Her entire memoir is full of her love for folk songs, not only from the United States, but Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England.

Seeger writes affectionately about her childhood, which, growing up with so many musicians in her family set the foundation for her life as an artist, “at two-years-old songs entered my bloodstream.” She started playing instruments at the age of six and unconsciously made a commitment to learning Folk songs. Writes Seeger, “Pete was as good an education for us as the teachers.” Pete was the elder son who used to visit his siblings and sing song’s he learned while touring the world. Yet lamenting the loss of a closer connection, “I only knew her folk music persona, her classical piano playing, her attempts to cook.” Seeger was raised in a musical house along with her brother Mike and sister, Barbara, “a tangle of children”, each two years apart. And although Peggy Seeger loved and respected her mother’s artistic successes in spite of “having children after the age of 33”, she reveals that her mother, “…read Perry Mason detective stories…drank oceans of black coffee”. Her mother, Charles’s second wife, was Ruth Crawford, a piano teacher and classical composer who was a member of the so-called “ultra-moderns” that included American composer, Elliott Carter. Her father was Charles (Charlie) Seeger was a composer and ethnomusicologist. Seeger was born in 1935 in New York City. But her achievements as an artist go much further and now, in her 82ndyear, we get to enjoy the stories of her life from the front row. Among her many accomplishments as a folk musician, most people may only know of Peggy Seeger as the partner of Ewan MacColl, the songwriter, historian and composer of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, written for Seeger in the first year of their liaison. Her story features a large cast of characters including family members, friends and musicians. Seeger, the half-sister of Pete Seeger, the legendary folk artist, has written about her life with wit and sentimentality.

The best part of any story is in the telling and so it is for Peggy Seeger’s memoir, First Time Ever (Faber&Faber) published last December.

First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger