Peggy Seeger

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a folk singer and songwriter. Born in America, she came to this country by her own admission, dirty and penniless, in the 1950s. From this inauspicious start, she led the revival of the British folk scene together with her partner of thirty years, Ewan McCall, the man who wrote in her honour the ballad The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. She comes from a musically accomplished family. Her father and mother taught music. Her brother is a famous folk singer too. And now, back in the United States, she continues to write and perform with the new partner in her life, a woman. Songs entertain us, influence our thinking, make us feel better or worse, she says. At best, they can help us cope with life. She is Peggy Seeger. It's a wonderfully romantic story, Peggy, your first meeting with Ewan McCall. You'd have been twenty-one years old and he was, what, twenty years older than you. How did it come about?

Presenter1:25

I was youth hostelling in Denmark.

Presenter1:29

And Alan Lomax, the collector, phoned my father in California and said, Where's Peggy?

Presenter1:35

Because he wanted for a television program called Dark of the Moon, he wanted a female singer who played the banjo. This was for Granada Television.

Peggy Seeger1:42

Yeah.

Peggy Seeger1:43

Granada television.

Presenter1:45

So he started phoning youth hostels and found me in Copenhagen.

Presenter1:49

And I said yes. I was in a knapsack with a guitar and a banjo and dressed in my old dirty jeans, and he picked me up.

Presenter1:57

And he looked at me and his face fell. He says, We're going to have to do something about you.

Presenter2:01

He was going at that time with a model named Susan Mills, who was glorious looking.

Presenter2:06

And she looked took a look at me and she just started stripping me off and she shoved me into the shower and she scrubbed me personally. And when she got me out, I think that the drain stopped up with what came off.

Presenter2:17

She said, What have you got to wear? and I only had one dress. And when she took it out of my knapsack, I think she took it with two fingers, kind of looking at it, and she said, Uh no.

Presenter2:28

And she dressed me in her own model's gear. She was a model. She put earrings on me, make up. She put my hair up so that I was easily six inches taller, put me in high heels, and gave me a shove and pushed me into the front room.

Presenter2:41

and they sat me on a stool and said sing

Presenter2:45

There were eight of them, and uh

Presenter2:47

That was how Ewan saw me, trying desperately to stamp my feet in high heels, looking like

Presenter2:54

something off the front page of Vogue. He was just sitting at the back, just looking at me like that, smoking. I remember him very clearly in this corner. What do you think he fell in love with? Was it was it the vision of you? Was it the face? Was it the voice? Was it he fell in love with the house carpenter, which I was singing?

Peggy Seeger3:04

I think he fell in love with the house.

Presenter3:08

And with a banjo. And a woman who could sing like he knew these songs ought to be sung. That was what was so impressive about the energy and the youth. And of course you know these fellows when they get into their forties and all. And he was a married man with a child.

Peggy Seeger3:09

And I

Peggy Seeger3:15

That's what was so impressive about it.

Peggy Seeger3:24

Yeah.

Presenter3:24

And that was a huge stumbling block to both of us. But did you fall in love with him with the same force? No.

Presenter3:33

But he got you in the end. Oh, yes. And I learned so much from him. I got they were hugely productive, hugely creative years. I mean, apart from your three children, you gave birth to hundreds of songs, didn't you? Yes, we worked together.

Peggy Seeger3:41

They were chilling.

Presenter3:46

They they were they were wonderful years.

Presenter3:48

and formed me into what I think I might not have I I might not have been as creative a person as I am now. Who knows? Okay. Let's um prepare to get you off to this desert island. Tell me about the first record you want to play there.

Presenter4:03

Over here.

Presenter4:04

when an instrumental group gets together.

Presenter4:08

For Irish or Scottish or English music, they play three tunes in order, and there's a signal given when you're going to change to the next one. Now where these ones come from that I'm you're going to hear now, they play the same tune for fifteen minutes.

Presenter4:21

And it's pieces like this that I learned to play the banjo from and which I'm listening to now in North Carolina where I live.

Presenter4:58

Boatman played by Alan Jabour, Mike Seeger, Tom Kelly, and Gill Carter. I see what you mean. It just sort of goes on and on, round and round. Because that's true of a lot of folk music, isn't it? There's a lot of repetition in there.

Speaker 45:03

Goes on and on, round and round

Presenter5:09

That's why why it's so easy to learn.

Presenter5:12

But you were

Presenter5:13

steeped in this stuff and in classical music as well. In Washington DC, in your childhood, you osmosed music, you said. Well, my mother, who is now known as one of the main female modern music composers of the nineteen hundreds,

Presenter5:30

She became interested in folk music during the Depression, and they were living in Washington DC, where the Library of Congress is located.

Presenter5:37

And there was a huge project of collecting folk music and then anthologizing it. And my mother was brilliant at transcribing it. So she'd bring home these records from the archives and she'd play them.

Presenter5:49

Transcribing the music down onto paper.

Presenter5:52

And so, as I say, osmosed, that's what we did, because when you hear this over and over and over.

Presenter5:58

You do kind of soak it in like a sponge.

Presenter6:01

And of course living in Washington DC, we had the symphony to go to whenever we wanted. And she would sit there in the symphony with this great score open and turning the pages, and I'd sit there tapping my feet to the parts which are in rhythm, which you're not supposed to do.

Presenter6:15

And we would read, and then she'd say, Now the drums are coming in in four bars, listen for them. So music was entirely your life.

Presenter6:24

As I understand it, they even played certain tunes when they wanted you to do certain things. They kind of regulated your life. Oh, yes. If they wanted you to put your galoshes on, those are what we put on over our boots. Peggy, put your boots on, boots on, boots on, Peggy, put your boots on all day long.

Peggy Seeger6:28

Regulated your lives.

Presenter6:42

Peggy, wear your red dress, red dress, red dress. Peggy, wash behind your ears, behind your ears And of course there was half brother Pete,'cause your father, professor of music, he'd been married before. Pete Seeger was his son.

Presenter6:56

older than you, obviously, and he would presumably drop by. I remember him first probably from about age four or five, when he was huge. You know, he was a bean pole of a man, and I'd be looking up and up and up and up and there's his head and looking down and down and down there's his big, big feet.

Presenter7:12

And my mother kept us out of school when Pete turned up. Pete adored my mother.

Presenter7:17

Ah but why would she keep you out of school? Oh, so we could see Pete.

Presenter7:21

And make music with him?

Presenter7:23

Well, we'd dance while he's and we'd learn his songs and we'd come up to him and put our hands on the banjo strings and detune the pegs. Pete, who of course we should remind people, became the the the elder statesman really of the protest movement in the middle. I got a bank loan in Asheville because of Pete

Peggy Seeger7:36

Protest movement in the

Presenter7:40

Didn't know anybody there. And the bank manager, Kay Williams, she looked at me. She says, Do you have a credit record? I said, No, no. She says, But

Presenter7:47

Your name looks familiar. You any relation to Pete? I said, Yes, I'm his sister. She said, Oh, okay. Um you're all right, that's a reference.

Presenter7:55

And you had you didn't have to sing your song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Turn, turn, turn. No, but she she she knew. She knew. Yeah, so many people do.

Peggy Seeger7:57

Yeah.

Peggy Seeger8:00

Uh

Presenter8:02

Tell me about your second record.

Presenter8:03

This one, I love to listen to what all the instruments are doing because Bach.

Presenter8:10

worked on multi levels. He worked one set of instruments.

Presenter8:14

Against and with the others. And he has about any dozens of melodies all going at once. It just depends on what you want to listen to. So on Monday, I'm going to listen to the bass. On Tuesday, I'm going to listen to the cellos. On Wednesday, I'm going to listen to the violas, etc., on this piece.

Presenter9:29

Part of the air from Bach's Suite No. three in D Major, played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the field, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter9:35

It was obviously Peggy Seeger a very unorthodox household, this. Full of music, yes, but you were running around naked a lot of the time, weren't you, you kids? Sounds like some.

Presenter9:45

Well, easy going, you know what I mean?

Presenter9:52

My father, when we went to Martha's Vineyard for a holiday,

Presenter9:56

He would go into the sea and one of us kids would go after him and he'd take his bathing trunks off and hand them to us and say, you know, I'll call when I want'em

Presenter10:05

And he would say going and swimming with clothes on, he says, is like putting caps on your teeth before brushing them.

Presenter10:11

And we ran around naked a lot, yeah. But happy. It was always happy. Oh, it was a happy childhood.

Peggy Seeger10:15

Oh, it was

Presenter10:17

Do you remember the first time you sang in public?

Presenter10:20

I think the first time I sang in public, real public on stage.

Presenter10:26

was when I was twelve or thirteen at a talent contest. I dressed myself up in a tuxedo and a top hat.

Presenter10:34

And with a guitar I sang

Presenter10:37

A song about my mother-in-law.

Presenter10:39

And my legs were literal it's the first time I really understood nervousness. It's interesting, isn't it? And you vowed never to do it for a living, didn't you? Oh, yes.

Peggy Seeger10:48

Oh yes, I

Presenter10:49

I I didn't like singing in pub public. But then back in in your childhood, as you say, very happy, all this fun of performing and not enjoying it or whatever. But then when you were eighteen and you'd gone off to college, your your mother died very suddenly of of of cancer. That must have changed everything. Ah, yes.

Presenter11:10

Yes, I became aware of her in a way that I hadn't been before.

Presenter11:14

Because when she died for the first year I felt she was under my skin and I was seeing things for her.

Presenter11:21

I also was aware of my father's suffering, because he s he lost the love of his life.

Presenter11:28

Even though he married again within two or three years, he really, really suffered.

Presenter11:35

And when the mother dies the the core of the house seems to go. And then, as you say, your father remarried, someone else went off to live in her house. So in a way, it was the end of the house. Definitely the end of childhood.

Peggy Seeger11:45

It was the end of childhood.

Presenter11:49

So off you took to Europe. Exactly.

Presenter11:53

Next record.

Presenter11:55

This next one.

Presenter11:57

is one that I first heard probably in about nineteen

Presenter12:01

Sixty sixty one it was on a collection of LPs that Ewan had brought back when he'd gone on a delegation to Romania.

Presenter12:09

And he came back with this lovely bound set of L. P. s, and on it there are some superb pieces of singing.

Presenter12:18

This piece, it's very simple.

Presenter12:21

It's got a melody that just every time I hear it

Presenter12:24

I get happy.

Peggy Seeger12:48

Oh, Jean that boy, my mother

Presenter12:54

Well, that was a Romanian singer. We don't know her name, and we don't know what the piece is called, but it's it makes you happy. It sounds like she's in love.

Presenter13:03

And it sounds like she's probably about eighteen, nineteen, twenty, on the edge of adulthood, and she is just

Presenter13:10

Like a bird.

Presenter13:12

Bit bit like you might have been when you first came here, perhaps. And again, interestingly, one sees the the the echo uh with the meeting of Ewan, because your family had been really very political, hadn't they? Your father and and of course your brother Pete Seeger had had fallen victim to McCarthyism. And here you come and you get together with this fiercely political animal called Ewan McCarthy. I mean he was an unreconstructed Marxist, wasn't he?

Peggy Seeger13:34

I mean he

Presenter13:37

He was a self-constructed Marxist.

Presenter13:40

Yes. But how political were you in all of that? Hardly. Hm. I thought my family was political until I met Ewan.

Presenter13:48

I did.

Presenter13:49

We were liberals.

Presenter13:51

We were genteelly political.

Presenter13:53

Ewan was vulgar political, common political.

Presenter13:57

He'd been brought up in

Presenter13:59

On the edge starvation and poverty. His mother used to bring home

Presenter14:04

food left over from the tables of the people that she cleaned house for.

Presenter14:10

And Ywain had an an anger, a fury, an outrage.

Presenter14:15

that meant that he never swerved in his

Presenter14:20

political ideals. So you were either with him or you were against him. He was quite tyrannical about it, was he? Yes. I think he other people would probably think he was tyrannical. I think he got better in his older years. But but at the same time

Presenter14:33

And you say you weren't fiercely political, but you were living alongside him, you were making music with him, you were having his children, you had Neil and Callum and later Kitty, you were running the house, you were writing, you were singing, you were performing. Heavy stuff. Yes, but we're living in a middle-class area and we had a reasonable income. No, I understand that, but what I'm really saying is that that seems to me to be where your feminism was born of that. Because, you know, you wrote one of your most famous songs is a women's anthem called Gonna Be an Engineer. This is, you know, a woman wanting to do a man's job and told that she can't do it because she's a lady. And in fact, what she's craving is some kind of recognition for everything that she does. My feminism was born not through you and

Presenter15:14

But through writing

Presenter15:15

Gonna be an engineer.

Presenter15:18

We did a programme every year, a theater a theatre production called Festival of Fools, and this particular year was Year of the Women.

Presenter15:27

And this year of the women, which now I I say, okay, we have the year of the women, we have the year of the dog, we have the year of the disabled, we have the year of the blind, and they all run concurrently with the years of the men who have them every year

Presenter15:39

Uh he said, well

Presenter15:40

You really should write a woman's song for this. We need this. So I sat down and literally in an evening did this quite complex song called Gonna Be an Engineer.

Presenter15:50

It tells the story of a woman who is trying desperately to be an engineer. Every time she turns around, somebody says you can't because you're a woman.

Presenter15:58

And uh the feminists loved it, and they began asking me to their their dues, their events. And I found I had no other songs to go with it,'cause so many of the folk songs are not feminist pieces, believe me, they're not.

Presenter16:12

So I started writing songs purposely. So it wasn't born of your own situation at all? Oh, not at all. No, I never wanted to be an engineer.

Presenter16:20

No, I wanted to be a farmer's wife who lived uh under the shade of a mountain by the sea with a waterfall.

Presenter16:25

Pickle number four.

Presenter16:27

This is a piece that's been made by Cormac Brannock.

Presenter16:30

And in nineteen

Presenter16:32

eighty nine, I think it was, out of the blue. He sent a cassette.

Presenter16:37

And I sat in the car one night while I was broken down in the car waiting for a mechanic to come to it, just playing this.

Presenter16:45

Right through, then going back to beginning.

Presenter16:48

And I listened to this piece, and I listened to it, and it just absolutely vibrated my whole body.

Presenter17:24

Portnabuki by Cormac Brannock. I said in the introduction, Peggy, that you and Ewan led the revival of folk in Britain, not least through what you called the Critics Group.

Presenter17:35

Put simply, it seems to me, that y that was you trying to get to strip folk music down and get back to its roots, weren't you? That's really where you were trying to go. But isn't the point of folk that

Presenter17:47

You don't know where the roots are.

Presenter17:49

Each music brings with it a discipline, an intention of the person who made.

Presenter17:55

The song. I know this because I wrote Gonna Be an Engineer and I've heard other people sing it who are taking it into the way they do. This is lovely, this is fine. But the looking can change, can't it? It can change. Ewan's The Shoals of Herring has become something quite different indeed. The Shoals of Erin. That's right. Isn't that marvellous? Well, things just disappear. But that's my point. These are not folk music. These are not folk songs. These are songs that are made by myself.

Peggy Seeger18:04

I can change the

Peggy Seeger18:07

Mm-hmm.

Peggy Seeger18:08

Indeed, the show is a very

Peggy Seeger18:12

Yes we

Peggy Seeger18:13

Uh

Speaker 418:13

Uh

Presenter18:19

But you won't

Presenter18:20

The folk songs were made in m in the mouths of generations of people. They were stripped down like skeletons, many of these texts, so that everything was right there and they were sung in certain ways so as to keep that skeleton.

Presenter18:33

pure and clean. And sometimes you can clothe it with things that are ridiculous for it, you know, like you're doing Strawberry Fair.

Presenter18:41

As one pop person did it with um five or six drums and two trombones and you then you lose the song totally. Sure, but that's fine. It just comes out in another mode and maybe another different audience would like it like that. They probably would. They probably would. But we used to say if y if you take one of the posthumous quartets and you play it on an ocarina, a harmonica, a one-string fiddle and a bass drum, is it still

Peggy Seeger18:52

Uh

Presenter19:03

The posthumous quartet, and no, it isn't that it's lost an awful lot, it has become something different.

Peggy Seeger19:07

It is because

Presenter19:09

So, you were trying to get back to the. We were trying to see what was this originally. I think, in a way.

Peggy Seeger19:10

We're trying to

Presenter19:14

It's learning what the music was like before you change it. I mean, I don't sing.

Presenter19:20

I I don't look on myself as a

Presenter19:23

Ethnic folk singer

Presenter19:25

I have too much of an education, music education, for that. And what you very much went on to do is to write.

Presenter19:32

Music with a mission, if you can call it that. A serious message in a hummable form. And you wrote stuff about Greenham Common, because you went and protested at Greenham Common. You wrote Woman on Wheels there, didn't you? Which is, again, it's a very serious message, but a fun song. Exactly. Well, I remember somebody saying, if the Revolution, if I can't dance at the Revolution, I'm not going.

Presenter19:53

This is one thing that I learned a little bit from Ewan and a lot from Irene.

Presenter19:57

that it's necessary to laugh, because the laugh brings the endorphins on. You live longer to fight, so to speak.

Presenter20:03

Or Irene, who's now the woman in your life, whom I want to ask you about in a minute. But let's just press on with record number five for a minute.

Peggy Seeger20:06

I want to ask.

Presenter20:11

Record number five is a strange choice. Um

Presenter20:15

As Ewan began to get ill,

Presenter20:17

I changed a lot during that time and found that my musical needs were very, very different.

Presenter20:23

because I was in such a state of stress and tension.

Presenter20:27

That

Presenter20:29

certain kinds of music which I had never heard before.

Presenter20:32

and which I didn't need to pay a lot of attention to.

Presenter20:36

were very soothing to me, and that's where this piece comes into.

Presenter20:40

And the Penguin Cafe, as you know, it repeats over and over and over again. I'm an accompanist for a living, so what I would do with this on a desert island

Presenter20:48

is I would play it, which is what I sometimes do at home with Penguin Cafe, and just sing whatever I want.

Presenter21:25

Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing Isle of View

Presenter21:28

Ewan had his uh heart attack in in nineteen seventy nine, Peggy. You you've

Presenter21:33

made a big point of saying it wasn't a heart attack, it was an attack of the heart. What do you mean by that? Because it was arrhythmia, serious arrhythmia, and I don't think that is a heart attack.

Presenter21:45

And he got it because I figured

Presenter21:50

When you love life in a certain way and when you've really

Presenter21:55

followed what you think is the best thing to do and worn yourself out with it, worked really, really hard at things he felt was important and hi his pol politics ran his life, politics and ideas.

Presenter22:07

And I think his poor old heart just couldn't couldn't deal with it.

Presenter22:11

But those last ten years of his life, between'seventy nine and'eighty nine,

Presenter22:17

were obviously completely different from the previous twenty that you'd spent together. How how did his illness change your the balance of your relationship?

Presenter22:27

For the f most of our life he had been the one who dreamed up the the projects to do, and I was kind of riding on the tail of this comet.

Presenter22:38

When I wrote Gonna Be an Engineer, which was seventy two, that was fairly early on, he got his first, as you said, heart attack in'Seventy Nine.

Presenter22:46

The minute I entered into the feminist world I began to be the head of my own comet.

Presenter22:51

He was proud of that, but I don't think he wanted it to go too far.

Presenter22:56

When he got ill, and I started occasionally doing concerts on my own,

Presenter23:02

I began to take the leadership in doing things.

Presenter23:06

I began to do most of the driving.

Presenter23:09

I began to do most of the

Presenter23:13

The work that ran the two of us.

Presenter23:16

It was just a change of power structure. It it's hard to explain.

Presenter23:20

Can I ask you, did did you sing to him when he was dying? Yes, we did.

Presenter23:25

His children were all there when he was dying.

Presenter23:28

He was in a coma, and we sang and talked to him into death. Do you think he could hear you?

Presenter23:35

Hearing is the last sense to go.

Presenter23:38

McWhither number six.

Presenter23:42

This was Ewan's goodbye.

Presenter23:44

To all the things he loved?

Presenter23:46

He got the idea for it.

Presenter23:49

Trying to climb Stack Polly.

Presenter23:52

in the north of Scotland.

Presenter23:54

The first verse says goodbye to the crags farewell, ye northern hills, you crags and peaks, goodbye, and the heather, the things he loved.

Presenter24:06

So that's the first verse. Then he comes into the second verse.

Speaker 424:10

Farewell to you, my love, my time is almost gone.

Presenter24:19

In the third verse he says goodbye to his children.

Presenter24:24

And he says, Farewell to you, my chicks My time is almost done.

Presenter24:29

Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone

Presenter24:33

It's a very moving verse, and he goes on to

Presenter24:37

Say, um

Presenter24:39

Safe be your journey.

Presenter24:41

I find great trouble in listening to this song.

Presenter24:45

and now especially because one of his children has died.

Presenter24:48

Cursed him a call.

Presenter24:51

I didn't know her very well, but I've always been a a fan of her music. She had something I always wished I had, which was a brashness and a a common touch.

Presenter25:06

I'm glad he didn't live to see his daughter die.

Presenter25:10

And the last verse

Presenter25:14

I'm sorry, I got very moved there. I'm trying to remember what the last verse is. You listen to it for yourself.

Speaker 425:20

I'll be riding the gentle wind that blows through your hair.

Speaker 425:27

Reminding you how we shivved in the joy of living.

Presenter25:37

The Joy of Living sung by Ewan McCall and my castaway there, Peggy Seeger.

Presenter25:42

And then, Peggy, you fell in love again. Tell me about that. Head over heels, like sinking into a blissful swamp, you've said.

Presenter25:49

Did I say that? Well, it's true.

Presenter25:52

It's true.

Presenter25:55

Irene Scott.

Presenter25:58

Um singer in her own right.

Presenter26:01

Lovely voice.

Presenter26:03

And

Presenter26:05

Really it was.

Presenter26:07

It was a revelation.

Presenter26:08

to me.

Presenter26:10

And I'm still in love with her in the world.

Presenter26:14

Twelve years on?

Presenter26:16

It's strange for you who've been spent your life being such a man's woman. Yes, yes, exactly. That's what I thought.

Presenter26:24

But uh I had always been a bit scathing about uh same-sex love and

Presenter26:32

I'm I've acknowledged totally. And you're obviously very honest about who and what you are because you sing together and you call yourselves together No Spring Chickens. The album that this next song comes from, it's been put out on several albums, but the song was made up by Ian Davison in Scotland. But the name No Spring Chickens came from an interview that I had with a Northern agent who turned me down saying I was No Spring Chicken and I was also not commercially viable. So we named the album Almost Commercially Viable and called ourselves No Spring Chickens and sang together for two years.

Peggy Seeger27:07

They sang together for

Presenter27:10

It's a great title. Tell me about this one then, record number seven. First of all, I would have this on a desert island because I like the last one, I want to hear the voices of the two people that I have loved most as lovers in my life.

Presenter27:23

But the song is for mature lovers someone who says I bless what has happened to you in your life. My joy of you says we're both mature people, things have happened to us, and I love you.

Presenter27:36

for whatever has happened to you to make you like you are.

Speaker 427:40

I've neighbours near and I've comrades too.

Speaker 427:48

But only one joy.

Speaker 427:53

That's my joy of you.

Peggy Seeger27:54

June

Presenter28:05

My Joy of You, sung by Irene Scott. So, Peggy Seeger, you spent the best part of forty years here from the fifties to the nineties, and now you've gone back to the States and and set up home in North Carolina. Why? Why don't you leave your children, your grandchildren?

Presenter28:20

Well, put like that, I ask myself the same question. But now if you're talking about the weather, or London traffic, or the fact that everywhere I go in this country reminds me of Ewan,

Presenter28:34

You'll know why I went. Too many memories. I also take it. Yes, I was looking for a place that had good air.

Peggy Seeger28:37

I also take it.

Presenter28:42

I wanted a small town.

Presenter28:44

I wanted to hear Boatman pieces like that again.

Presenter28:48

I wanted wide skies.

Presenter28:51

And you've packed up the memories of Ewan in in as in as far as you can in boxes and sent them off to

Peggy Seeger28:55

Yeah.

Presenter28:58

There's an archive. To an archive. Sixty boxes of Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger went to the archive in Headington and Ruskin College.

Presenter29:07

But I live quite a modern life out there now. Um I have a website and I do email and

Presenter29:13

I have a small motor home, nineteen feet long, that I travel around in for four or five months of every summer, can live totally in it.

Presenter29:21

I I like it.

Peggy Seeger29:23

You're happy.

Presenter29:23

You're happy. Yes, I am.

Presenter29:26

I miss my children and my grandchildren very, very much. I miss the music with my sons. I mean, I'd love to do concerts with my sons, but I can't afford them. Callum is is is music director for Roland Keating. Neil and his group write write music for television and

Presenter29:43

I can't afford them.

Presenter29:45

Yes.

Peggy Seeger29:47

Last record.

Presenter29:48

Tell me about that.

Presenter29:51

My daughter Kitty will be proud of me for choosing this one. She's introduced me to a lot of music that I haven't heard before. But this one I really should have heard when Paul Simon recorded it. I probably did in my background, but I didn't listen to a whole lot of pop music.

Presenter30:08

This one I'm taking because I love Paul Simon's songwriting. He is superb. He knows what to leave out. He knows when not to be logical, when not to follow a chain of logic. His accompaniments are gorgeous, and he's got a sinus problem when he sings, like me.

Presenter30:27

And this is one of my favorites, and I'm going to dance on my desert island with it.

Speaker 430:31

Uh

Speaker 430:32

When I was grown to be a man.

Speaker 430:35

And the devil would come for dreams.

Speaker 430:39

See now who do who do you think you're fooling?

Speaker 430:45

I'm a consummated man, dog

Speaker 430:49

Slaggle Q.

Speaker 430:51

D, my mama matters.

Speaker 430:54

She loves me.

Speaker 430:56

She get down on her knees and hug me Want you love me like a rock

Presenter31:02

Paul Simon and Loves Me Like a Rock. Now, Peggy, if you could only take one of those eight records, it's a really nasty question.

Speaker 431:10

Which one would you

Presenter31:10

Which one would you take? Probably take Bach'cause it's the longest.

Presenter31:16

And what about a book? I think I'd take the Scots Queer by Louis Grassett Gibbon.

Presenter31:25

The language is superb. It's in Scots.

Presenter31:29

And

Presenter31:30

The last time I read it, I read through it three times. I read it out loud.

Presenter31:34

Trying to perfect my somewhat Americanized Scots accent. But what is the book? I don't know what it is. Uh it's the story of the daughter of a farmer.

Presenter31:42

Who eventually moves to Aberdeen, and it's just her story.

Presenter31:47

And it's

Presenter31:49

It's superb. And what about your luxury? You get just one of those. I would take a banjo.

Presenter31:56

with a plastic head which wouldn't break, and an ex inexhaustible supply of parts for it.

Presenter32:03

strings and pegs.

Presenter32:05

But of course, what else? What else? Beggie Seeker, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, Sue.

Speaker 232:18

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.