Latest news with #Seeger
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Folk music legend loving life in 'iconic' village
"I rent in an iconic village in south east Oxford and I've become part of the community." Folk music legend Peggy Seeger, 89, is about to hit the road for one last tour of the UK and Ireland with her 25th solo album Teleology. She said while she misses the stage, she now enjoys walks in Iffley, Oxfordshire, where she has been living since 2013. After more than 70 years of music-making and activism, Seeger said she "never tried to be famous" but just "do what I do, as good as possible". "I've had some absolutely wonderful feedback from people and they seem to really know how to listen to it because it's not an easy album," she said of her latest album. Teleology contains nine new songs and two reinterpretations, one of which is The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - a timeless love song that folk singer, broadcaster and activist Ewan MacColl wrote for her in 1956. The pair went on to make more than 40 albums together, marry and have children. She said: "It's a strange thing because people think that my husband and I both fell disastrously in love with each other, but we didn't. "I ran away from him for three years, he was not my idea of what I wanted to do with my life." But despite her resistance and a 20-year age difference, they got together and Seeger said the truth about it was written in her memoir. "The first kiss I got from him just curled my toes," she said. Peggy Seeger on her husband Ewan MacColl Peggy Seeger: The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face How Folk Songs Should Be Sung But in a Radio 4 interview, she said she had become "weary" of talking about the past. After MacColl's death in 1989, she moved back to America where she decided that "really, my true home where I wanted to live until I die, was the UK". "My children and my grandchildren are here and I know this country better than I know the United States," she said. "I love this country - all four nations of it." She said that in Iffley, it was the "first time I've been really part of a community", adding: "I'm now on the village committee and my job is to raise money." She also continues to be involved in environmental concerns, joining a campaign against building on two green fields. She has made a film called The Mother, which she said will be shown around Oxford "because it's important to save as much of Oxford's green land that we can". Seeger said she "loves" walking along the River Thames, going down to the Iffley lock, meeting "some absolutely wonderful friends" and visiting the village shop. "But I don't get up to much in Oxford because I'm not very fit," she said. "I love the Christ Church garden but, generally, I will go outside of Oxford because I can't park [in the city], so I'll maybe go out to Waterperry Gardens or drive up to Burford." Seeger said her upcoming tour "is going to be fabulous". She said: "Part of it grieves me because there's going to be so many friends there and I won't have time to see them. "I miss the stage but I'm not physically up to it anymore." Her message to budding musicians, she said, would be: "Examine your reasons. "It's almost impossible to make living from it - venues closed down one after the other when Covid hit ... the competition is fierce and you have to really be something different to capture the audience." Seeger said that when she came to the UK, she had "the right combination of who I was". "I was female, young, reasonably good-looking," she said. "I was American and I played a longneck banjo and I was greeted by one of the main folklorists in the world. "I've never tried to be famous, I don't want to be, I just want to do what I do as good as possible." You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram. Fishing industry play inspired by 1960s radio show Folk anthem's lost verse to be revealed after 75 years The trespass and the folk legend
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Yahoo
Racine homicide, Wisconsin's Most Wanted subject sentenced to prison
RACINE, Wis. - Alejandro Sierra – one of Wisconsin's Most Wanted – was sentenced to prison after he was found guilty of murdering his girlfriend in Racine. On Friday, May 9, Sierra was sentenced to 50 years in prison, which includes 40 years of initial confinement and 10 years of extended supervision. Back in March 2025, a jury found Sierra guilty of 1st-degree reckless homicide in the death of his girlfriend, Alexis Fisher. FREE DOWNLOAD: Get breaking news alerts in the FOX LOCAL Mobile app for iOS or Android Marshals say Sierra shot and killed Fisher during an argument back in April 2023. Racine police said a deputy was conducting a traffic stop unrelated to the search for Sierra when he came out of hiding and surrendered. The backstory U.S. Marshals are looking for a man they say abused and killed a Racine woman. They want 30-year-old Alejandro Sierra off the streets now because he is dangerous and has a weapon. "It was a malicious violent domestic abuse incident," Task Force Officer Michael Seeger, U.S. Marshal Service. The U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and the Racine Police Department need your help to find Sierra. There is a warrant for his arrest – and he is wanted for first-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon. "We are on the hunt for Mr. Sierra," Seeger said. Marshals say Sierra shot and killed 36-year-old Alexis Fisher of Racine during an argument. He body was found Saturday, April 15 near Spring and State Street. Officials believe Sierra is in the Racine area. He is described as being 5'8" tall, weighing 200 pounds, with several facial tattoos. "He has 'Miracles' written on the side of his head. He has a rose on the other side of his face. He has initials H.B.K.," Seeger said. Officer Seeger said you should not approach Sierra. "He is still armed and dangerous. The firearm used in the incident has not been recovered," Seeger said. Click to open this PDF in a new window. The backstory U.S. Marshals confirmed Alejandro Sierra – one of Wisconsin's Most Wanted – surrendered and was taken into custody on Thursday, April 20, 2023. The Racine Police Department and U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force had been searching for Sierra for days. Prosecutors said he murdered Fisher on April 15, 2023. "The defendant and his girlfriend argued and during that argument, he shot her in the chest and killed her," said the Racine County assistant district attorney. SIGN UP TODAY: Get daily headlines, breaking news emails from FOX6 News Prosecutors said a witness saw Sierra shoot Fisher. They said he checked on her, only to take off and go into hiding. Police found her body near a roundabout at Spring and State. "I find that he is a grave risk to the community," the court commissioner said. Racine police said a deputy was conducting a traffic stop at 9th and Center unrelated to the search for Sierra when he came out of hiding and surrendered. Police said they now have the gun used in the killing. The Source FOX6 has profiled Alejandro Sierra as one of the subjects of Wisconsin's Most Wanted, getting information from the Racine Police Department and the U.S. Marshals Service. Court information is available on the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access website.
The Courier
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Courier
Peggy Seeger:
'I loved Scotland from the moment I entered it on my Lambretta scooter in 1956,' says folk singer Peggy Seeger, casting her mind way back to her earliest days exploring the UK. 'It was summer, and I remember coming into Edinburgh from the south at sunset. Behind me and to the west was the most glorious, unbelievable sunset.' At the age of 89, Seeger's inquisitive nature is as sharp as her memory, and on the phone her voice sounds strong. She's been singing professionally for more than 70 years, and now she's going on tour for what she says will be one final trip – including a visit to Stirling as one of two dates in Scotland. 'I was coming up from London, and I wanted to get to the top of Scotland,' she continues. 'I only got to Aberdeen, where I stayed with Jeannie Robertson during an iconic rainstorm that lasted for three days.' Arriving at the house of the esteemed late Aberdonian folk singer, Seeger found all her belongings were soaked. She ended her journey there and never did travel further north in Scotland, a minor regret amid an extraordinarily full life. 'I come from a big country,' she says. 'The United States is 3000 miles across and a thousand miles top to bottom, you could fit Britain into Texas. I love the smallness of this country, how it changes every ten miles as you go north. 'The different stones that are used, the different architectural ways of making the cities, and the oldness. 'When I left America we only had about 250 years of history behind us. Of European history, that is.' Seeger can still pinpoint the main difference she sees between her birth country and her adopted UK home. 'I love the informality of America,' she says. 'Americans are impudent, and even now my manners sometimes offend people over here. 'But I've lost track of America, I've revoked my American citizenship. I'm just a Brit now. 'I swore allegiance to the Queen in 1959 in a fly-blown solicitor's office in Lincoln's Inn Fields.' Born in New York City in 1935, Seeger's surname is one of modern folk music's most famous. Her father Charles was a celebrated musicologist and folklorist, and her brother Mike followed in the family tradition while also playing music. Yet it was her half-brother Pete who became one of the most widely-celebrated folk and protest singers ever. Caught up in McCarthy-era discrimination against America's folk musicians, Peggy came to Europe in the 1950s and ended up living in Beckenham in Kent from 1959 until 1995. She then moved back to the US for 16 years, but she's lived near Oxford ever since. She had three children with her second husband, the famed British folk singer Ewan MacColl, who live within driving distance of her now (while this marriage also made her stepmother to the late Kirsty MacColl). Now her sons Neill and Calum are her backing band, while Peggy also writes with her daughter-in-law Kate St John, once of pop group the Dream Academy. 'They're the ones I always travel with,' says Seeger of her sons. 'I wouldn't want to play with any others. They're so sensitive, they put up with all my quirks. 'Sometimes family doesn't work, but ours has.' The tour, she says, is a chance 'to prove that I'm still vertical, breathing and walking'. 'I won't have a chance to have quality time with a lot of old friends in the audience, but I will get to say hello and goodbye to them,' she adds. 'It's nice to have new people come in, especially young people, and old friends can see I'm still here. It's a commemoration of more of 70 years onstage. 'I first went on stage when I was 12, with my knees shaking in a talent contest which I lost, and I've been on the road since I was 21,' she continues. 'Of course I'll be singing I'm Gonna Be an Engineer, I'll be singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (which MacColl wrote in tribute to her). 'I'll be singing some of the old ones, but there'll maybe be one or two that people haven't heard.' This tour also promotes her memoir First Time Ever and the recent final album Teleology, both of which will be on sale in signed versions. It's a rare privilege, isn't it, to be able to consciously cap a career in such a way? What's on her mind in these songs? 'Well, what do you think is on the mind of a 90-year-old?' she smiles. 'You're very mortal at my age, especially if you had a bad fall a year ago and you're creeping about a bit. 'It's seeing the goal post, if you can see it without putting your glasses on. It's very humbling. 'Most of my political work at present is towards climate change, making people aware that human beings are part of nature, and until we start acting as if we're part of nature, we're going to destroy our own environment. 'I'm not trying to convert anybody, though. Some of the songs are for fence-sitters, people who don't know which way they're going to fall, and you're hoping to nudge them over onto a constructive side where they can pull their own weight. 'I don't tell people what they should do, I just show them what I've done and say, you can be very effective in your own little way.' Peggy doesn't consider herself 'famous', but rather 'well-known in my field'. 'Probably a lot of older people, if you mention my name they'll say, oh yes, I heard of her somewhere, what does she do?' she smiles. 'It's a nice place to be.' Although writing albums and touring are ending soon, Seeger still might record the odd song for Bandcamp or pop up near her home to talk about her life. 'I'm regarded as a resource now, somebody who remembers the old greats,' she says. 'People are always impressed: 'oh, you met Woody Guthrie, you met Leadbelly, Pete Seeger was your brother, you met the Lomaxes, Ewan MacColl'. 'I say, yeah and I'm still here, so let's talk about what I'm doing now. That's more important, because there's plenty of people my age who can still sing. 'They're just not given the luck of having a family that's willing to take them out on tour.'
The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Post your questions for folk music legend Peggy Seeger
After a long career which has established her as one of the most significant folk singers on both sides of the Atlantic, Peggy Seeger is about to celebrate her 90th birthday with a final tour and album – and will answer your questions. Born in New York to a musicologist father and a modernist composer, and with siblings including future folk legend Pete Seeger, she started out on piano at seven years old, eventually adding guitar, banjo, autoharp, dulcimer and concertina to her skillset. She has lived in the UK for more than 60 years after travelling to London in 1956 for a job offer to be a singer and banjoist with folk group the Ramblers, where she met her future husband and folk singer Ewan MacColl. The two started an affair and in 1957 MacColl wrote the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for Seeger, performing it for her over a long distance phone call (it was later a No 1 hit in the US for Roberta Flack). Seeger often performed with MacColl by her side until his death in 1989. She then married singer Irene Pyper-Scott, after forming an intense connection – she later described herself as 'uncontrollably in love'. Seeger is also widely recognised as a feminist icon and an activist on issues from the environment to war and workers' rights. Her song I'm Gonna Be an Engineer became a feminist anthem thanks to scathing lyrics such as: 'She's smart – for a woman, I wonder how she got that way / You get no choice, you get no voice / Just stay mum, pretend you're dumb.' It's a remarkable career, and one that's coming to an end: her latest album Teleology, out now, is being billed as her last, and she is doing a 25-date farewell tour of the UK and Ireland from 14 May. Before she brings the curtain down, what would you like to know about her songwriting, her activism, her loves and losses, and the rest of her richly lived life? Post your questions in the comments before Wednesday 7 May, and her answers will be published on Friday 16 May.
Telegraph
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The heartbreak – and lawsuits – behind Roberta Flack's greatest songs
Roberta Flack was a singer who defied categorisation. The tributes paid to her following her death have variously described her as a jazz, soul and pop singer. But while a prolific songwriter herself, Flack's great skill was to draw on songs from a range of genres and sources and make them definitively her own. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the two songs that were biggest hits and with which she will always be associated – one, Killing Me Softly With His Song, drawn from the unlikely partnership of a young folk singer and a veteran Hollywood songwriter. The other, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, composed by an English folk singer, songwriter and political activist, who had once been on the files of MI5, described as 'a Communist with very extreme views', who wrote more than 300 songs but who never himself actually recorded the one he is most famous for. That 'Communist' – he was a party member – was Ewan MacColl. Peggy Seeger – the sister of folk singer Pete – had first set eyes on him in 1956 when, newly arrived in London, she sang at an audition for a new folk group, the Ramblers. There was applause when she had finished the song, she recalled later, but not from the man sitting in the corner, 'a cigarette burning down to his fingers, just looking, staring'. Then he introduced himself, 'thick straight black hair and a very red beard… my next thirty-three years.' MacColl was 41, Seeger just 21. A few weeks later she wrote in her diary. 'Ewan MacColl is in love with me. And I with him. He is married with a boy of five years. I would lose my personality were I to marry him.' Running away from what seemed like a hopeless love affair, Seeger returned to America where she sang regularly on a Los Angeles radio station. Her repertoire at the time consisted entirely of traditional folk songs, all, she remembered, 'concerned with death, destruction, murder, and misogyny. They liked the folk-song love songs,vbut oh they're all so sad. Have you got a hopeful love song?' She telephoned MacColl to ask for his help. He told her he had a song he had written about her. ''Here it is,' he said. 'And he sang it over the phone.' 'The first time ever I saw your face, I thought the sun rose in your eyes' – the lines were unintentionally ironic. The first time MacColl actually saw her face, she recalled, she was suffering from chronic acne and constantly soaking her face in Dettol. Seeger started performing the song at shows in America, and over the years it went on to be recorded by a number of folk singers, including the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and Gordon Lightfoot – and Elvis Presley. MacColl hated them all, describing the Elvis version as being like Romeo at the bottom of the Post Office Tower singing up to Juliet. It eventually came to the attention of Flack who in 1969 recorded it on her first album, First Take, at the Atlantic records studio in New York. But it would be another three years before it was released as a single, after Clint Eastwood had included the song in his 1971 film Play Misty For Me, about a late-night radio dj, telling Flack 'I'd like to use it in the only part of the movie where there's absolute love.' Eastwood paid $2,000 for the rights to use the song. Flack would later recall that when she recorded the song she was thinking about a different kind of love – for her cat that had just been run over by a car. The song went on to spend six consecutive weeks at number one on the American charts, earning Flack her first million selling gold record. By the time Flack had a hit with the song, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl had reunited and were living together, songwriting and performing, and doing their best to make ends meet. In 1971 they received a royalty check from Flack's version of The First Time Ever… for $75,000. Seeger wrote that it was the end of scraping, worrying and having to take every single paying job. She started cooking elaborate five course meals. MacColl had long since divorced. Now, 21 years after he and Seeger had first met, they married – on the advice, Seeger said, of their accountant – went home and got drunk. At around the time Seeger and MacColl were celebrating their royalty check for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, the singer Don McLean was performing at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. McLean had just released American Pie, the album that was shortly to make him an international star. Sitting in the audience was a 20-year-old folk singer named Lori Lieberman. Inspired by McLean singing his song Empty Chairs – inspired by his former wife – Lieberman began writing poetic notes on a paper napkin. At the time, Lieberman was signed to a five-year management contract with the veteran songwriter Norman Gimbel and composer Charles Fox, during which they would receive 20 per cent of her earnings. Among Gimbel's accomplishments was writing the English lyrics for Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz's The Girl From Ipanema. And with Fox, he also wrote the theme songs for numerous American TV shows, including Happy Days and Love Boat. Gimbel was also having an affair with Lieberman, despite being 24 years older and married. 'I would hide on the floorboard of his car as we drove through Beverly Hills and it was the craziest thing,' she told Geoff Edgers, a journalist for the Washington Post in an interview in 2020. After seeing McLean's performance, Lieberman phoned Gimbel telling him about the effect watching McLean had on her and reading him the notes she'd made. 'Lori is only 20 and she really is a very private person,' Gimbel told the New York Daily News in 1973. 'She told us about this strong experience she had listening to McLean. I had a notion this might make a good song so the three of us discussed it. We talked it over several times, just as we did with the rest of the numbers we wrote for the album and we all felt it had possibilities.' Lieberman had a phrase ringing in her head from a novel she'd been reading about a jazz musician by Julio Cortazar, 'killing me softly with his blues'. But, Lieberman felt the word 'blues' didn't describe the effect McLean had on her, and suggested changing it to 'killing me softly with his song'. In 1972, Lieberman released her own version of the song, and, following a script that Gimbel had given her, would often preface any live performance by telling the story of how it had been inspired by seeing Don McLean. It was a good story, after all – and one that Gimbel himself would often repeat when talking of the song. 'Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words,' he told the Asbury Park Press in a story published early in 1973. But he and Fox would excise Lieberman from the writing credits, which read 'N. – and from the publishing royalties. Lieberman says she didn't mind when her first album came out and she got writing credit for just one of the 10 songs. 'I was just so grateful that they had plucked this young, naive girl,' she told Edgers. 'And honestly, I was completely overwhelmed.' It was only later the scales fell from her eyes. In 1972, in the wake of her success with The First Time Ever I Saw Her Face, Roberta Flack was on a plane ride to Los Angeles when she heard Lieberman's version of Killing Me Softly on the in-flight entertainment. Flack would recall how the song 'smacked me in the face', and – much like Lieberman seeing Don McLean the year before – she reached for a sheet of paper, and played the song 'eight to ten times' transcribing the melody. On landing she immediately contacted her friend Quincy Jones asking how she might meet Charles Fox. 'Two days later I had the music.' In 1972 she recorded the song at the Atlantic studios. Released in January 1973, the song would spend five consecutive weeks at number one on the American charts, giving Flack her second gold record. Things, however, were not going so well for Lieberman. She had recorded four albums, only one of which had charted, and in 1976 the business relationship between her and Gimbel and Fox broke down. According to the account in the Washington Post, Lieberman claimed that Gimbel had become emotionally abusive, controlling and unfaithful. She broke off with him and asked to be released from her contract. But Gimbel and Fox refused, instead allegedly demanding she reimburse them $27,000 a number of expenses including recording costs and hotel bills, and telling her that if she left the contract she would also owe them a portion of her future earnings up to $250,000. Rather than fight the case, Lieberman, who was living with her mother, retired from performing to start a family, not returning to music until the 1990s. Gimbel, meanwhile, was doing all he could to write Lieberman and Don McLean out of the story behind Killing Me Softly. In 2008 he even threatened to sue McLean if the singer did not remove the 1973 New York Daily News article referencing McLean's connection to the song from his website. On the day Gimbel died in 2018, at the age of 91, McLean posted a message on his Facebook page in which he called the dead writer 'abusive and obnoxious'. In 2010, Charles Fox, who is now 84, wrote his own memoir, Killing Me Softly, My Life In Music, which purported to provide a 'full personal account of his experiences in writing the song with Norman Gimbel and what the song meant to him', not mentioning Lieberman's story about being inspired by Don McLean, but noting 'I still have a special place in my heart for her.' Asked in an interview with the website Song Facts, if it was correct that Killing Me Softly was inspired by Don McLean, Fox replied 'the answer is no', describing Lieberman's account as 'an urban legend or something'. He and Gimbel, he said, had written the song and then presented it to Lieberman. 'She loved it; she said it reminded her of being at a Don McLean concert. So in her act, when she would appear, she would say that. And somehow the words got changed around so that we wrote it based on Don McLean.' In 2019, Flack met Lieberman for the first time, and in 2020 Flack emailed the Washington Post saying that she had cried when she first heard about the conflict over the song, adding 'I hope that Lori knows that I am forever grateful for her part in the writing of the song.' For her part, Lieberman told Geoff Edgers that she had long ago given up any thought of receiving song writing royalties. She just wanted her part in it to be recognised, 'I have been called a liar. And it feels terrible. It's really for my own integrity and for the truth to come out.' She has continued to record and perform over the years. In 2024 she released an album Perfect Day, including songs by Lou Reed, Scott Walker and Tracy Chapman. But she never felt comfortable singing Killing Me Softly herself, until Flack and Don McLean acknowledged her part in it.
