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113 5 Music from the True Vine Mike Seeger and the Search for Authenticity During his involvement with the New Lost City Ramblers, Mike Seeger never ceased making music on his own or being active in a multitude of ways in the emerging old-time music scene. When he made the decision in 1960 to devote his life fully to music, Mike invested his total energy and passion. That decision exacted a costly toll on his health, marriage, and family life. He worked indefatigably over the ensuing decades, often as a member of the Ramblers but increasingly on his own as a missionary for old-time music. Mike was the supreme multitasker: he gave innumerable solo concerts; recorded LPs; worked as a session musician with Bill Clifton and others; performed frequently with the Ramblers, the Strange Creek Singers, and his second wife, Alice Gerrard; and produced important documentary recordings of Dock Boggs and other seminal musicians. Increasingly , he also participated in workshops and seminars; held a variety of college residencies; and served on the boards of directors of the Newport Folk Festival, the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, the American Folk Festival, the Smithsonian Folk-Life Festival, the Mariposa Folk Festival in Canada, and the National Endowment for the Arts Folk Arts Program. Mike’s most distinguished contribution to America’s traditional music, however, came through his own musicianship. The other members of the New Lost City Ramblers had been valued for their talents and eclecticism, but in many ways, Mike always stood out from the pack. Jon Pankake isolated a crucial component of Mike’s unique gift in a retrospective of the group that he wrote in 1968 for Sing Out! Seeger’s performances were “the most beautiful and personal of the Ramblers,” Pankake claimed, because they arose from his intimate identification with the persons from whom he 114 THE SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICITY learned the songs: “We are so moved by his performance of ‘Freight Train’ because Seeger has been so moved by Elizabeth Cotten.”1 Many young musicians , on the other hand, were more impressed by Mike’s versatility and his seemingly effortless ability to move fluently from one instrument to another . Chris Darrow, for example, a founding member of the experimental rock band Kaleidoscope, spoke for many young musicians when he said: “If you asked Ry Cooder, if you asked Taj Mahal, if you asked David Lindley, if you asked me, you would all get, ‘I wanted to be Mike Seeger.’”2 Still others were drawn to Seeger because of his commitment to and seeming mastery of stylistic authenticity. Bob Dylan referred to this when he noted in a lengthy, rambling, Whitmanesque poem written in 1963 for a short-lived folkie magazine called Hootenanny that “Mike Seeger is really real.”3 In the first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan was more explicit in his acknowledgment of Seeger’s influence on his own budding career. He remembered that he had first seen Mike perform solo at a couple of music parties in New York City, including one at Alan Lomax’s loft on 3rd Street. Dylan claimed to have discerned very early that Mike already possessed the qualities that he himself was struggling to attain. Mike was “extraordinary,” he wrote, “the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. . . . What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes, in his genetic makeup. Before he was even born, this music had to be in his blood. Nobody could just learn this stuff.” Since Mike had already cornered the market on “real” performance in folk music, Dylan would have to do something else: “[M]aybe I’d have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn’t know.”4 Mike’s earliest solo performances are hard to document because he appeared occasionally at very small venues and his shows were not always remembered or reviewed. He, in fact, had given programs at elementary schools and children’s nurseries in the year or so after his high school graduation. His two most important early concerts, however, were in April 1959 and January 1960 at Carnegie Hall and Swarthmore College, respectively . On April 3, 1959, Mike performed at Carnegie Hall as part of Alan Lomax’s Folksong ’59 concert. He played briefly in two segments with his brother Pete and Jimmy Driftwood, and he also did a short set by himself. The reviews of Mike’s performance were generally favorable, but he...

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