‘Climate change is going to cull us as a species': folk hero Peggy Seeger on Bob Dylan, the ultimate love song and touring at 90

The Guardian

15-05-2025

Touring at 90 is amazing. What was a career highlight? Nicens_boiWhen 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]? neetoneetoIn 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.
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? ThankYouJohnI 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.
Your song I'm Gonna Be an Engineer buoyed me up through training as the one woman amid 11 men on my electronic engineering training course and the one female engineer working with 100 male engineers. Was there a particular woman's story which inspired you to write it? LMCollisFirst, I didn't want to be an engineer. I was downstairs doing the accounts and Ewan said, 'Peg, we need a woman's song.' I probably said, 'Fuck off, I'm doing the accounts!' I was very angry because he never did the accounts, but afterwards I sat and wrote that song literally in an hour or two. I'd just been to Corby and seen a young woman my age working on a turret lathe, hence the mention in the lyrics. So many women have sung that song but you can't shorten it. The first part is the woman declaring what she wants to do and the second part is the system telling her, 'You can't do that because you're a girl.' It lasts about five minutes, but was ahead of its time.
Do you think folk music still has the power to engender social change? Did it ever? RobinCYou can't write a folk song – a folk song becomes one. And they have helped to engender change because the community felt they spoke for them. Most of what people call 'folk' now is just singer-songwriter stuff. The closest I come to folk on my new album is Sit Down, written in the 1930s by Maurice Sugar about people downing tools. I remade the song for now, because if all the key workers at the bottom of the economic pile just withdrew their labour, things would change. The other song of mine that's on its way to becoming a folk song is The Ballad of Springhill, about Springhill mines in Nova Scotia. Everyone up there knows it and very few of them know who wrote it [in 1958, while watching a live broadcast of the mining disaster], but it's an absolute honour that it's been taken up by the community it was written about.
Any plans to rush back to America now it's 'under new management'? LowerColonNot for all the tea in China. I swore allegiance to the Queen in 1959. I'm a British subject although I did move back to America between 1996 and 2010. It's a fantastic country and has some amazing people in it, doing unbelievably brave things which we don't see on the news, like the takeover of town hall meetings by Democrats in Republican states. The Republicans are being heckled so badly! Bernie Sanders and AOC [Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez] are amazing people, and they're doing what I was talking about doing in music – not accepting what was being pumped into us – but Trump has so much power.
Do you see any prospects of a new folk revival within this digital world dominated by Spotify? Even if the likes of Trump, Musk and Farage must surely encourage a strong protest movement? Brian DowsettWell, I can say what I would like to see, but I'm not sure it will happen. Climate change is going to cull us as a species. There won't be any big bands and we won't have any producers of guitar strings, so we're going to have to rely on our own voices and make instruments out of whatever we can find. But we'll always need music that expresses the hopes and dreams of the community.
What is your best memory of your brother, Pete Seeger? SheerContentOh, I have so many. When we were little kids, he would come down to visit and he would've been 19 or 20, and he'd have his long-necked banjo and I'd stand on his feet while he stamped them. When I decided I was gonna live in England he sent me songs, asking, 'Do you know this?' I remember being sat singing with him in New York two or three years before he died. Pete was wonderful and I love what he did with his life: getting people to sing. He's responsible almost single-handedly for the American revival of folk music.
Your mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, has become increasingly recognised as the composer of some of the most remarkable music of the first half of the 20th century. Growing up, were you aware of the significance of her work? kramskoiI didn't even know about her work when I was growing up. My father never talked about it. She never talked about it. I found out about it in my 30s and Judith Tick asked me to read her wonderful biography before it went to press. I was angry that I hadn't been told that this wonderful woman had all this music. I think my father kept it from me. He was a composer, her teacher, her professor, and I think he was jealous. I wouldn't be the musician I am without her teaching. So now I do anything I can to push her music forward.
How old were you when you mastered the guitar and what are you most proud of in your folk career? Otis, aged 10.That's a good question, Otis. I never mastered the guitar – my sons are better players than I am – but folk music didn't ask very much of me. I took pride in learning songs. I was a guitar accompanist rather than a solos person. I played with my father when I was seven or eight and the main thing I would say is learn something really well before you perform it for anybody else. Don't necessarily feel you have to be that good, just play and enjoy the sound of this wonderful instrument, and once you learn the normal tuning try open tuning. I've also recorded some albums that are not as good as they should be, so don't record anything until someone else – not your family – tells you it's good. I'm not 'proud' of anything, but I feel I've done my best.
If you had to spend eternity listening to just one singer, who would it be? chymistI don't believe in heaven or hell, but if I did, it would be hell to listen to just one singer for ever. You'd fall asleep. So if I can sleep through eternity, give me Paul Simon.
Peggy Seeger's final album Teleology is out now. Her Final Farewell tour continues until 28 June. She will perform on Later … with Jools Holland on 8 June.