Scope and Content Note
The Seeger Family Collection documents the lives and careers of pioneering musicologist Charles Louis Seeger (CLS), his second wife, modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, their eldest daughter, folksinger and songwriter Peggy Seeger, and her husband, singer, songwriter, and playwright Ewan MacColl. It spans the period 1846 to 2023, with the bulk of the materials dating between 1920 and 2000. Collection materials include manuscript and printed music, transcriptions, song books, song sheets, and lyric sheets; correspondence; business and financial papers; writings including articles, books, plays, reviews, sermons, and essays; class assignments, notes, and syllabi; promotional and publicity materials including posters; set lists, tour itineraries, and repertoire sheets; interview and oral history transcripts; photographs and iconography; scrapbooks; vital records; awards and certificates; and realia.
The collection is divided into six series that represent the Seeger Family writ large (including Crawford Family members), and Charles, Ruth Crawford, Peggy Seeger, and Ewan MacColl individually, as well as MacColl and Peggy Seeger together. There are considerable overlaps between the series, particularly with respect to correspondence, biographical materials, and writings.
Correspondence
All six series provide extensive evidence of the wide networks of family, friends, and colleagues the Seegers cultivated. The Seeger Family Members Chart provides names and relationships for four generations of Charles Seeger's family. Correspondence in these series documents relationships within the extensive Seeger family network, including the Crawford, Dickenson/Taylor, and MacColl families. The Seeger Family series contains much of the family correspondence prior to 1989.
Ruth Crawford exchanged long and frequent letters with her mother, Clara, and brother, Carl, in the years before her marriage. This correspondence provides insight into Ruth’s life in Chicago and her growing interest in composition. Carl’s letters concern family matters, his military training, and provide a glimpse into the Florida land boom of the 1920s and its impact on his and Ruth’s financial standing. After her marriage Ruth maintained her correspondence with Carl and his family, but on a more sporadic basis.
Ruth and Charles Seeger maintained a lengthy correspondence during their "courtship" throughout her Guggenheim year in Europe (1930-1931). Although each discussed their daily activities and Ruth described her composing efforts, the people she met, and the concerts she attended, these letters are notable for being between two people keenly in love who miss each other desperately. The correspondence continued after their marriage while Charles was conducting fieldwork in Florida and Georgia and Ruth was at home with their family. Charles described his travels and Ruth recapped the daily round of family activities.
A similar, albeit one-sided, correspondence is in the MacColl/Seeger series. In 1958 MacColl wrote love letters to Peggy Seeger during her stay in France. These describe his activies and anguish at being separated from her as well as his concerns for their future.
Throughout his life, CLS carried on correspondence with all seven of his children, his five stepchildren, and his numerous grandchildren. These letters dispensed advice on matters from car buying to dealing with Grandmother Seeger’s wrath.
There is a lengthy six year correspondence (1954-1959) between Peggy and Charles in the Peggy Seeger Addition Series. These letters from a pivotal time for both the Charles Seeger family and Peggy herself illuminate the Seeger family's turmoil after Ruth Crawford Seeger's death and Peggy's early relationship with Ewan MacColl and the birth of her son Neill.
Also in the Family series is a set of letters written by Mike Seeger between 1954 and 1958 while performing his conscientious objector service at the Mount Wilson Tuberculosis Hospital near Pikesville, Maryland. These letters describe his daily activities at the hospital and his developing music career.
In addition to communicating frequently with family members, CLS maintained extensive correspondence with colleagues, students, and others seeking information about ethnomusicology, including: Dalia Cohen, Wayland Hand, Mantle Hood, Malena Kuss, Klaus Wachsmann, and Bonnie Wade. However, there is little correspondence between Seeger and notable musical figures, such as Paul Arma, Henry Cowell, Hans Eisler, or Carl Ruggles, with whom he was in regular contact. These materials are located in the CLS Correspondence subseries. Although identified as correspondence, the subseries contains both correspondence and subject files. Included are materials associated with specific organizations and articles, reports, and other materials that Seeger received from his correspondents.
Three groups of materials document CLS’s federal service: the Resettlement Administration files and those of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Pan American Union (PAU). Resettlement Administration materials document music collecting and community building activities through reports, skits, and the creation of song sheets, while WPA materials include reports on a limited range of that agency's activity.
CLS’s position with the Pan American Union (PAU) brought contacts with noted Latin American composers and ethnomusicologists. These relationships can be seen in his correspondence with Luis Heitor de Corrêa Azevedo, Juan Orrego-Salas, Miguel Querol Galvada, Vicente Salas Viu, and Domingo Santa Cruz. There is also correspondence with Mercedes Rio Pequeno (founder and chief of the Music Division of Brazil’s National Library). Included in the PAU materials are reports on folk music in the southern hemisphere.
Peggy Seeger (PS), too, maintained correspondence with her children and grandchildren, her siblings and half-siblings, and nieces and nephews. This correspondence, located in the Peggy Seeger and MacColl/Seeger series, includes many notes and greetings from her siblings Mike, Pete, Barbara, and Penny; children Calum, Neill, and Kitty, and notes and drawings from the grandchildren. Correspondence with her brothers is more substantive, concerning music performances and politics, than that with her sisters. Peggy also corresponded regularly with friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, although much of this correspondence is of shorter duration. Notable correspondents in the PS series include Joe Glazer, Reynaldo (Moses) Martine, Jimmy Massey, Jr., Bruce Molsky, Faith Petric, Helga Sandburg, Rosalie Sorrels, Rufus Wainwright, and Abby Washburn. One extensive set of letters comes from the English poet Elsa Corbluth, in which she talks of life in Beckingham and her poetry writing.
MacColl and Peggy Seeger maintained a general correspondence file that covers the entire range of their activities: performing, composing, business management, and relationships with friends and family. The correspondence concerns tour arrangements, Singers Club schedules, visits from friends and family, Backthorne Records, creation and distribution of the New City Songster, and song rights and their management. MacColl and Seeger's involvement in social issues such as the anti-nuclear movement and wormen's righs is also apparent through invitations to perform or speak at various political events. Additional correspondence on most of these topics and others can be found throughout the MacColl/Seeger series.
Significant correspondents in the MacColl/Seeger series include: all of Peggy Seeger's siblings, their spouses, and several of her nieces and nephews; Ruth Crawford Seeger biographers Matilda Gaume, David Nicholls, and Judith Tuck; musicologists and friends Sidney Robertson Cowell, Gershon Legman, Alan Lomax, and Ralph Rinzler; and performers Billy Bragg, Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Ruthie Gorton, Christy Moore, Faith Petric, Sally Rogers, and Paddy Tunney.
There is little correspondence directly with MacColl in the series; when letters were directed to him, Peggy often replied on his behalf.
In contrast, there is limited non-family correspondence from Ruth Crawford Seeger (RCS). There is little in the way of substantive correspondence with her fellow composers and collaborators, the exceptions being Alan Lomax and Edgard Varèse. There is also a fragmentary letter from Alfred Frankenstein in which he provides a critique of Diaphonic Suite and her compositions for clarinet. Other correspondence is business-related and concerns her publications.
Biographical Materials and Writings
Biographical materials can be found in all six series. Genealogical charts for the Seeger and Crawford families are located in the Family series. This series also contains memoirs of Ruth Crawford’s grandfather, William Plummer Graves, and of Charles Louis Seeger, Sr., and his wife Elsie Adams Seeger, while the CLS series contains his remembrances of his childhood and his sister Elizabeth’s comments on the time. Birth, death, divorce, and marriage records are located in both the Family and MacColl/Seeger series. A small number of items concerning CLS and his first wife, Constance de Clyver Edson, can be found in the Family series, including placards for, and a scrapbook on, their traveling trailer tour and a photograph of Constance’s father John Tracey Edson. Other CLS biographical material includes oral history transcripts, biographies, honors, and obituaries.
Similar biographical material is available in the RCS series along with information about performances of her music, an autograph book used first by Clara Crawford and then by RCS, and programs of performances attended by RCS. Of special interest are three scrapbooks created by RCS between 1916 and 1918 that include invitations, letters, and a wide array of mementos, such as candy wrappers, dance cards, and flowers.
An extensive group of published articles about RCS analyzing her music and her significance as a composer is found in the RCS Writings About subseries. Also included here are performance, recording, and score reviews. Additional biographical material about RCS is located in the Biographical Materials subseries of the Peggy Seeger series. This includes correspondence and essays about her, the 2001 publication of the preface to Our Singing Country by Larry Polansky, performance programs, recording reviews, and student reminiscences of RCS. This subseries also contains material about Pete and Mike Seeger.
Ruth Crawford's father, Clark (1854-1913), was a Methodist minister. He left a trove of sermons from the period 1884 to 1912. Many are handwritten and comprise dozens of sheets. These materials are located in the Family series.
The CLS Writings subseries contains articles, essays, and reviews that reflect CLS's wide-ranging interests on various topics, including musicology and ethnomusicology, folk music and culture, music education, sound, and the computer analysis of sound. Included are his "Barbara Allen" study, drafts and reprints of the articles that were revised for publication as Studies in Musicology, and "Principia," which became the posthumously published Studies in Musicology, II. CLS’s collection of reprints by his colleagues is equally extensive. In addition to the above topics, these articles discuss the ethnomusicology of Asia and Latin America, mathematics of music, and music classification. Many articles are interfiled with correspondence. These titles were left in place, but are listed in the container list.
Researchers interested in graphical musical analysis will want to examine the following CLS Correspondence subseries folders: Bengtsson, Ingmar; Cohen, Dalia; and those labeled Melographs.
The MacColl/Seeger Writings series contains articles; drafts of books, plays, and radio and television scripts; songsters; and teaching materials created by both MacColl and PS. MacColl's radio ballads and other radio programs and his agit-prop plays including The Good Soldier Schweik, Operation Olive Branch, and Uranium 235 are extensively documented. PS's role in creating and distributing the New City Songster is also documented here.
Music
CLS is little remembered as a composer. The CLS Music subseries documents this aspect of his life through some thirty compositions. These are mostly settings for voice and piano of poems by a wide range of nineteenth-century poets, including Hartley Coleridge, Lawrence Hope, John Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Suckling. Also included is an incomplete score and libretti for "The Queen’s Masque," written while CLS was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and a printed copy of his setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s "Windy Nights," composed when he was fourteen.
The Composers' Collective subseries documents CLS’s involvement in this left wing New York City organization. Seeger donated the materials in 1940 requesting they be maintained separately from his other donations. In 2009, they were processed as the Workers Music League Collection. The materials have since been incorporated into the Seeger Family Collection because Seeger acquired and used them during his time within the Collective to write music reviews and commentary on the arts for the Daily Worker.
The bulk of this subseries consists of music composed by members of the Collective or acquired for review by Seeger. Among the composers represented are Paul Arma, Henry Leland Clarke (as Jonathan Fairbanks), Hanns Eisler, Roy Harris (as Tom Morrow), Alex North, and Elie Siegmeister (as L. E. Swift). Seeger, under the pseudonym Carl Sands, also composed for the Collective. Some thirteen of his works are included here, many of which are holograph drafts. Of some significance is his draft of "Into the Streets May First" composed in 1934. It lost out to Aaron Copland’s setting of the same verse in a Composers' Collective competition for best workers song for May 1 that year. Several Carl Sands compositions are also housed in the CLS Music subseries. British, French, German, and Soviet composers are well-represented.
Other material in the subseries includes 38 workers songbooks from around the world. Two of these, from Germany, are signed by Bess Brown Lomax. The subseries is rounded out by programs from Composers' Collective or Workers Music League events and reviews written by Carl Sands. Much of this series is in Russian, French, or German.
Music is the largest subseries in the RCS series. Holograph scores exist for all of RCS’s significant compositions. In addition there are numerous versions with edits in RCS’s hand, pasteovers, and excisions. There are also sketches, arrangements of works by Bach and Beethoven, and a version of "When, Not If." RCS composed under the pseudonym Fred Karlan; copies of holograph scores for two of these works ("Lolipop-a-Papa" and an untitled song) can also be found here. The works are arranged in five file units: chamber music, piano music, vocal music, arrangements, and posthumously printed music. To protect the materials, the Library of Congress microfilmed all of the RCS manuscript compositions. Researchers are to request manuscripts by the microfilm number associated with each title in the container list.
Beyond the music manuscripts, the strength of the RCS series is her writings and book drafts. There are drafts of her entire unpublished preface for Our Singing Country, transcriptions of the songs that appear in American Folk Songs for Children, mockups and transcriptions for six unpublished, illustrated children’s books, and the stories and poems she wrote between 1915 and 1929.
In addition to these writings, the Family series contains the drafts of several unpublished collections of folk music prepared by Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. All are based upon music transcriptions created by Ruth Crawford Seeger. Both transcriptions and lyric sheets are availble. "1001 Folksongs" and "Love Songs of the American People" were collaborations between the Seegers and Duncan Emrich, while "We Come by it Natural" was a CLS and RCS endeavor.
The Family series also includes a number of books published, owned by, contributed to, or used by Charles, Ruth, or Peggy Seeger, including Harvard Class of 1908 reports, a copy of Our American Songbag inscribed to Ruth by Carl Sandburg, Peggy’s The Essential Ewan MacColl Songbook, and The Peggy Seeger Songbook.
As a family of composers and authors, the Seegers devoted time to managing permissions to use and collecting royalties for compositions, transcriptions, lyrics, and text created by Ruth, Charlie, and his siblings Alan Seeger and Elizabeth Seeger. Much of this material is located in the Family Permissions and Royalties subseries. A similar set of materials is located in the MacColl/Seeger Recording Activity sub-subseries.
Songwriting
Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl made their names as singers and songwriters. They were also song collectors. The MacColl/Seeger Songwriting subseries consists of original works by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, arrangements and transcriptions of traditional ballads and folk songs primarily from the United Kingdom and the United States, and unsolicited original songs sent to MacColl and Seeger from folk song enthusiasts.
Both the Peggy Seeger and the MacColl/Seeger series provide extensive evidence of their songwriting efforts. The Song Evolutions file unit in the PS series comprises folders for 112 of her songs containing information about lyrics, tune source or author, and holograph and typescript revisions and edits. While less detailed, the M/S series includes folders for 121 MacColl songs and half as many PS songs (some of which overlap with the Song Evolutions material). Materials in the PS Songwriting file unit show the process by which she developed lyric ideas from current events. Clippings about George W. Bush’s presidency, poetry, other people’s lyrics, and music in this file unit all informed and inspired her composing. A similar clippings file containing information on women's isues such as abortion, child care, divorce, domestic abuse, rape, sexual violence, and women’s health exists in the Resources section of the MaColl/Seeger Songwriting subseries.
MacColl/Seeger Creative Activity
In addition to songwriting, MacColl and Seeger were performers and recording artists who in many ways were synonymous with the folk revival in England. Two MacColl/Seeger subseries provide evidence of this: Subject Files and Organizations. The bulk of the Subject Files subseries concerns the state of the folk scene from the 1960s to the 1980s as seen through agent mailings, folk club newsletters and directories, performer publicity, and posters.
Information regarding MacColl's and Seeger's performing schedules is also a part of the Subject Files subseries as are concert programs and flyers, performance books, reviews and set lists. Performances are also heavily documented in the Peggy Seeger (PS) and Peggy Seeger Addition (PSA) series. Performances are documented by program books for Seeger's solo tours and those with Ewan MacColl and with Irene Pyper-Scott, repertoire sheets, and tour records.
The Critics Group and the Singers Club provided additional avenues for MacColl's and Seeger's creative output. Their role as founders and leaders of these entities is amply documented in the Organizations subseries. The Critics Group provided MacColl with performing colleagues who appeared in the annual Festival of Fools productions mounted by the organization from 1965 to 1971. The subseries includes scripts and technical materials generated by these prodcutions. While MacColl wrote the scripts, PS managed the productions and provided musical arrangements.
The Singers Club served as MacColl's and Seeger's home stage for decades. Performace books again attest to their heavy singing schedule. Although run by a committee, MacColl and Seeger were heavily involved in the club's management as can be seen in the minutes and account books.
The Recording Activity subseries provides documentation of Blackthorne Records created by MacColl and Seeger to record their own LPs. Both the business, and to a lesser extent the creative sides of the enterprise, are documented.
Peggy Seeger
The Peggy Seeger series documents her life as a songwriter, traveling performer, and workshop teacher in the United States from about 1989 to 2009.
The Business Papers subseries provides information on working with agents; developing publicity, including posters, flyers, and brochures; setting up tour itineraries; and managing rights and permissions. There is also an extensive set of printed email files, invoices, miscellany, and assignment sheets known as the Daily Planet that was maintained by Seeger’s assistants from 2001-2010.
Subject Files contain transcripts of Ewan MacColl’s "Vox Pop" program from 1967 and information about Libba Cotten, Paul Robeson, and Vassar College.
Photographs, Iconography and Realia
Photographs are found throughout the entire collection. Those included with correspondence remain in situ and are noted in the container list. Images in the CLS Photographs and Artwork subseries include lecture and book illustrations (mostly negatives), photographs taken by Sidney Robertson Cowell on a collecting trip to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, candid shots by her of Henry Cowell and Carl Ruggles, and a set of images of African-American and Greek musicians taken in Ybor City and Cross City, Florida.
Images in the Peggy Seeger and Peggy Seeger Addition series include portraits of her alone and with Irene Pyper-Scott and event photographs depicting Peggy alone, with her brothers, and with other performers. There is an extensive set of family snapshots and slides in the MacColl/Seeger and Peggy Seeger Addition series showing the family on holiday and in daily life. These subsubseries also contain PS's photographs taken during her 1950s trips to China and eastern Europe including Poland, and the Soviet Union. The family snapshots and slides came in two accessions. Due to the extent of these images and their varying formats, organization, and numbering systems, no effort was made during processing to cross check the accessions for duplicative images.
There are pencil sketches of CLS in the CLS Photographs and Artwork subseries and of PS in the PS Iconography and Realia subseries. Other artwork includes drawings by Kore Loy Wildrekinde-McWhirter in the PS and PSA series and by Boardman Robinson and Hedy West in the CLS Photographs and Artwork subseries. Portraits of PS and Ewan MacColl are part of the MacColl/Seeger Biographical Materials subseries; portraits of PS alone (including a pencil sketch by her Aunt Elsie Seeger) are located in the PS Iconography and Realia subseries.
Among the realia items are lanyards, badges, and pins belonging to Peggy Seeger, a quilt honoring RCS from the Children’s Music Network, a Seeger Family Reunion t-shirt and one with the Singers Club logo, several rubber stamps and printing plates, and MacColl's casket plaque. There are badges owned by MacColl and several awards received by him for writing First Time Ever as well as Peggy's 2009 Grammy nomination medal.