Mike Seeger

He was born in New York City on 15 August 1933 to the musicologist and composer Charles Seeger and the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, and the family soon moved to the Washington, D.C., area, where his father worked for the New Deal and his parents were in close touch with John and Alan Lomax’s work at the Library of Congress. Music was played at home, and he and his sister Peggy discovered that Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, who worked for the family, played guitar; with their encouragement she went on to a career as a performer, and Seeger later recorded her. He taught himself his instruments, among them banjo, guitar, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, dulcimer, harmonica and jaw harp.

As a conscientious objector during the Korean War he was assigned to community service work near Baltimore, and there in 1954 he met Appalachian musicians who had moved north from West Virginia and Kentucky, among them Hazel Dickens, her brother Guy and Bob Baker, in whose Pike County Boys he played in the mid-1950s. With the Dickens family he went to country music parks such as New River Ranch and Sunset Park, and from 1955 he taped the shows of Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Reno and Smiley and others. Recording banjo players led to American Banjo Tunes & Songs in Scruggs Style (Folkways, 1957), and more Seeger productions followed: the anthology Mountain Music Bluegrass Style (1959) and early albums by the Country Gentlemen, the Stoneman Family and the Lilly Brothers. Over his career he produced more than forty albums by others, including Elizabeth Cotten, Tommy Jarrell, Dock Boggs and Maybelle Carter.

In 1958 he formed the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Tom Paley. The trio learned its repertoire from obscure hillbilly records of the 1920s and 1930s and played them for folk audiences, mostly on college campuses, aiming to carry the feeling of the originals rather than copy them note for note. Paley left in 1962 and was replaced by Tracy Schwarz. Seeger became a full-time musician in 1960, working with the Ramblers and as a solo act. In 1961 he published one of the first in-depth articles on bluegrass, in Sing Out!, reworked from his notes to Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, and with Cohen he compiled the New Lost City Ramblers Song Book, 125 old-time songs and instrumentals with notes on their sources. When the Ramblers were booked for the first University of Chicago Folk Festival in February 1961, he got the Stanley Brothers onto the bill, and as a board member of the Newport Folk Festival from 1963 to 1967 he helped bring bluegrass acts from Bill Monroe and Mac Wiseman to the Osborne Brothers, the Kentucky Colonels and the Stanley Brothers to its stage.

His solo albums for Folkways included Old Time Country Music (1962) and Tipple, Loom & Rail (1965). From 1968 to 1976 he sang and played with the Strange Creek Singers, named for the West Virginia town, with Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Lamar Grier and Tracy Schwarz, a group that mixed bluegrass and old-time music and made one album, for Arhoolie. He played on Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard’s Rounder albums of the 1970s, and he and Gerrard, who married in 1970, toured and recorded together through much of the decade.

From the early 1970s he advised the State Department and the Smithsonian Institution on tours by traditional musicians, and he made annual West Coast tours with musicians such as Tommy Jarrell, Dewey Balfa, Elizabeth Cotten, Lily May Ledford and Kilby Snow. He served on the boards of the Smithsonian’s folklife program (1968–76), the National Folk Festival (1972–78) and the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project (1973–86). In the mid-1980s he set out to document Appalachian solo dancing, work that produced the film Talking Feet (1987) and a book of the same name, and in 1986 he founded the Rockbridge Mountain Music & Dance Festival in Buena Vista, Virginia, a gathering with no contests.

His later recordings for Smithsonian Folkways included Southern Banjo Sounds (1998), True Vine (2003) and Early Southern Guitar Sounds (2007), and he joined John Hartford and David Grisman on Retrograss (Acoustic Disc, 1999). Late in life he received a grant to copy 275 hours of his field tapes, including the 1950s concerts by Monroe, the Stanleys, Flatt and Scruggs and Reno and Smiley, for the Library of Congress, the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina and the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Mike Seeger died at his home in Virginia on 7 August 2009. Bill C. Malone’s biography of him, Music from the True Vine, appeared in 2013, and the IBMA inducted him into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.

• National Endowment for the Arts grants: 1975, 1982, 1984, 1987
• Smithsonian Institution Visiting Scholar, 1983
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1984
• Rex Foundation’s Ralph J. Gleason Award, 1995
• Honorary Member, Society for American Music, 2003
• Heritage Award, Uncle Dave Macon Days, 2004
• Bess Lomax Hawes NEA National Heritage Fellowship, 2009
• Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, 2018