Mike Seeger – True stories
“But she didn’t have her own guitar, she hadn’t had a guitar for I don’t know how long — she said 20 or 25 years, something like that. So when I listen back to that Close To Home CD that I did [a collection that includes home recordings he made of Cotten in 1952], and realize that she didn’t have a guitar, she’d been working nonstop for 12 hours, plus getting up in downtown Washington…it’s phenomenal. She was a really good guitar player, a wonderful cross between very old black traditions and parlor guitar.”
In early 1952, Seeger began to play the five-string banjo. “Well, of course, I learned from Pete to start with,” he says with a laugh. “And we had records of Bascom Lunsford. I met a guy up north named Roger Sprung who I learned a little bit from, one of Peggy’s boyfriends showed me how to ‘knock’ the banjo, and then I began seeing what was around Washington and meeting banjo players, both white and black. In those days, musicians who learned by ear from the old noncommercial, community kind of tradition, they were all around. But almost everybody I met at that point said, ‘Well, I haven’t played much for 20 or 25 years.’
“I was living at home — I was 19, which was pretty old for that in those days, but my parents were somewhat tolerant — and I played the banjo a lot. I’d go out to some of the firehalls out in Virginia, and they’d let me sit in the back and play banjo with them.”
It was an idyllic situation but a short-lived one. The military draft was in full effect in those days, and though Seeger obtained conscientious objector status, service was still required. He wound up working at a tuberculosis sanatorium, where the same kind of serendipity that had led to the “discovery” of Libba Cotten came into play again.
“I met Hazel Dickens and her family,” Seeger begins. “One of her brothers was in the sanatorium, and he invited me to come down and meet his family. I was real open to that, because I just loved down-home kinds of people; that was just part of where I felt comfortable.
“And at the same time I met Dick Spottswood through Peggy, because they were classmates at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. And he’d play me some of the Stanley Brothers, and Bill Monroe, which seemed to me impossibly complex and far out. When I heard three-finger banjo for the first time — the combination of the ping from the tight head and the picks and the roll — it didn’t sound like banjo to me, because all I’d heard was clawhammer.
“And then I think it was through Dick Spottswood that I met Pete Kuykendall. He educated me in early bluegrass, a real quick crash course. I’d go spend a night with him in his mother’s house; we’d pick bluegrass apart and put it back together, figure out what made it tick, even back in the mid-’50s. There was some good musicology going on there,” he says with a grin.
“So that was my life then. I’d work by day in the kitchen at the Mount Wilson state hospital, and half the nights of the week I’d go and spend three or four hours playing bluegrass downtown, getting kicked out of one house after another. And then on weekends we’d go up to the New River Ranch music park. I’d gotten a tape recorder with the first royalty check from one of my mother’s books, and the idea occurred to me to ask them if I could record. Alec Campbell, who was running the place, said it was OK if I asked the artist, and so I’d do that. I think Bill Monroe was either the first or second, and then it just became a regular thing after that.
“I came to realize very quickly that this was a music in the early stage of development, and I thought it would be really neat to have recordings of it, because I listened to the solos and realized that a lot of what they were playing they’d never done before, they were making it up as they went along. We knew the records pretty well, and the thing we loved to do was to stay by the side of the stage and try to steer their repertoire to some of the older, more obscure stuff by making requests — stretching them a little bit more. That was an exciting time for bluegrass.”
Thus, by the middle of the 1950s, Mike Seeger’s twin impulses — to play and to document, to perform and to preserve — had begun to shape a career that would encompass both. Over the next several years, they would lead to projects such as American Banjo, Three Finger & Scruggs Style and Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, two pivotal collections that presented an array of mostly bluegrass performers from both urban and rural backgrounds (including, on both, Seeger himself). In addition, there was an album of music by Libba Cotten, one by the Stoneman Family, and, as the ’50s turned into the ’60s, still more by an array of Seeger’s favorite musicians, from the Country Gentlemen (he engineered their albums for Folkways) to Clarence “Tom” Ashley to Doc Watson.
Yet at the same time, Seeger felt he was reaching his limits as a bluegrass musician. He had been playing here and there with bluegrass acts, but his interests were turning elsewhere.
“I had made up my mind earlier that I didn’t want to play city folk music — music of the world and all that kind of stuff — and be a song leader like my brother,” he explains. “But then I began to feel that bluegrass…well, I might as well just say it, I think there are certain limitations to bluegrass. It’s one style of playing, a basically improvisatory kind of acoustic country music. I also felt like it was technically ahead of me.
“With old-time music, I felt there was more stylistic latitude. Maybe it’s partly my upbringing in the traditional music, but it just fit my being a lot more. I’d started going back into that in about 1957. I had tried to record an LP with Ralph Rinzler of old-time music going over into bluegrass, because he particularly liked bluegrass, but then I was also fooling around with trying to learn ‘The Old Fish Song’, which is just voice and fiddle. And I loved that sound. So I was playing around with some of the old-time sounds, and it just seemed like they fit me more.
“So when I heard that Tom Paley and John Cohen were going to play on the radio and were getting together in D.C., I said hey, I think I want to be part of that. I had met John several years before, but I didn’t know him, and I’d heard of Tom, and I think might have played music with Tom maybe once before that. We had just a couple of minutes before we went on the air there, and went through a few tunes, and that was the beginning of the New Lost City Ramblers.”