My song Everyone Knows, where you unpack the issue, shows where the conflict lies between men and women. And then there were the scalpel songs, which were delicate. Then I started writing not so much protest songs, as songs with alternative suggestions in them. I’ve written one about the killing of an abortion provider in Kansas city called Right to Life, and after 9/11 I wrote a song called Caveman. “So I have what I call sledgehammer songs. As we moved into ecology and identification with nature, I began to realise that there were other ways other than hitting people over the head with a sledgehammer. There were songs about the anti-apartheid movement, the poll tax and things like that.

“When I first got together with Ewan MacColl, I wrote quite a number of movement songs, about unions and class solidarity. “I’ve been through a number of stages of song writing and some of them have depended on what the subject matter of the song was about,” she says on a Zoom call from her home in Oxford. Feminism, class politics, ecology, the menopause and the invisibility that seems to accompany ageing are just a small handful of the many topics to which she has turned her attention. There is no subject unfit for her laser-sharp wit and wisdom. A folk musician all her life, Peggy Seeger's famed lineage (daughter of musicologist Charles Seeger and Guggenheim fellow Ruth Porter Crawford, sister of Pete and Mike, and partner to English folk singer/songwriter and folk activist, Ewan MacColl for over 30 years, until his death in 1989) inevitably informs and colours her worldview.īut Seeger is a woman on a mission that’s barely dimmed over a lifetime of singing, songwriting, campaigning and touring. In the midst of her First Farewell tour (there will be many more farewells, she reckons), she's electrified by the 27 gigs she's recently performed over 40 nights, in the company of her son, producer and singer/songwriter Calum. Peggy Seeger lives and breathes her music as viscerally now, at the age of 87, as she did six decades ago. If I stop, a huge part of me would vanish and die.”

Peggy seeger the first time ever