Folk royal in concert

BY ANGELA CROMPTON

A benefit concert to raise money for the Nelson Women's Centre destroyed by arson two years ago is being held on Saturday. It stars international folk musician, composer and activist Peggy Seeger, who has been holidaying in the Kenepuru Sound.

Raising awareness about the world's inequalities has been a focus of the music composed and played by Peggy Seeger. The 75-year-old says she was never personally physically or emotionally abused but she has made it a mission to write songs and raise public awareness about the many women who are.

"I [once] worked in a women's refuge in London.

"I took women to the court, I took them to hospital, I took their children to and from school. That's when I saw, I'm ashamed to say, what men can do."

Men are also part of the solution, however, and Seeger stresses she is not "anti-men".

"The genders need each other. I have two sons; I lived with a male partner for 30 years.

"But who makes the wars? Who creates the weapons?"

Seeger's partner was British folk singer Ewan MacColl. Twenty years her senior, he fell in love with the young American woman who had travelled to England when she was 20.

His song, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face – made famous later by Roberta Flack – was written for Seeger.

She just smiles when asked about it, preferring to talk about her work with MacColl encouraging people in Britain to reclaim the music and songs from their own cultures.

American influences had infiltrated the English-speaking world in the sixties and Britons were having an identity crisis, she says.

"Ewan and I started encouraging people to sing songs from the culture they lived in."

Preserving cultures remains important today, as mass migration leaves many people feeling displaced. Seeger says England is struggling to assimilate its newcomers; cities in Australia are having similar problems; and even Blenheim needs to look at how it serves the people brought over from other countries to work in Marlborough vineyards.

"I feel sorry for them; they are walking the streets; they're out of their culture and they don't know what to do."

The other day, though, Seeger had seen a group from Vanuatu singing and playing music outside a supermarket. It had been wonderful to see shoppers stopping to listen and enjoy the sounds being created by another culture now sharing their town.

Home for Seeger is currently Boston, Massachusetts, although she is planning to move back to England next year where all her family live.

Seeger and MacColl had three children: Kitty, Neill (now lead guitarist for the David Gray band); and Calum (musical director for Ronan Keating, who recently performed in New Zealand).

Seeger's mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was the first woman to be awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Music and went on to become one of the United States' top female composers. Her father, Charles Louis Seeger, was a music professor at the University of California and invented the melograph, an electronic means of notating music. Brother Mike became a virtuoso of several dozen instruments and half-brother Peter is considered the grandfather of the 1940s American folk revival.

Seeger herself was playing the piano by the time she was 7, and then went on to learn guitar, five-string banjo, autoharp, Appalachian dulcimer and English concertina.

She will play four of those instruments at Saturday's concert, to be held in the Nelson School of Music. She is looking forward to playing its new Steinway but denies the piano is her favourite instrument.

"My favourite instrument is the one I'm playing at the time. It has to be. You have to savour it, let your fingers taste it."

Joining Seeger on stage will be Nathan Torvik and her Kenepuru friend and former music partner Irene Pyper-Scott. Nelson female Celtic group Cairde will be support. Tickets, $30 can be bought online at nsom.co.nz or by phoning 035489477.

My favourite instrument is the one I'm playing at the time. It has to be. You have to savour it, let your fingers taste it - Peggy Seeger

- The Marlborough Express