posted on 17 Feb 2019

The First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger

I’m not sure how often the label ‘British Folk Revival’ has been used over the past fifty or sixty years but it feels that somewhere, on the outer edges of the popular music scene, there’s always someone claiming folk music’s next reincarnation. Back in the late 60s and early 70s I was swept up in one of those periodical revivals – the so called ‘folk-rock’ scene which was dominated at that time by bands like Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and a whole host of fellow-traveller singer-songwriters as diverse as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Martyn, Nick Drake and a whole load more.

The addition of electric instruments and what might be called a ‘rock music sensibility’ to the folk repertoire was, as far as I was concerned in my late teens, a brilliant recipe but for the previous generation of folkies who had made a shibboleth of ‘authenticity’ it was tantamount to apostasy. However, many of those who were at the forefront of the folk-rock boom were in fact very well versed in what might be called ‘traditional’ folk traditions and because of them I found myself exploring the more purist work of the previous generations and I found plenty there to enjoy – and plenty that I’ll never go anywhere near ever again.

It was during this period that I first encountered the work of Peggy Seeger and Ewan McColl – traditional but fiercely political and also innovative with their conceptual musical documentaries that they called Radio Ballads. So when I saw that Seeger, now in her eighties,  had written a lengthy memoir I was expecting to really enjoy having a lot of background filled in and that I would get a privileged peep into the events and personalities that peopled the folk music world.

How wrong I was. I said in a previous review of a memoir written by Patti Smith that the reader of these life stories always runs the risk of discovering that they don’t much like the person they thought they might admire and that turns out to be true of this book too. I took such a strong dislike to Seeger that it completely dominated the experience of reading the book. But I think this isn’t a very good book for reasons other than my dislike of Seeger’s personality – all the things I imagined would be there just aren’t.

Seeger came from a comfortable middle class musical family (Pete Seeger was her brother) and her decision to leave her family environment and become an itinerant folk musician is perhaps the most interesting part of the memoir. It was during this time that she first met and enchanted the older, already married Ewan McColl. And although they had a strange and tempestuous relationship that continued in one form or another until McColl’s death, if you think you might actually get any sort of coherent portrait of McColl or his politics, you’re going to be disappointed. The two will always, of course, be associated with the McColl-penned love song to Seeger, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, but we get very little more than a cursory description of the creation of the song and its subsequent popularity – although it’s always lurking there in the background casting an odd shadow over the book. Their wonderful Radio Ballads are also passed over with only a page or two of a 450 page book dedicated to something that I think many might argue are some of their most significant works.

She does talk about how, prompted by McColl’s famous and almost fanatical insistence on keeping the folk songs pure and authentic, they created extraordinarily authoritarian rules which they insisted on for anyone who wanted to perform in their club. But beyond that you won’t find any overview or appreciation of the wider folk scene and, with one exception (the musician who taught Seeger to play the accordion) there are no portraits of the folk musicians she must have mixed with.

What we do get though is Seeger, Seeger and more Seeger. It’s certainly true that she has had a pretty remarkable and often traumatic life and her personal relationships have been complex and eventful but, my God, don’t we know it. Here in detail is how she felt about just about everything - as long as it puts her at the centre; the gory (literally) details of her abortions, her relationship with McColl and McColl’s other wife and children, her irritable bowels, her most recent same sex relationship and her relationship with her father.

Now I’m prepared to accept that there will be those who are quite happy with this balance but not me I’m afraid. I am interested in her as a musician and for her perception of the cultural environment she lived in and contributed to and there is so little of this and so much of the domestic private life that I just felt alienated.

But I have to say it’s more than that – a good deal of my irritation comes from the inescapable feeling that this was an exercise in self-absorption and ego and there’s no space here for anything or anyone else. She’s so fixated on herself and her interpretation of events that she can’t turn her gaze from introspection to look at and consider what else was happening around her. When the external world does force its way in, the analysis feels astonishingly superficial:

“Politically, the 1970s felt…scattered. I resented that the country had adopted decimal currency. I had been so proud to learn the zany pounds-shillings-and-pence monetary system.”

Really. That’s it for Britain the Seventies?? I’m not going to tax your patience by picking out more of this kind of stuff but it does, I think, illustrate what a missed opportunity this was to bring a different and unique perspective to British musical and cultural history of the second half of the 20th century.

Terry Potter

February 2019