“Older women are the best,” says Peggy Seeger with a flirty twinkle, “because people think we think we’re doing it for the last time …” She may be celebrating her approaching 80th birthday but, performing with extraordinary gusto and no little verve, there’s still plenty of the mischievous reprobate – not to mention the untamed rebel – about her.
As Indian summers go, Seeger’s renaissance is spectacular. Part of a great American folk music dynasty (the likes of Lead Belly, Alan Lomax and Woody Guthrie would casually drop by her family home), she crossed the Atlantic and teamed up with Ewan MacColl to put politics into song and play a pivotal role in the 1950s-1960s British folk revival.
Yet, after MacColl’s death in 1989, Seeger returned to the US, and was rarely seen on these shores for many years. Since coming back to live in the UK in 2010, she subsequently underwent life-threatening illness and major surgery, so to see her now – orchestrating stirring chorus-singing from an adoring full house and skipping between autoharp, banjo, guitar, concertina and piano while delivering an amazingly varied set with such vigour, passion and an unexpected line in comedy – is joyous.
This is no sympathetic lap of honour for past deeds; no orgy of nostalgia. With sons Calum and Neill MacColl framing her still-expressive voice in cultured arrangements on a variety of instruments (bowed psaltery, autoharp and banjo on one set of Playford tunes), the emotional intimacy of her remarkable recent album Everything Changes slices the air. Recently named best original song at the BBC folk awards, Swim to the Star – Peggy and Calum’s disquieting observation of the Titanic disaster – sounds even more darkly affecting on stage, while the album’s title track offers a swathe of compellingly poignant reflections on her mother, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger.
There are guest appearances from Paul Brady (duetting deliciously with her on Five Nights Drunk) and Eliza Carthy; Calum and Neill MacColl offer two of their father’s most celebrated hits, Sweet Thames Flow Softly and The Joy of Living; and it’s a goosebump moment when Peggy rises to sing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, written for her by Ewan in 1957. Stripped of its Roberta Flack histrionics, the sheer bareness is shockingly powerful.
After mingling with the audience beforehand and hanging around at the interval to fiddle with the instruments, she dashes off to the foyer to sign CDs. “I don’t want you old people to get tired,” she says, grinning.
- At the Stables, Milton Keynes, 10 June. Box office: 01908 280800. Then touring until 28 June.
