Associate Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley has published a chapter, "Peggy Seeger: From Traditional Folksinger to Contemporary Songwriter," in Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music, Ray Allen & Ellie M. Hisama, eds. (University of Rochester Press, 2007).
This essay explores the trajectory of Peggy Seeger's career, focusing in particular on the familial influences and musical traditions that laid the foundation for her distinctive use of folk music in her contemporary songs. Peggy was born in 1935, just at the time that her parents (composer and musicologist Charles Seeger and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger) were beginning to study folk song, intrigued by its possible usefulness as a resource for Modernist composers who sought to develop a meaningful American musical style. From her parents, she received a rigorous classical music training in a household filled with recordings of folk music.
In 1956 she met, and later married, British folksinger and songwriter Ewan MacColl. Through Ewan's influence, Peggy's career changed as her political consciousness of folk music as an expression of class struggle grew. Thus, the songs Peggy writes reinterpret folk models while calling on her classical training for their sophistication, and her approach to performance is grounded in a study of traditional styles. These qualities prompted folklorist Ellen Stekert to recognize Peggy as one of the revival folksingers working within what she terms the "new aesthetic." Because Peggy's primary purpose in writing and singing folk songs is to reach people with social and political messages through the medium of traditional musical styles, she is not concerned with adhering to notions of authenticity when she writes or performs in a folk idiom. Rather, she strives to pay homage to the social context of folk music.
