Peggy Seeger has never had any interest in music as “content” or pop, rock and folk groups staying hitched to their old hits to boost their bank balances. In her world, the political and the personal are inextricably intertwined and, for all her love of Scotland and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, it’s impossible to overlook the full range of what this remarkable character has witnessed and experienced since she was born in the United States in 1935. She may have travelled to Britain in the 1950s “because the money gave out”, but Peggy is folk music royalty; the sister of Pete Seeger, famous for Where Have All the Flowers Gone and If I Had a Hammer, and the partner – for 33 years – of Ewan MacColl, who wrote the famous song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in her honour.
Solidarity with working people Yet, while she turned 89 last week, I didn’t get any impression of somebody slowing down or contemplating retirement. Polite, engaging and convivial, my first thought was that she rather resembled Angela Lansbury, another formidable left-wing woman whose range far extended beyond playing Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote. And my second was that, even as she remarked about her occasionally off-kilter memory: “One of those days, you’ll have to remind me who I am”, she exuded the impression she had a thousand stories to tell, whether entertaining Fidel Castro in Havana or mourning Ewan’s daughter, Kirsty MacColl, who .
