Mike Seeger (1933-2009) R.I.P.

We announce with regret that our longtime valued colleague and good friend Mike Seeger died on Friday, August 7, 2009 from the combined effects of multiple myeloma and leukemia. He was 75.

Mike Seeger was one of the most influential voices of the generation that rediscovered American vernacular music in the 1950s and 60s and, in doing so, gave a new shape to American culture as a whole.

“Sometimes you know things have to change … Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door, and your head has to go into a different place,” wrote Bob Dylan in his autobiography Chronicles. “Mike Seeger had that effect on me. He played on all the various planes, the full index of the old-time styles, [and] he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them. What I had to work at, Mike already had in his genes.”

Mike Seeger’s genes were impressive indeed: his father Charles Seeger was a distinguished scholar who once headed the UCLA Folklore and Ethnomusicology Department, and his mother Ruth Crawford Seeger was a noted folksong collector and composer, while his sister Peggy and half-brother Pete would become figures of towering importance in the postwar folk music revival.

Mike was born on August 15, 1933 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He began playing music at the age of 12, on an Autoharp; by the end of his teens he had added guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin and other instruments, and was playing with Peggy for square dances. With their sisters Penny and Barbara, Mike and Peggy recorded the influential American Folk Songs For Children.

Then, in 1958, he and fellow enthusiasts John Cohen and Tom Paley formed a group called The New Lost City Ramblers to play pre-bluegrass, or “old time” music. They ignited the imaginations of a generation of musicians who, following their example, investigated 78rpm discs of the 1920s and 30s by nearly-forgotten musicians like Charlie Poole, Riley Puckett and Uncle Dave Macon, and encountered a vast repertoire of songs, tunes and playing styles. A large handful from this songbag was gathered in The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book (1964), edited by Seeger and Cohen. Well-worn copies of that collection still inhabit the guitar and banjo cases of countless folk musicians.

Between playing with the Ramblers at campus folksong clubs and coffeehouses, participating as both performer and board member in the early Newport Folk Festivals, and making albums for Folkways, Mike tracked down and taped some of the musicians he had heard on old records, such as Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, Sam and Kirk McGee, and, most notably, Dock Boggs, a singing banjo player and former coal miner from southwest Virginia. Boggs’s eerie fusion of old-time country music and blues fascinated Mike and the other Ramblers, who realized long before most of their contemporaries how interwoven were the histories of white and black music in the South.

The Ramblers continued to play, with varying frequency and occasional periods of inactivity, for the next 50 years (Paley was replaced in 1962 by Tracy Schwarz), but Mike, always musically restless and inquisitive, also formed other alliances, such as the Strange Creek Singers with Schwarz, Hazel Dickens, Lamar Grier and Alice Gerrard. He and Alice also worked and recorded as a duo, and were married for a time.

As well as a score of LPs with the Ramblers and several duet albums with his sister Peggy, Mike made over thirty albums in his own name, including Tipple, Loom and Rail (1966), a collection of old-time songs about coal mines, cotton mills and railroads, Music From The True Vine (1972), Second Annual Farewell Reunion (1973) and Third Annual Farewell Reunion (1994). He mastered a variety of instruments, including the jews harp, autoharp and African gourd banjo, and gave an accurate impression, rather than a mere imitation, of regional styles from many parts of the South. Retrograss, a hilarious 1999 collaboration with David Grisman and the late John Hartford, ingeniously recast rock ’n’ roll songs by Chuck Berry and The Beatles into old-time musical styles. He also made a number of instructional videos, passing along the traditional styles he had learned from the older musicians.

He served on numerous boards and committees associated with the Newport Folk Festival, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the National Folk Festival and the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him four grants between 1975 and 1987; he was nominated for six Grammy Awards, he held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, was given The Rex Foundation’s Ralph J. Gleason Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, and was awarded honorary membership in the Society for American Music in 2003. He was especially pleased to learn, shortly before his death, that he had been awarded the 2009 Bess Hawes National Heritage Fellowship Award. Always committed to expanding the knowledge of American traditional music, he traveled to and performed in Africa, Japan and Australasia, as well as Europe, where a 2002 concert in London marked the final overseas appearance of the Ramblers.

Always lean and bony, especially in the last decade when he was contending with leukemia, Mike as he grew older came more and more to resemble the men who were his models – “the very image,” as Robert Cantwell writes in his study of the folk revival, When We Were Good, “of the storied frontiersman whose music he has been all his life reinventing, a smaller edition, it might be said, of Abraham Lincoln.” If he seemed to be slowly morphing into one of those strong-jawed mountaineers that can be seen in old photographs of obscure string bands, it was entirely appropriate, for his interpretation of old-time Appalachia was steadily refined, over decades, in understanding and authenticity.

Diagnosed with leukemia nearly a decade ago, Mike underwent treatment for that condition while continuing to perform, record and teach. In July of this year a subsequent diagnosis showed that he had developed a second and very aggressive cancer, multiple myeloma. In the same forthright manner in which he had always lived his life he prepared for his death, refusing additional treatment and choosing instead to enter home hospice care. Toward the end he was visited by his oldest friend, Hazel Dickens, and a few other close friends; and his final weeks were spent peacefully and pain-free, surrounded by the loving care of his wife, his sons, and his sister.

He is survived by his wife, Alexia Smith; three sons by his first marriage to Marge Ostrow, Kim, Chris Arley, and Jeremy; his sister Peggy; and his half-brothers Pete and John.

— From Folklore Productions