RIP: Mike Seeger (1933-2009)

Written by archtop girl on Monday, 17 August 2009

RIP: Mike Seeger (1933-2009)
A founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, Seeger was both a musician and a music historian, collecting traditional American songs and folklore, and recording artists including Elizabeth Cotten and Dock Boggs for the Folkways label. Bob Dylan cited Seeger as a major influence – and inspiration for him to start writing his own songs, ‘ones that Mike didn’t know’, as he wrote in his biography Chronicles.

Seeger was steeped in the American folk tradition; his father was a musicologist and his mother a composer, and visitors to the family home in Washington DC included song-collectors John and Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Seeger’s nanny? Songwriter and pioneer guitar-picker  Elizabeth Cotten. Said to have made his first recording – a rendition of the English song Barbara Allen – at the age of five, Seeger grew up to play guitar, mandolin,  dobro, autoharp, banjo, harmonica and dulcimer, and released his first record, ‘American Folk Songs’, with his sisters Peggy, Penny and Barbara in 1957.

He founded the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Tom Paley in ’58, a relatively stripped-down and authentic-sounding group in comparison to the slick, polished folkies of the time such as the Kingston Trio. The Ramblers continued intermittently into the Seventies with occasional revivals, whilst Seeger also released solo albums, wrote books, produced videos, curated festivals and generally continued to champion traditional American music – though sometimes in the shadow of his better-known and more outspoken half-brother, Pete. 

Before cancer took its toll, Seeger’s recent work included playing banjo for Ry Cooder on ‘My Name Is Buddy’ and for the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration ‘Raising Sand’, as well as a solo recording featuring 25 different guitars, ‘Early Southern Guitar Sounds’ (2007). He made over 40 albums and was nominated for six Grammy awards.

Seeger’s last known interview is at Country Music Pride.com .  There are many YouTube clips, some where he explains the story behind the song he is performing. This one’s from the Smithsonian Folkways studio in 2007; it’s a fine lesson in old-time banjo playing, as well as being pretty close to how the song may have been sung back in the 1900s.