Born in 1935 in New York, Peggy is Pete Seeger’s half-sister and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s daughter. Her first life-partner was the Salford playwright and songwriter Ewan MacColl, who wrote First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for her and to whom she bore three children. She has nine grandchildren. A multi-instrumentalist, she is known for her excellent renditions of Anglo-American folksongs and for her activist songwriting, especially in the fields of feminism and ecology. Her best-known pieces are Gonna Be an Engineer and The Ballad of Springhill, which latter is rapidly becoming regarded as a traditional song. After living 35 years in England, she returned to the USA in 1994 and took up residence in Asheville, North Carolina. She moved to Boston (USA) in 2006 to teach songwriting at Northeastern University. She moved back to England (Oxford) in 2010. She tours extensively in the UK and occasionally in the USA, Canada and Australia as a solo concert artist, singing and giving workshops. She has made 23 solo recordings and has participated in more than a hundred recordings with other artists, one of whom is her second life-partner Irene Pyper-Scott. She has published a songbook with 150 of her 200+ songs (The Peggy Seeger Songbook, Forty Years of Songmaking, Oak Publications, 1998). Her latest CD, Everything Changes, is due out in September 2014 (Signet Music). Her website, www.peggyseeger.com, contains extensive information, a discography, CD information, photos, an itinerary and interesting insights into her creative life.
