Michael Seeger (1933-2009)

Mike Seeger was born in 1933, the first of Ruth Crawford and Charles Seeger's four children. The Seegers, who were prominent avant-garde composers, had recently discovered folk music, and when Seeger was young, Saturday night folk singing had become a regular activity in their family. Raised in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., Seeger later spoke of learning "Barbara Allen" at the age of five. When his parents began transcribing music for John and Alan Lomax's Our Singing Country (1941), his home was filled with the sound of Library of Congress field recordings. Musical siblings Pete and Peggy shared in this journey. The Seeger housekeeper, Elizabeth "Libba" Cotton, gave him firsthand experience with what he would later call "Music from True Vine—the home music made by American southerners before the media age" (Seeger n.d.).

In his late teens, Seeger taught himself to play string instruments and began meeting other young people who shared his musical interests. Some, like Hazel Dickens, came from families that had migrated from Appalachia to work in the capital region. Seeger and Dickens, who is now best known as a songwriter, were drawn to bluegrass, part of a group of young people who frequented country music parks, like New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, to hear shows by Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. Seeger began taping these performances with a portable recorder, and he brought new friends like Ralph Rinzler, whom he met at the Swarthmore Folk Festival, to hear them.

In 1956, Folkways Records' Moe Asch encouraged Seeger to record this music. The result, American Banjo Scruggs Style (1956), was the first of over twenty documentary albums, mainly field recordings, that Seeger produced for Asch in the next fifteen years. Many of these have been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways.

In 1958, Seeger and a group of like-minded musicians founded The New Lost City Ramblers. Inspired by Harry Smith's 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, this group re-created music recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. They performed widely in the 1960s, making over twenty albums. As Seeger located and began playing with master musicians like Doc Boggs, who had made those old recordings, the focus of the The New Lost City Ramblers opened to embrace a broad spectrum of southern rural musics. They became leading advocates for the American old-time music movement. The New Lost City Ramblers continued to perform, albeit less frequently, until 2009. In later years, Seeger usually recorded and performed on his own or with musician friends, including Elizabeth Cotton, Doc Boggs, and the many others whose work he documented. He was a three-time Grammy nominee.

From the 1970s on, awards and grants from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Guggenheim Foundation supported Seeger's research, and he worked as a consultant and board member for a variety of cultural organizations, particularly festivals. Recognition for his work came from the Society for American Music, the Rex Foundation, and others. He was a visiting scholar at California State University (Fresno) and the Smithsonian. Shortly after his death, the NEA gave Seeger the 2009 Bess Lomax Hawes Award, a prize that "recognize[s] an individual who has made a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage" (National Endowment for the Arts n.d.).

Mike Seeger's metaphor of True Vine aptly describes his own Barbara Allen-like intertwining of study and performance. He inspired scholars and musicians alike (see, for example, Dylan 2004: 69-72). He used his keen intellect and musical charisma to advocate generously for the understanding and preservation of the music cultures he knew and loved.