>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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>> Nancy Groce: Hello my name is Nancy Groce I am one of the senior Folklife specials here at the American FolkLife Center and I'd like to welcome you to the latest presentation of our ongoing Benjamin Botkin lecture series. The Botkin series allows us to highlight the work of leading scholars in the disciplines of folklore, ethnic musicology, oral history and cultural heritage, while enhancing the collections here at the American Folklife Center.
The center, and for the center, and for the library, the Botkin lectures form an important facet of our acquisitions activity. Each lecture is videotaped and becomes part of the permanent collection here at the center. In addition, the lectures are later posted as webcast at the library's website where they will be available for viewing to Internet patrons [phonetic] throughout the world. So, if you haven't already done so now would be an excellent time to turn off cell phones and anything else that might beep and make noise. 
So, today, I have the honor of introducing the respected folklorist researcher, ethnomusicologist and author, Jean Freedman. Dr. Freedman received her PHD in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University in 1995 and her first book "Whistling in the Dark, Memory and Culture in Wartime London", [inaudible] popular culture and political ideology in London during World War II". 
She's published on a wide variety of topics, including Scottish ballads, Jewish folk theater, an unconventional Civil War soldiers. Her writings have appeared in numerous prestigious publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Journal of American Folklore, and Fast Folk Magazine. She lives in Washington DC area and she teaches at Montgomery College and also at George Washington University, where I understand
you'll be teaching the course on "Fairy Tales" starting next week.
>> Jean R. Freedman: I actually already started.
>> Nancy Groce: Already started? OK, today she will be speaking about her recent University of Illinois publication, "Peggy Seeger, a Life of Music, Love and Politics". Jean first met Peggy in 1979 during a junior year abroad in London and she frequented the Singers Club, a legendary folk club run by Peggy and her partner and husband Ewan MacColl.
Although much has been written about other members of the Seeger family, several years ago, Jean realized that Peggy's involvements in and contributions to the world of folk music, in the folk music revival had been under documented. So, her highly readable new biography should address this oversight, in some very good read, Jean was in close touch with Peggy when researching and writing this book, and she also may considerable use of the significant collections on the Seeger family material. We are proud here to have her here at the library, both in the American Folklife Center and in the music division, and we are always delighted to feature Botkin much you have made use of library resources and archives. Anyhow, I'll let her tell you more about Peggy Seeger. Let me just close by reminding you that we do have copies of Jean's book for sale in the four yard, and she will be happy to sign them immediately after her talk. So, what please join me in making welcome Jean Freedman.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Jean R. Freedman: Thank you Nancy and thanks to everyone here at the Library of Congress for making this possible and thanks to all of you for coming. Can you hear me? OK. All right. Well, I'm going to start off by building on what Nancy said about how I first met Peggy because that is usually the first question, I'm asked when people hear that I've written a biography of Peggy Seeger. So, I'm just going to read a little bit from the preface. 
I first met Peggy Seeger on an autumn evening in London in 1979. The setting was the Singers Club, a folk club that Peggy and her husband, Ewan McColl had begun in the early 1960s. I was in London, studying theater through the most American of adventures: the junior year abroad. Having grown up in a much smaller city, I was entranced by the cultural offerings it only a major metropolis can afford. But on that October evening, I was still a newcomer and a stranger, a long way from home and amused by cultural differences I had never anticipated. I didn't know my shoe size or the proper way to buy vegetables. The cars were unfamiliar and they drove on the wrong side of the street and I needed a new vocabulary for ordinary things, lift, over jean, petrol, chemist shop, surgical spirit, translated into American that is elevator, eggplant, gasoline, pharmacy and rubbing alcohol.
I'd never seen Peggy before, but her accent was familiar and she sang the songs I knew, The Single Girl and Jenny Jenkins. After the performance, I introduced myself and said, "Thank you for taking me home". Throughout that long an extraordinary year, the Singers Club became an essential part of my routine. In a small room above Bloomsbury pub, I could hear some of Britain's finest folk musicians for a price of 50 Pence, and anyone who wanted to could sing a song from the floor in the middle of the evening. I particular looked forward to the nights when Ewan and Peggy sang, I loved their unique combination of old and new music, 18th century ballads and 19th century sea shanties mixed with musical polemics about apartheid or Margaret Thatcher. I loved their combination of musical skill, intellectual rigor and political clarity. I joined the committee that round the Singers Club in at our first committee meeting, Ewan begin telling me of his days in the theater. When I indicated my interest in hearing more, Ewan and Peggy invited me to dinner at their home where we ate, talked and sang long into the night. Ewan and Peggy's influence on my life is perhaps greater than they knew. After my year in London, I returned to the United States and completed my degree in theater. Then I moved to New York, where I found myself spending more and more time with folk music. Singing, writing songs, helping to run a small folk club in Greenwich Village. In 1988, I began graduate work and folklore in ethnomusicology at Indiana University. My PhD dissertation was a study of London during World War II. Once again, I spent a year in London. But the Singers Club no longer existed and the folk music community, still creative and vibrant, was very different from the one I had known. 
Time passes. In the 1990s, a friend from the New York City folk revival, put Peggy and me in contact via email. A friend from graduate school asked me to review a book about Peggy's mother, Ruth Crawford Seegar for the Journal of American Folklore. I had questions about the book and emailed them to Peggy. She preferred to discuss the matter by telephone. In the course of our conversation, she asked if I knew anyone who was interested in writing her biography. I suggested myself. Six months later, we saw each other for the first time in years when she visited my home in Montgomery County, Maryland, only a few miles from where she grew up. Our work is biographer and subject had begun.
So that was the beginning. 
Now, Peggy was born in New York City 1935, live there for six months before moving to the Washington, DC area, and her parents were very influential on her life in many ways. This is a photograph of the Seeger family at home, there's -- reading from left to right -- her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, her sister Barbara, her father Charles Seeger, her sister Penny, her brother Mike Seeger, and then Peggy herself. Now, her father, had begun as a composer, and then later became an academic. And her mother also began as a composer and later also became a folk song anthologized. She transcribed and arranged folksongs for many people, including Ben Botkin. And Peggy in fact, learned how to transcribe when working for her mother, transcribing songs for Ben Botkin's Treasury of Western Folklor. So, there's a very strong connection between Botkin and the Seeger's. They move to Washington, so that Charles could take up a post with the New Deal and he held a variety of positions in the government service for several years, doing all sorts of activities to do with folk music. These included: collecting folksongs, publishing them. He started out in the resettlement administration in which there were these new communities that had been formed by people who had been displaced by the depression, and Charles's job was to use music to create some kind of cohesion, and community spirit, in these communities. And the Seeger's met Botkin fairly early on, he was also employed by the New Deal, he was working for the Federal Writers Project and they became not only coworkers, but personal friends. 
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And I suggest that it is largely through their influence that the idea of folk music that we have today as sort of progressive left liberal notion of folk music, was promulgated initially by the Seeger's and by Botkin. And it was in contradistinction really do an older idea folk music which is become common in the early decades of the 20th century. An idea that that folk music was essentially rural, it was essentially conservative, it was resistant to change. And the people who were involved in what's often called the first folk revival, used folk music in a very, very conservative fashion, very nationalistic, frequently racist, frequently anti-semitic. And in the 30s people such as the Seeger's, [inaudible] said, "This is all wrong. This is not what folk music should be used for". I'm going to read just very briefly, from the book: I say, "they argued for a vision of America more diverse and progressive than had here to fore been known, an America in which the cultures of rural and urban communities were valorized, the contributions of immigrants, workers and minorities celebrated. Botkin's Treasury of American Folklore for which Charles Seeger served as music consultant, contains a strongly worded denunciation of those who view folklore in terms of racial heritage, or insist that a particular folk group or body of tradition is superior or pure".
So, this is the atmosphere that Peggy grew up in. An atmosphere in which music is always present, her parents were always playing music. They were always singing. Her mother had songs that accompanied every activity, she said she knew it's time to go to bed when her mother started playing Cindy on the piano, and when it was time to wash dishes they would all get together in the kitchen and one person would lead the singing and that would be the accompany meant for the activity. It was not a real surprised when both Peggy and her brother, Mike became, not only interested in folk music, but became proficient in it by the time they were in their teens. Now, the second question I get asked when people find out that I've written a biography of Peggy Seeger is "is she related to Pete? And the answer is, yes, Charles Seeger had been married before and had three sons by his first wife of which Pete is the youngest. This is a picture taken during World War II, and there you see private Pete Seeger with Peggy and her younger sister Barbara. 
Now, in the fall of 1953 a number of very important things happened in Peggy's life. One is she started college at Ratcliff [phonetic], and the second thing that happened was much less happy, her mother died. Ruth Crawford Seeger had cancer. She died far too young. And she had been the main breadwinner for the family for several years. She -- most of the money that came in, was earned by Ruth as a piano teacher. So, Peggy was concerned, as a college freshman, that she might not have enough money to continue college. Since her father had to support the other children, support the household, he might not have money for tuition. So, she was talking to a couple of her friends in Boston. This was sort of the springtime of the mid-century folk revival. She had a lot of friends, who were involved in the folk revival. And they said to her, "Why don't you make an album? If you need money, why not make an album?" And so, she did. And her first album, collection of love songs call "Folk Songs of Courting and Complaint", they are all traditional, all but one is American. And I'm going to play just a little bit of one of these songs, "hen First Unto This Country a Stranger, I came".
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[ Music ]
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OK. So, that's her early voice very pure very lovely, relatively anonymous. It could had belong to any talented young singer. So, she made this, so she was able to continue college. Her father and sisters moved up to Boston so they could all be together and there be only one household to support, and then at the end of her sophomore year her father remarried and moved to California with his new wife, taking the younger girls with him. Peggy didn't really want to stay in Boston on her own. She considered briefly going to college in California, but she ended up going in the opposite direction and spending some time with her brother Charles the third. Technically her half-brother, Charles Seeger's eldest son, at the university of life, where he was a professor. So, she moved to Leiden in the autumn of 1955.
But she didn't stay there very long, her initial plan was to study Russian in the language of Dutch, which was challenging and interesting. But, she was never far from folk music. So, towards the end of the year a friend of her's from home, who been studying at the London School of Economics showed up in Leiden and said, "How'd you like to hitch hike around Europe" and she said, "sure". So, they were hitchhiking around Europe in December, and it was cold and there was no central heating and they were picked up by a Belgium Catholic priest named Joseph Lousberg. Who is with a bunch of students from the University of Leuven in Belgium and they were going to Germany to present a Christmas play in German, and they asked Peggy and her friend if they wanted to join. Because what does a German Christmas play really need? It needs a banjo.
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[ Laughter ]
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So, they said, "sure". And they went to Germany, they did the play in German in Berlin. Peggy's friend went back to London and Peggy returned to Belgium with this Catholic priest and a couple of the kids who they had met in Berlin and stayed there for a while. Went back to Leiden for a while and then she got a phone call from an old family friend: Alan Lomax. And he said, "how'd you like to come to London, I am starting a folk group and we are going to do a production of dark of the moon and I think there are lots of things that you could do. We need a banjo player, no one in England plays the banjo. So, can you come to London?" And initially she said, "no". She said "I'm going Scandinavians, friends that I met on the boat coming over to Europe have invited me to go with them. I said 'yes', I have a commitment. And besides I don't have any money. I can't afford to come to London". But Alan's persistent. He was nothing if not persistent and he said, "OK, you can wait a few weeks, you fulfill your commitment to go to Scandinavia and I'll send you the money to come to London". And she said "all right, why not? Sounds like an adventure". 
So, she arrived in London on the morning of March 27th 1956. She had been on the train all night. Now, you know how you look when you have been on the train all night? You know how you feel when you've been on the train all night? That's how she felt and looked. Allen met her at Waterloo Station, gave her a big hug and said, "you got an interview. So, not an interview, an audition, this morning with this group of singers that I want you to play with". Alan's girlfriend at the time was a model, she took one look at Peggy and started doing a makeover on her, giving her lots of makeup, doing her hair in a beehive, giving her one of those 1950s outfits that looked like that. And Peggy went out and saying for this group of musicians, and they thought she was wonderful. Particularly one, his name was Ewan McColl. So, Peggy joined The Ramblers, which is the name of the folk group. They did concerts, they did albums. They did this production of Dark of the Moon and to hear you until the story, he fell in love with her. The minute he saw her, but there were a number of problems in their relationship. One was that he was 20 years older than she was, and another one with the he was married to somebody else. So, Peggy said, "I can't handle this. I'm going to go back to the States". ^M00:20:03
So, she went back to California stayed with her father, but they stayed in touch. And Peggy being Peggy continue doing concerts. And one day she and Ewan were talking on the phone. Now, that sounds completely unremarkable to as now that someone in California would be talking to someone in London. But, in the 50s this was very rare, was very expensive. You tended to limit your calls to three minutes because in every three minutes block, you had to pay more money and during the course of their conversation, Peggy said, "I got a concert coming up and they want a new short love song and I can't think of one. Do you have one? Do you know of one I could use?" And he said, "well, I'm sure I can write one" and put together this song on the spot on the phone.
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[ Music ]
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So, that was the song, she sang it, it was well received. She then got a gig playing at the Guetto Horn in Chicago, which was one of the mayor first major folk clubs. And then you would encourage her to go to the World Youth Festival in Russia, which was a gathering of people, young people from all over the world. Left wing organizations had begun the World Youth Festival shortly after the end of World War II, and actually the one she attended with the largest of the World Youth Festival gatherings. So, she went. She met a young Californian, whom she had actually known before at her parents' house, Guy Carawan, and the two of them gave a number of concerts together in Russia. I don't know if you can see it. But if you look very, very closely at this photograph, you can see the hammers and sickles on the curtains.
And so, she and the rest of the American delegation gave a number of concerts and then the American delegation was invited to go to China. Now, this was 1957, America had no diplomatic relations with China and everyone in the American delegation, was, got an individual telegram from the State Department. This was John Foster Dulles State Department, saying, "if you go to China, you will be considered to be a willing [inaudible] in this propaganda, working against the interests of the United States and when you come back home, you maybe fined, you may lose your passport, you may even be put in jail". Now, this is pretty serious business, this is the height of the Cold War. And so, most for the people in the American delegation decided that they had better not take a chance, that they were going to heat State Department's warnings, and not go. But, Peggy and Guy Carawan, and his wife Noel, and a few other people, about 40 other people decided that they were going to go to China. When would they get another opportunity like that. And there's a picture of Peggy in China. Now, when she left China, she actually went back to Russia for a while and she didn't want to go back home because she had been warned that she might lose her passport and if she lost her passport that meant she'd be stuck in America and she wouldn't be able to see Ewan MacColl. Their relationship at this point was sort of a state of flux. She didn't know quite what was going on, so she decided that she was going to stay in Europe for as long as possible. She stayed for a while in Paris, staying with a friend of Ralph Rinzler, who, I'm sure you know the name, became one of this country's most distinguished folklorist are the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. 
At the time was a student studying French in Paris. And she got a work permit to enter England briefly, not permanently, but long enough to work on what were called radio ballades. Now, these were a particularly innovative radio documentaries that she and Ewan MacColl, and Charles Parker produced. And what they did is they went around and interviewed people and then they created songs based on the interviews and they also used the actual words of the interviewees which was very new, it was extremely revolutionary technique. BBC wasn't quite sure if it was going to work. But, it ended up working very nicely. The first radio ballads called "The Ballad of John Axon". It was about a train engineer who had died sort of like a captain going down with his ship there was a train malfunction and he had stuck with it, do it till the end. The third radio ballad, which is one of the best known called Singing The Fishing, won a very prestigious prize, The [inaudible]. So, they continued working on these radio ballads of throughout the, the late 50s and early 60s. But Peggy could only initially, while she was working on the radio ballad, she could only go to England for a brief period of time on this special work visa, then she'd go back to France. And she and Ewan decided that they did want to stay together, they did want to live together, so they had this problem to solve, and then something happens that sort of accelerated the process of them deciding what to do. Peggy got pregnant. So, they had to figure out some way that she could get to England and stay there. Now, the easiest way is to marry a British subject, but at this point, Ewan was still married to his second wife. They had a friend, a Scottish folk singer by the name of Alex Campbell, who in what I consider an absolutely extraordinary gesture of friendship said, "I'll marry you". And so, when Peggy was about six months pregnant, they were married in Paris. The priest, giving Alex Campbell, a dirty look the whole time, and later on gave him a stern dressing down for getting this young woman in trouble and waiting so long to make an honest woman of her, but it fulfilled its bureaucratic purpose. She was able to go to England and she immediately could get citizenship. Because she was married to a British subject, and then sometime later, she and Alex Campbell had a nice quiet divorce.
So, 1959 Peggy moved to England and lived with Ewan. Also in that year their first son Neil was born. 1963 their son Calum was born and that's a picture of the four of them at the Singers Club. 
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All right, now I want to give you some examples of the different kinds of music that Peggy does because she is very prolific, she can do all sort of different genres, different varieties of music. First thing, I am going to play you a little bit of a traditional Scotts folk song that she sang with Ewan and called "The Spinning Wheel". One of the many things that I love about this song is that in common with many Scots folksongs, it has a heroine named Jean. 
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So, that's a love song in which the man is courting the woman and she continues to spin her spinning wheel until the very end in which she says, "what I learned? I like to [inaudible] wheel far better than my spinning wheel". Up until this point, Peggy had done mainly traditional songs, mainly American. She started singing Scott songs and English songs with Ewan. But in the late 50s she started writing songs of her own, and the first one that really got attention with called the Ballad of Spring Hill, and it was about an event that happened in 58 near the town of Springhill, Nova Scotia, where there was an underground earthquake that caused a mine to collapse, and a number of the miners were killed immediately. The others were eventually rescued, took about a week. And it became very well-known because it was the first of this kind of disaster to be televised. So, Peggy heard about it when she was still living in France, and she wrote this song in traditional ballad format, but telling this very modern story. I'm going to play just a little bit of the Ballad of Spring Hill. 
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OK, and another thing that both Peggy and Ewan and became very well-known for was writing political music, writing topical songs about events. And in 1960 they brought out this album called the "New Britain Gazette", which was composed entirely of new songs. Again, that's something that we think of unremarkable for folksingers to be politically minded. But, except for Peggy's brother Pete, this was relatively unusual, so this was very much a new thing, and Peggy wrote "The Crooked Cross" after a campaign in London, a political campaign, in which a man named Oswald Mosley was running for office. Now, Oswald Mosley was a fascist, genuine fascist, big F. During the wars, he had been part of an organization called the British Union Fascist. And he was running for office in 1959. His followers plastered London with swastikas, which was of course "The Crooked Cross", and Peggy wrote this song in response. 
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So, by the early 60s, Ewan and Peggy were becoming known as the primary folksingers in England, and there was a group of young folk singers who wanted to learn more about singing, and about songs and writing songs. And so, Ewan and Peggy got together this group, which they named The Critics Group. And, this was a group of young singers who would meet weekly at Ewan and Peggy's house and they would get instruction on how to sing, how to write songs and they also did quite a number of projects. Together they did albums, they did concerts. And one of the most innovative things they did was a kind of folk theater called The Festival of Fools. 
Now, The Festival of Fools was originally a medieval festival done in Europe in which people on the, the lower runs of social hierarchy make fun of people on the upper runs of the social hierarchy. And this appealed to them, so they decided it was time to revive this tradition. And what they did is they would go through the newspapers, month by month, collecting items of news that were interesting, horrifying, funny, engaging, in some way dramatic, and they wrote songs about them, and they made sketches about them. And then at the end of the year, they performed this as sort of a musical revue called The Festival of Fools and they did this from the, the mid 60s to the early 70s. It was very well received, it became very well known, and then in 1971, they used to have this, the first stirrings of what we now called the second wave of feminism, and Ewan wrote most of the script of The Festival of Fools presentations. Peggy wrote a lot of the songs. She also did the musical direction, she also acted, sang, played instruments, did most of the organizing.
So, she had a lot to do, and then in 1971, Ewan said, "I think we need a women song in this year's production. I think you should write a women's song". Peggy had a quite enough to do as it was, but she decided, "Yes, that was a good idea". And she wrote what is often considered for most famous song "I'm going to be an engineer". 
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OK, yes, then that is still her, her most famous song. She still has people coming up to her, saying, "I became an engineer because of you" or then it was, "my daughter became an engineer", but now it's, "my granddaughter became an engineer because of you". And she and Ewan continued to play, sing, write songs about all sorts of issues. In the 80s Peggy got involved with quite a number of new issues. One of them was the women's Peace Camp at Greenham Com, and where she went periodically. She also got very involved with the environmental movement, and that remains one of her passions. One of the things that she continues to sing and write songs about. And then, in the middle of the decade was the miners' strike in Britain and she and Ewan were also very involved in the miners' strike. So, they continued being up to the minute political topical song writers throughout the 80s. Then in 1989 Ewan McCall died, and Peggy got a lot of solace from a friend of hers, Irene Scott, someone she had known for many years. And after Ewan died, Irene was them very often the person that she turned to. And then, they fell in love, and here's a song, she wrote about that. 
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So, after Ewan died, it became difficult for Peggy to stay in England. Everything there reminded her of Ewan, and she also found that she and Ewan had been considered such a musical unit that it became difficult for her to get bookings without him, there was one man in particular, a particular horrible person who referred to her as a "remnant of a dead duo". Yes. So, she decided she would like to move back to the States for a while. She was, after all, a specialist in American folk song and that remained her specialty throughout the time she lived in England, because she felt, "this is my culture, these are the songs of my country in this is what I can do best". But, she hadn't lived in in America for nearly 35 years. So, she moved back to America initially to Asheville, North Carolina, which is the, the seedbed to a lot of the song that she sang, it was the place that her father visited during his work for the New Deal, visited some of, the festivals there. It was a place where her brother Pete, first heard the five strings banjo. So, it was definitely a very meaningful place for her to go to. And she lived there for 12 years, and then moved to Boston to teach song writing at Northeastern University in 2006. And stay there for four years, continuing to write songs and continuing to make albums of traditional music.
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She never lost her roots, she was always someone who had one foot in the traditional camp and one foot in the contemporary camp, and who was equally adept at both. And then, in 2010 she moved back to England and settled in Oxford. Her children and her grandchildren lived in the London area, so Oxford is very nearby. And the last thing I am going to play for you is a song she wrote for her brother Pete's 94th birthday. Now, let me see if I remember how to get out of this. So, this is the song that she wrote for Pete's 94 birthdays 
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Just had the pleasure to play all that, it's so delightful. 
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OK, so we're almost up to the present. Peggy made her, the most recent album she made was in 2014. It's called "Everything Changes" and it's a very different album from the kind of things that she had done previously. And she's now planning a new album to go along with the tour that she's doing in the autumn, and that's not bad for an 82-year-old. I spoke to her last summer. I remember, she had just finished the tour and she said -- I'm tired and I need to take a break. I've just had this tour throughout England -- and I said -- OK, so what are you going to do? -- She said -- well, Irene and I are going to go on a three week safari in Africa --. So, that's how she relaxes. Well. Thank you very much, does anyone have any questions? Yes.
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[ Inaudible question ]
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That's something that's not entirely clear, I know she didn't want to initially, they, and so it took a while to get a divorce. They eventually did divorce and eventually Ewan and Peggy did marry, but exactly how it happened is something I have never figured out. Yes.
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[ Inaudible question ]
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Yes.
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[ Inaudible question ]
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Interesting.
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[ Inaudible question ]
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That's a good question. I really don't know they, The State Department's take on that. I do know that, a lot of folksingers, particularly Pete, was viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. In fact, one the reasons that Charles Seeger, the third was in Leiden, and not the United States is that he couldn't get a job in the United States, not because he wasn't a good enough scientist, but because he couldn't pass the security clearance. He'd been offered a plumb job at, I believe it was MIT on, but the interview consisted largely of, "tell me about the politics of Pete and Peggy". So, they were very much, under the, they were very much on the radar of the powers that be, how much they were actually being followed by the State Department, I don't know. It's a good question. Yes.
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[ Inaudible question  ]
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Yes. That's a good question. I mean, Peggy always does what she thinks is right, and you know if there are consequences, there are consequences. But, I know in the in the early 60s, she and Ewan had planned this major tour of the United States and at the last minute, Ewan didn't get a visa, he was considered too much of a security threat. So, she had to do the tour by herself. So, I know that was one thing. England, was under less of a of a red scare. So, I think it was, it was less of a problem there. But certainly, coming here it could be a problem. Definitely. Yes? Nancy.
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[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:47:53 
That's a huge question. She was a great influence and in fact, the American folk rival in some ways jump started the British folk revival, then they had took great pains to differentiate themselves from the American folk revival. But, before a number of Americans came there, including Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger, the main folk music, the idea was sort of the Cecil Sharp early 20th century, Maypoles peasants dancing in the village green idea, and people who were interested in this kind of music took their inspiration from Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. And started a movement called skiffle, which was in many ways, a sort of attempt to do the songs of Guthrie on Leadbelly in England, using particular instruments, washboard base and things like that. Then, Alan came along doing lots of folk music of projects and brought Peggy over, and because she was such a skilled musician and because the music she did was so exciting, that a lot of people in Britain said, "hey, I want to get involved in this". The American folk revival was doing very well, records were selling well and were being played on the radio, and so a lot of a British people started singing American folk songs. And there was actually an incident that took place at the Singers' Club in which someone was singing a Leadbelly song, I can't remember which one, but singing in the very strong cockney accent and Peggy just fell on the floor laughing. She thought it was so funny. And people were saying "that wasn't a very nice thing to do, laugh at this person's performance", she says, "but I know Leadbelly, I know how he is supposed to sound like and that's not it". So, the Singers' Club instituted a policy, which lasted till the end of the Singers' Club, that if you sang a song in that club, you sang the songs of your own culture.
^M00:50:04
So, that if you were English you sang English songs. If you were Scott, you, sang Scott songs. And so, a lot of people in Britain, then started looking toward their own music and started saying. "hey, we got folk music to, we don't have to just be imitating the Americans. We can sing the songs of our own culture", so she had I think, she had a great influence on the folk revival there, and continues to do so. She's sort of the elder stateswoman of the folk revival there now. Yes.
^M00:50:37
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:51:05 
Yes. It's interesting. Good catch, she does, this is something I discuss in the book, I didn't actually discuss it with her. But, she read everything I wrote so -- and she made comments and if she didn't like something she'd let me know. So, she didn't make a negative comment about that, so she apparently approved. But in "Love Unbidden", she takes some of the language from first time ever and uses it, and uses it in sort of interesting ways, like in first time ever, he has talking about the trembling heart of a captive bird that was there at my command, in a "Love Unbidden", she talks about being a wild bird instead of a captive bird, she is a wild bird that is at your command. So, it's a very, very different idea, but using a similar structure and she uses the same structure beginning every stanza with approximately the same line with minor revisions. So, it's yes, it's very definitely taken off of first time ever. And, one of, there's one scholar has a quote in the book who noticed that she in the first in "Love Unbidden", she talks at, I am on one of those who dare not claim thee. And she says that this sounds like the love that dare not speak its name, which is on that what was the phrase, it became famous at, at Oscar Wilde's trial for homosexuality. But very subtle. Yes.
^M00:52:45
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:52:58 
Sure, she recorded for lots of different record labels, go to her website and you'll see that there are maybe 20. But yes, she recorded for Folkways, she recorded for DECA, she recorded on the On-Topic Folk Lyric, Rounder. She and Ewan founded their own company, Blackthorn Records, she did a number of records on that. Apple Seeds. It just loads and loads of different -- wherever they could do the kind of music that the wanted and could get it out. Good question. Yes.
^M00:53:42
[ Inaudible question ]
^M00:53:48 
I know a little bit, she's planning to do a similar to her most recent album, which is a much more contemporary, it has a much more contemporary sound. It's really her. I was talking with her daughter in law, who said, "this isn't a folk album this is a Signer's songwriter album". And it's true in a lot of her albums, it could it have been a live recording. It could it just been sort of like the old-fashioned way that music technology was, so this is to record live performance. Her latest album is not like that at all, is full of sampled sound. It's full of music that could only have been done in a recording studio and it's full of, of jazz inflected accompaniment, lots of international instruments and also, writing in a much less traditional style, so that's what she is planning to do for her next album. I'll be eager to see it. 
Anybody else? All right, well, thank you.
^M00:54:52
[ Applause ]
^M00:54:57 
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