Peggy Seeger in Iffley

Folk on Foot

Matthew Bannister

Music Interviews, Performing Arts, Music, Nature, Arts, Science

4.8 • 526 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2020

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a life on the road, folk legend Peggy Seeger has settled in the village of Iffley on the outskirts of Oxford. In this episode she talks poignantly about her mother, a talented composer who died when she was fifty-three and Peggy was just eighteen. Peggy recites a poem called “My Mother is Younger Than Me”. She sings old union songs, including “The Miner’s Prayer”, recalls her time on the Greenham Common protests, shows us a piece of the wire fence she keeps on her mantelpiece and sings a song called “A Woman on Wheels” which is about a protester in a wheelchair who she saw using bolt cutters to breach that fence. Come with us on a walk through Peggy Seeger’s life in an unforgettable episode of Folk on Foot.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Well, this must be the right house because there's a van here, a red van with bumper
0:30.5	stickers all over the back. One of them says, hug a musician, they never get to dance.
0:35.4	Bad politicians are elected by good people who don't vote.
0:40.0	And then another one on this side says,
0:42.2	eat, sleep, folk, repeat.
0:45.3	And at the top, we know it's the right place,
0:48.2	it says, what would Pete Seeger do?
0:50.5	Ha!
0:57.0	... Seeger do. Ha! Since Peggy Seeger was a child, she's been steeped in folk music,
1:16.9	first in her Native America, then in the UK.
1:19.8	Her creative partnership with her husband, Ewan McColl,
1:22.5	was the engine of the folk scene in Britain during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
1:29.6	Peggy's own songs have become anthems for feminists, for anti-nuclear campaigners and for those fighting for social justice.
1:35.4	Now in her 80s, her creativity has been undimmed. In 2015, she won the Radio 2 Folk Award for
1:41.5	Best Original Song for Swim to the Star, written with her son Callum.
1:46.0	After a life on the road, she's settled here in Ifley in Oxford, and we've come to meet her at her home. I'm sorry.
2:10.8	Somebody was FaceTiming me.
2:12.6	No problem.
2:13.8	I hate it.
2:15.2	Come on in.
2:16.0	We were just reading your bumper stickers.
	...

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