Peggy Seeger on the art of songwriting: “Make them laugh before you make them cry”

‘When I wake up in the morning I’m a hundred years old...’ is the first line of the last song on Peggy Seeger’s new album, First Farewell. She continues, ‘my feet on the floor and I’m 99…’ and as her day passes time unwinds. By lunchtime she’s only 50 – ‘and I’m heading for 49.’ Soon she’s contemplating buying jeans with designer holes. ‘Gotta Get Home by Midnight’ becomes a sprightly, witty subversion of the Cinderella story. The Prince Charming who comes to Seeger’s door wisely tells her to ‘come home whenever you like.’

Someone comes to her door in the first song, too: a little boy hoping the young Peggy can come out to play. Time passes more conventionally in ‘Dandelion and Clover’. The song accumulates a lifetime’s moments of love and loss. That boy dies on a schoolroom floor, a later lover dies on a highway. These events and these people return to Seeger in dreams; they inhabit her memory.

“What I think about songwriting is that you have to reduce what you say, reduce it to its bones”

First Farewell is, then, bookended by songs of time and ageing; one runs forward, the other backwards, rewinding. Both are reflections on a long life, richly led. Seeger is exploring an important truth: as we grow older the past does not retreat and fade, but presses ever more vividly into the present. We are, at once, what we were and what we have become. “Every day I am a child,” Seeger says, “and an old woman. Every day.”

Peggy Seeger with Paul Robeson, in Trafalgar Square, 1960

Dead people live on in our memories but all too easily they disappear from sight while still alive. ‘Eighteen years have gone by in the blink of an eye, and it seems that I’m not here at all,’ Seeger sings in ‘The Invisible Woman’, nailing a universal feminine experience – ask any woman in her 50s about getting served at a busy bar. Seeger is candid about the challenges of ageing.

She launches ‘Lubrication’ with the line ‘certain moving parts are meant to get along together.’ I approach cautiously, muttering about stiffening joints. She snorts, “it’s about KY Jelly!” Well, yes – but much more. That old question, ‘Did the earth move for you last night, dear?’ takes on tectonic significance in New Zealand, where Irene Pyper-Scott, her partner for more than three decades, lives. “Irene is one of a group of women who phone each other after earthquakes. You get one, nearly every day, of some sort,” Seeger explains. “One phoned and she actually said, ‘Did the earth move for you last night, dear?’ So I used that. It’s like recycling.”

It’s a giggle – but it’s serious. From the mid-50s until his death in 1989 Seeger lived with Ewan MacColl. A convinced Marxist, MacColl celebrated the struggles, culture and voices of industrial working class men. In his songs men (almost always) heroically hew coal, build roads and hunt fish, all with no more concern for the natural world than their capitalist nemeses. But Seeger has, through her feminism, embraced environmentalism. For her the personal is not simply political, but ecological. The orgasmic shudder of the individual and the tremor of the planet are, her songs suggest, connected.

First Farewell is, by my calculation, Seeger’s 24th solo album. “I’ve lost count,” she says. “I’ve never made one like it. I’ve never looked so closely into what it’s like to be old, looking back and being able to deal with so many emotional subjects. It’s introspective, but it’s not just for older people. I don’t think of it as a solo album. I made it with other people, and it wouldn’t be the same without them. I go to different places with my sons [guitarists Calum and Neill] and my daughter-in-law [Kate St John].”

Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl in 1980 (photo: Tom Paley)

So, Peggy Seeger at 85 is warm, wise, witty and creatively engaged. She is also coolly realistic. ‘Soon it will be over,’ she sings, ‘all over, gone away.’

These collaborations are distinct, Neill’s work musically augments his mother’s joie de vivre, Calum’s is quietly reflective and Kate’s, with her poignant cor anglais and oboe, stark and dark. ‘One of Those Beautiful Boys’ speaks obliquely about a young man who took his own life. “I’ve done four songs with Kate,” Seeger says, pensively. “I broached with her that I do a slightly cheerful song for this album and she said, ‘I don’t do cheerful’.”

No, but together they do bleak brilliantly. ‘Lullabies for Strangers’ is the song of a mother who has left her own children and come to a strange land to look after someone else’s. She has been away for seven years. ‘When I tie their shoes, I think of you.’ She sings her employer’s children to sleep, wondering who sings for her own daughters. This terrific, heartrending song helps us not just to understand someone else’s experience, but to feel it. It widens and deepens our sympathies, which is what great art does. The song is true. “I steal a lot from what people say,” Seeger admits. “Ideas, and actual quotes, come from other people. ‘Lullabies for Strangers’ was taken from two Filipino women who came to my house to clean.”

Peggy Seeger with brothers Mike and Pete in 1995 (photo: Dave Gahr)

Before finalising her songs Seeger sings them to people to make sure they are easily understood. Those on First Farewell are not, she insists, folk songs (though I’ll be surprised if ‘The Invisible
Woman’ doesn’t ‘enter the tradition’). Even so, wrought with strong images, narrative velocity and spare economy, they owe a great deal to traditional ballads. “What I think about songwriting is that you have to reduce what you say,” Seeger says, “reduce it to its bones, so each person listening can put it together in their own way. The ballads do that. This gives the listener the chance to create from their own experience. So they are important to the whole thing.”

This doesn’t preclude humour. ‘We Are Here’ neatly dissects the self-absorption our obsession with constant connection brings, isolation becoming the inevitable consequence of our addiction to social media. ‘I’m on my phone. You’re on your phone. We’re sitting at the bar together, apart, alone…’ Seeger’s songs are witty, catchy, children’s songs, I suggest, for adults. “Oh, I love that – can I use it?” she asks. “Irene tells me I have to be funny. You have to make them laugh before you make them cry.” With First Farewell she achieves that.

The clarity of her lyrics is matched by the simplicity of their musical setting. Seeger sings expressively, without straining her vintage voice. There is no banjo on this album and she plays guitar on only the final track. “It’s a huge problem now that I have arthritis in both hands. I can’t play the way I used to.” Luckily, she is blessed with subtle, simpatico guitarist sons. Instead, Seeger plays the piano. She was taught the instrument, with some music theory, by her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, who had been in the vanguard of modernist music in the 1920s. She was the first female composer to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. But classical composing gave way to gathering folk music after her marriage to musicologist Charles Seeger, who had been a composer who subsequently turned against the avant-garde.

“She was looking for an American music, but joined a global group looking to do away with old Western ideas of harmony. Also, doing away with old ideas of melody. I didn’t know any of her early works until I was about 35. It was never talked about in the house, I think because of my mother’s bitterness. My parents had got together on the basis of that music, but my father declared it was music for musicians and went over to folk music. He never composed again. She started having babies… She was composing children. So, I have the two outside parameters of music. I have knowledge of both classical and folk music. My big lack is the stuff in the middle – pop music.”

From her mother, Seeger also inherited an attitude, a musical ethic. She practises every day, loves to perform and relishes life on the tour bus. “We had 26 dates planned last year, a marvellous tour in May and June. The whole thing just swept off the board by COVID-19. So we moved it to this year. Now it has been swept off the board again… I don’t know when we’ll be able to tour next.”

Might the title, First Farewell, be a nod to this, her last album, a farewell tour… until the next one, and maybe one after that? “It was a tongue-in-cheek imitation of my brother Mike and his group The New Lost City Ramblers. Once they broke up they held an annual farewell concert.” And in First Farewell the jokey signifies something deeper. “I’ve seen so many people off at the airport. You give them a hug. Then you watch them walk towards where you can’t see them anymore, and they turn and wave. So it’s the hug. That’s the first farewell.”

And, as with much of Seeger’s art, it goes beyond the personal. “This is a first farewell to the way we live on the planet. We have to learn how to get along with it; we have to do something about it. We do something about our old age every day. We exercise; we stretch. We remember to eat what we’re supposed to. So, do the same for the planet that we do for ourselves to survive is what I’m trying to say here.”

Read the review of Peggy Seeger's First Farewell on the Songlines Reviews Database

This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today