New Room Bristol
"How I long for peace..." sings Peggy Seeger. We're in the Methodist Church again, and there is something hymn like about the piece. A meditative chant, though: Not a Wesleyan rabble rouser. Her son, Calum, does The Big Rock Candy Mountains: in between each verse, she interrupts him with songs and anecdotes of her own. "Jesus!" he says under his breath when she jumps in with another funny story, and then apologise to the venerable building. It's planned, of course, but it seems unrehearsed, and I think he is a bit annoyed as well as pretending to be annoyed for comic effect. They do a mildly dirty folk song about a lady who is only interested in the big thing the cowboy had between his legs (namely, his horse); and Calum effects to be surprised that he can sing that kind of song with his mother.
They have a deep musical rapport. No-one is accompanying anybody else, says Peggy, after another traditional number: we are having a conversation.
Peggy Seeger is now a very old lady; Calum MacColl is nearly sixty. But the evening is not an exercise in nostalgia. Ewan is only mentioned at the very end, when Calum sings the Joy of Living, the heart-breaking song his father wrote when he realised that his days of being a rambler, a rambler, from Manchester way were over. "Farewell to you my chicks, soon you must fly alone..." He says it isn't a sad song, but a joyful one. Peggy's legendary half-brother isn't mentioned at all, although I think I detected a Freudian ship ("Our house was full of Pete...of folksingers".)
Peggy Seeger is now a very old lady; Calum MacColl is nearly sixty. But the evening is not an exercise in nostalgia. Ewan is only mentioned at the very end, when Calum sings the Joy of Living, the heart-breaking song his father wrote when he realised that his days of being a rambler, a rambler, from Manchester way were over. "Farewell to you my chicks, soon you must fly alone..." He says it isn't a sad song, but a joyful one. Peggy's legendary half-brother isn't mentioned at all, although I think I detected a Freudian ship ("Our house was full of Pete...of folksingers".)
Things come out in passing: her mother was a classical composer of some renown, and Alan Lomax used to drop by to ask her to transcribe songs he had collected in the field. She sings a song that Lomax collected from a woman who washed her clothes in the muddy Mississippi. Many of us know it as "if I had wings like Noah's Dove" but she sings it as Dink's Song because Dink wast he name of the lady Lomax learned it from.
Song of Choice remains a haunting political protest -- a riff, I suppose on "First they came for the Jews":
Close your eyes, stop your ears
Close your mouth and then you know
Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear
And later you can say you didn't know
Let others take the lead and you bring up the rear
And later you can say you didn't know
It's a song I associate with Dick Gaughan: but then for many years I thought that Father's Song was Gaughan's own, but it's actually by Ewan MacColl. It has something in common with Song of Choice. I suppose Calum is the child the song was directed at. There was clearly a folkie protest tone that was in the air, or at any rate, in the family, back then.
Peggy identifies the comedic "different and therefore equal" as being a product of 1970s feminism, rather than the modern era, but the humour and the message stands up. "Achilles shoulders/moved boulders / Helen's hips / launched ships". The merch stand is selling tea towels with "different, therefore equal" printed on them, along with "what would Peggy do".
Delayed for two years, this was billed as the First Farewell tour; but let's hope there are many more farewell tours to come.
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