Mike Seeger, half brother of Pete Seeger and a man who played a critical role in preserving the music from “the old, weird America,” has died of cancer at age 75.
In 1958, Seeger helped form the New Lost City Ramblers, a group who kept alive American country, folk and blues from the 1920s and 30s. He called it the “true vine” of American music, a mix of British and African traditions and topical storytelling that took root in the South.
Seeger was part of an extraordinary musical family. His father, Charles Seeger, was a well-known ethnomusicologist, and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, a composer and folk-song collector. The family produced Pete, Mike and Peggy, also a noted artist.
Mike Seeger played banjo, guitar, autoharp and other instruments, which he learned from old records and in some cases from the musicians who originally played them. He sought out older musicians who had been lost for decades and introduced them to a new audience.
In one remarkable story, Mike Seeger discovered that the family maid, a woman named Elizabeth Cotten, then in her 60s, had been a folk and blues composer and singer in her earlier days. The discovery came when Elizabeth picked up a guitar and began to play. Mike started to make reel-to-reel tape recordings of Cotten’s music and triggered a major revival of her music.
In 2006, in a tribute to Cotten at the New York Guitar Festival, Seeger played and told stories with Taj Mahal, Jolie Holland and Marvin Sewell about discovering Cotten in his home. That night I met Seeger and was impressed at how friendly and accessible he was. I later learned much about old time American music from his excellent web site at www.mikeseeger.info/.
Dock Boggs, a banjo player from western Virginia whose records were prized by folklorists, was also found by Seeger, who brought him to the American Folk Festival in Asheville, N.C., in 1963. Boggs was a major figure in Greil Marcus’s important book, Old Weird America, about the eerie country, folk and blues embraced by Bob Dylan and the Band on the The Basement Tapes recorded at Big Pink in Woodstock, New York.
In his career, Mike Seeger was nominated for six Grammys. Yet, his life had perhaps a greater impact on other musicians and the music they made. One of those was the young Dylan, who wrote of Seeger in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One.
“Mike was unprecedented,” Dylan wrote, adding: “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once.”
RIP, Mike Seeger. Your life’s work has left an indelible mark on American music and culture.
Seeger, in the middle, performing with the New Lost City Ramblers
