playing, so we could follow from page to page. My mother whispered, "Now the oboe's coming in, look down there." And so I'd listen for the oboe coming in. We started being 'shushed' by other people in the audience so she just pointed, and we went right through the piece with this score. I've never forgotten that. What an education for a child!
So rather than recommending just one concert, I recommend taking children (yours, or other people's) to concerts of all sorts, and helping them to understand what's going on. It's an experience they will never forget and will help them to love music of all sorts.
TECH
I have two apps on my phone that I use all the time.
Picture This is invaluable on my daily walks. You can aim it at a flower, take a photo and it'll tell you what the flower is with all of its possible names. Ewan MacColl, my first life partner, was a flower freak. He taught me so many British flowers and their colloquial names but I tend to forget them now, so it's great to remind myself. The other one I use all the time is the Merlin Bird app. If there's a bird singing in the garden you just turn Merlin on and it tells you what that bird is. I've discovered so many birds that I just didn't know were there as they don't always come to the bird table but hide in the trees and bushes.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
I'm not sure this is the next big thing, because it's been going for a while, but find a green space that is what has wildlife in it and find ways to preserve it. Treasure the green spaces and defend them. Defend trees, defend rivers. I love the idea of wildflower bombing – where people throw wildflower seed down by lampposts or small patches of unremarkable ground. I send cards that have flowers seeds in them to kids and hope that by encouraging children to grow things they'll find a lifelong joy in watching nature thrive.