Alice Gerrard and Mike Seeger
Alice Gerrard and Mike Seeger were a husband-and-wife duo of the 1970s who sang and played old-time songs together on guitar, banjo, fiddle and a handful of other instruments. Married in 1970, they toured together through much of the decade and made two duo albums: a live set recorded in Japan in 1970 and Alice Gerrard & Mike Seeger, released by Greenhays in 1980.
They had known each other since the 1950s, when Gerrard’s first husband, Jeremy Foster, renewed his high-school friendship with Seeger in the Washington area and the circle of friends, Hazel Dickens among them, spent Sundays at country music parks such as Sunset Park and New River Ranch. From 1968 both sang in the Strange Creek Singers with Dickens, Lamar Grier and Tracy Schwarz, a group that mixed bluegrass and old-time music and made one album, for Arhoolie, and Seeger played on the Rounder albums Gerrard made with Dickens, Hazel & Alice (1973) and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (1976).
The year they married they toured Japan, and concerts recorded in Tokyo and Hakodate in 1970 were issued there by King. Their studio album was largely recorded by Seeger at Garrett Park, Maryland, in 1980 and mixed by Mike Rivers at Gypsy Studio in Falls Church, Virginia. Gerrard played guitar, fiddle and piano and Seeger guitar, banjo, banjo-guitar, cello, fiddle and mandola, and the fourteen tracks ran from “Bowling Green,” “Sugar Baby” and “Dear Companion” to “St. Louis Blues” and “New Freedom March.” Their version of “Pretty Polly,” with Tommy Jarrell on fiddle, had been recorded by Seeger at Jarrell’s home near Mount Airy, North Carolina, in March 1979. In 2008 5-String Productions reissued the LP on CD as Bowling Green, adding the Japanese live recordings and further tracks with Jarrell.
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Alice Gerrard and Mike Seeger1980 · Greenhays Recordings
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Alice GerrardPlayed on recording with Alice Gerrard and Mike Seeger
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Mike SeegerPlayed on recording with Alice Gerrard and Mike Seeger
