WAMC Performing Arts Studio
News and Reviews
| SEEGER SIBLINGS TEAM UP FOR RARE JOINT SHOW By Michael Eck, Special to the Times Union (First published in the Times Union of Albany, NY: Sunday, April 4, 2004) Siblings Mike and Peggy Seeger are members of one America's first families of music. The children of composer/musicologists Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, and half-kin to brother Pete, each has made their own distinctive mark on the country's sonic landscape -- Mike as a preserver and purveyor of "old-time" Southern song styles, Peggy as a singer of traditional song and as a champion of contemporary women's music. The duo visited the WAMC Performing Arts Studio on Friday night for an uncommon performance together. "We sing together so rarely," Peggy said, "it really is a shame." Mike opened the concert with his usual array of instruments, eccentric songs and homespun humor. "I have a fair amount of junk with me," he noted as he took the stage. Seeger's peculiar magic -- on his own or with the seminal New Lost City Ramblers -- is that he makes the old tunes sound fresh and new. Friday's performance was a tad more academic than usual, but never dry. The jaw-harp workout on "Miss McLeod's Reel" was mesmerizing. The banjo-and-quills silliness of "Tennessee Dog" was entertaining. And his sing-along version of Libba Cotten's "Freight Train" was as pleasant as ever. Toward the end of the first set, Peggy came up to join in on a few, including the Seeger family favorite "When First to this Country" and the Carter Family's "Worried Man Blues." Peggy, also a multi-instrumentalist, launched the second half of the show with a melancholy concertina air and a request for "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" -- the song her late husband, Ewan MacColl, wrote after meeting her in England in the 1950s. Seeger also honored requests for her feminist anthem "Gonna Be An Engineer" ("which I've sung 5,000 times") and "It's a Free World" (an anti-smoking showdown with a flatulent punch line). She was at her most gripping with the plea for peace, "We Sow and We Sow." She preceded the tune, written after 9/11, with a list of American bombings of other countries since World War II, and followed it by asking the audience for silence instead of applause. "My heart's going like a hammer," she said. "I like to listen to it after that song." The duo came back together for a brace of casual, gently out-of-tune numbers to close the show, including "Little Town Flirt," "Soldier's Farewell" and "The Darby Ram." Back to News and Reviews |
| Used with permission of the Times Union of Albany, NY. Re-use rights may not be assigned to a third party without prior written permission from the Times Union. |