Music from the True Vine: Mike Seeger's Life and Musical Journey

2 FOLK MUSIC AND POLITICS: Growing up in the Seeger Household

27 2 Folk Music and Politics Growing up in the Seeger Household Although Mike Seeger spent most of his youth and early adulthood in the Washington, D.C., area, he lived his first thirty months in New York. He was born in the Sloane Hospital for Women in New York City and, except for brief interludes at Fairlea, his paternal grandparents’ home in Patterson (Putnam County), lived the rest of his New York years at 111 East 87th Street in Manhattan. Mike understandably had few memories of these early years, but he gained some glimpses in stories, family recollections , and photographs (including one of the famous four-wheel trailer that Charles and Constance had used in 1921 during their abortive touring concert season). After 1921 the trailer was seldom used, except for occasional camping excursions and when Charles worked on Mr. Hammell’s blueberry farm during the hard times of the early 1930s. Charles, Ruth, and Mike apparently lived in the trailer briefly during the summer of 1933.1 During his stays at Fairlea in the summers of 1933 through 1935, Mike lived with his parents in an apartment in his grandfather’s spacious remodeled barn. Divided bya garage, the barn had been outfitted with a comfortable apartment for Charles’s sister, Aunt Elsie, and a variety of other spaces used as a kitchen, a workroom, a carpentry shop, and sleeping accommodations .2 These early NewYork years were times of severe privation for the Seeger family. Judith Tick refers to this period as “the nadir of their poverty.” Charles had lost his job at Juilliard because of his former wife’s resistance, and Ruth was restricted to home with two small babies. Ruth joined her husband at the farm in August, and the small but growing family lived for awhile in the trailer. Pete later recalled to Judith Tick that Ruth was sometimes “frantic, trying to take care of two babies with no running 28 GROWING UP IN THE SEEGER HOUSEHOLD water.” He went on to observe that the Seeger wives had a problem: “Their husbands would ask them to do more than human beings could do.”3 Pete may have been referring to his father’s two wives, but he, and later Mike, also expected the mothers of their children to live on little and perform heroically. Charles, for his part, struggled to support his growing family with earnings obtained from part-time teaching and odd summer jobs performed on farms near his father’s house in Upstate New York. The move to Washington promised security and prosperity, but relocation there certainly did not bring immediate relief. Before settling down in 1938 in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Seegers lived in a succession of houses and apartments in the Washington area. They stayed first in a suburban brick house on Pershing Drive in Arlington, Virginia, and spent the summer of 1936 in a very wooded place near Turkey Run, Virginia, that Mike described as “just kind of camping out between leases.” They lived from late 1936 into 1938 in a tiny row house at 2441 P Street NW in a racially integrated section of Georgetown. Mike’s first memories are associated with the Georgetown residence, and in particular the night in May 1937 when Baby Mike playing with Charles Seeger in Central Park, New York City, 1934. (Photo courtesy of Alexia Smith) GROWING UP IN THE SEEGER HOUSEHOLD 29 his mother hurriedly gathered items from the top of a bureau on her way to the hospital to give birth to Barbara.4 In 1938 the Seegers rented a house at 10001 Dallas Avenue in Silver Spring, a suburb of Washington that at the time still had the flavor of a small southern town. Mike always remembered this home on the edge of the city with great affection.5 It was a big rambling house with a peaked roof, heated with a basement coal furnace and surrounded by an expansive yard that was adjacent to open fields of woods and blackberry patches. It was almost like living in the country. One of Mike’s “indelible childhood memories,” in fact, was of a neighbor, a burlyex-Texan whoworked as a carpenter and fireman but also raised chickens that ran freely in his backyard. Mike sometimes watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the man wrung the neck of one of his chickens, which then flopped around the yard...