While I was writing my post commemorating Mike Seeger on Monday I phoned Jill Nicholls, the producer of Folk America, to ask if she had any words she'd like me to add about her meeting with Mike while making the series. Jill was in an airport with little time to talk but yesterday sent me a lovely email, with reminiscences and extracts from her interview with Seeger. It's a wonderful tribute. Jill writes:
"I was lucky enough to meet Mike Seeger last summer when I was filming for the Folk America series. Obviously he was on our 'A' list of desired interviewees. His personal musical journey threaded in and out of everything we were hoping to cover in the series - from his passion for and deep knowledge of old time southern music, to his involvement in the 60s folk revival, trying to get that music across to a bigger, younger, city audience to whom the old was something rich and strange.
He invited me and my cameraman Daniel Meyers to come to his house in Lexington, Virginia, a beautiful peaceful sun-filled place where he lived with his wife Alexia, also a musician. Mike played some Dock Boggs for us on his banjo, making you feel that Dock was there with you in the room - as he often had been together with Mike, telling his own life story into Mike's tape machine between coal miner's coughs. Mike also played us Henry Thomas's Fishing Blues, with some hand crafted quills, again combining authenticity with absolutely present tense commitment to the music. These were no museum pieces - they lived.
From the long, thoughtful interview that he gave us that day, always fair, always precise, choosing his words carefully, I especially remember him saying that he didn't see why people like him -and like the New Lost City Ramblers which he helped to start - should be attacked, as they often are and often were in the 60s for just repeating the past, for being stuck in the past. "So many people look on somebody and say, you're stuck in the past. Well, classical musicians play Mozart. That's stuck in the past. People perform Shakespeare. They're stuck in the past. And some people will take it and change Shakespeare a little bit, and that's what some of us do. And some people even go crazy with some of Shakespeare's stuff and bring it right up to date, and there are people doing that in old time music now. I think that people should ask the musicians what they think about their music."
It's interesting that Mike Seeger compares 'old time' music playing with classical music. He himself came from a classical music background - his father was the composer Charles Seeger, his mother Ruth Crawford Seeger, whom I have been reading about since meeting Mike in Alex Ross's fantastic book, The Rest is Noise. Ross calls Ruth Crawford Seeger "one of the few major women composers of the early 20th century".
Mike said of his background: "My father was a musicologist; he was mostly interested, before my birth, in modernist music and dissonant counter point and just kind of looking at the whole musical spectrum. My mother was a modernist composer and she was pretty well known in the early 30s in the modernist music community, which was about 200 people maybe across the country at the time. But they discovered and took on the mission to try to keep old time music alive in the early 30s as part of the movement towards people's music. I was fortunate to be brought up in a family that loved old time traditional music and - and had a mission of trying to keep it alive."
It was a mission Mike continued throughout his life. He was happy to answer all our questions, but very keen that we should show that this is a living tradition, stronger now, he felt, than it was in the 60s: "This is an exciting time in the revival. There are gatherings of musicians around the country, only maybe 10-15-20,000 people playing this kind of music but once in a while we get a little bit of visibility on the media or in the internet, and that helps more people to come this direction and be able to realise all the wonderful things there are about this music."
He was also very keen that we should meet traditional musicians who did not have the benefit of his famous family name (the most famous of course being his older half brother Pete). He drove us up to see a local man called Bruce Clarke, who runs a music venue for traditional song and dance in an old barn in the middle of the countryside, Mike and Bruce sat together by an open doorway, soft rain falling on the hills and trees outside, taking off from each other, as serious as your life but laughing, showing such mutual respect. It struck me that Mike was where he wanted to be."
Jill Nicholls produced the BBC series Folk America
