Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, on tonight's program as part of our Culture Wars Week,

an extended interview with a singer and songwriter

who comes from an American folk music dynasty, but who was blacklisted by her own government

for travelling to Moscow and to China during the Cold War, an American who, along with our

husband, Ewan McColl, tried to resist the Americanisation of culture in Britain.

A woman who almost accidentally penned what would become an anthem for the women's movement, going to be an engineer.

My guest this evening is Peggy Seeger, to whose home just outside Oxford I went last week.

She was born in 1935 into a musical family with progressive social and political ideas.

Our half-brother Pete Seeger was one of the key figures in American folk

and Ledbelly and Jackson Pollock visited the house when she was a child.

But it was in the 1950s that she began to make a name, an identity for herself,

moving to England and marrying the working class Solford-born communist Ewan McColl.

During that decade, they were key figures in the second folk revival, demanding that singers only sing songs from their own region and in particular ways

to some people a form of cultural Stalinism.

Involvement in the revolutionary radio ballads which brought regional voices to a previously

strangulated BBC, an anthem for the Greenham Common Women.

These have been just two of her contributions

to England's cultural landscape. But throughout her life, whatever else has been happening,

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