Peggy, who had been performing solo, recounts: “A defender of the free world stands up and pours beer over me.
Sitting in the front row were five or six burly American soldiers. Peggy had been performing an anti-war song against the invasion of Vietnam by America in a folk club in Maidstone, Kent, in 1970. Today grandmother Peggy, aged 82, looks back at the highs and lows of her life, particularly the period shared with Ewan, with whom she had three children, and who was referred to as the “godfather” of folk.Īmong anecdotes from the book are those dubbed the “audiences from hell”.įolk clubs in those days could often be boozy, loud and intimidating, particularly for women. He was, incidentally, the father of Kirsty MacColl who sang with The Pogues, and who died in a boating accident in Mexico in 2000. She lived for a period in Highgate and sang and played the banjo with her husband, singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl in clubs and pubs around Camden, Islington and the West End.Įwan, who was 20 years her senior, died aged 74 in 1989.
The book also highlights the extraordinary rise of folk music from the 1960s onwards.Īmerican-born Peggy was the half sister of legendary folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, who died in 2014 aged 94. The incident is related in her wonderfully entertaining new memoir, First Time Ever, chronicling her life as a performer, feminist and committed left-wing political activist. THINK political intolerance is bad today? Back in the 1970s, before social media, one of the world’s most influential folk artists, Peggy Seeger, was doused in beer by an angry member of the audience, simply for singing an anti-war protest song. Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl at Newport Folk Festival in the early 60s
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