First Farewell: Peggy Seegar embarks on irish tour

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FOLK music legend Peggy Seegar has announced a 14 Irish date tour in Ireland as part of her โ€˜First Farewellโ€™ album promotion.
Peggy Seeger will be performing with her son Calum MacColl, a gifted professional musician and songwriter in his own right and producer of many of her albums, including her most recent album โ€˜First Farewellโ€™ (selected by Mojo Magazine as their No 1 Folk Album of 2021).
Expect an evening of warmth, humour and exceptional musicianship, mixing traditional and original songs from across Peggyโ€™s remarkable career with anecdotes and plenty of family chat when the duo perform at Lime Tree Theatre on Wednesday June 8.

Peggy says: โ€œFirst Farewell is an odd title for a CD or a tour, but it looks both forward and back as I have tried to do in my life. I have toured all over the globe since I was twenty and it is always a delight, a new adventure. I am an activist, an advocate, a left-winger, an eco-feminist, a singer of traditional and topical songs, trying to speak in my own way for my own time. This may be the last time, but then again it may not โ€ฆ.โ€
Peggy is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Association of Independent Music (AIM) Women in Music โ€˜Most Inspirational Artistโ€™, Folk Alliance Internationalโ€™s โ€˜Lifetime Achievementโ€™ and BBC Radio 2โ€™s Folk Awards โ€˜Song of the Yearโ€™.
Now in her mid-80s, Peggy Seegarโ€™s light burns as brightly as ever, still touring her legendary live performances that might include an unaccompanied traditional ballad, followed by an anecdote from her remarkable life, before launching into a topical song about drugs, war, hormones, politicians, unions, women, love or ecology.
A multi-instrumentalist (piano, guitar, 5-string banjo, autoharp, English concertina and Appalachian dulcimer), she is lauded for her feminist and political songs. She has made 25 solo recordings and participated in over a hundred more. Her 2021 album โ€˜First Farewellโ€™ is a collection of 11 new songs written and recorded with family members.
As Ewan MacCollโ€™s partner and muse, she was the inspiration for MacCollโ€™s classic โ€˜The First Time Ever I Saw Your Faceโ€™ (the title of her much-praised recent memoir) yet this is a woman who has consistently followed her own path with passion and vigour.
The MacColl-Seeger work was seminal. From 1959 onward, Peggy and Ewan encouraged and set standards for the burgeoning UK folk revival; they trawled the USA & UK field recordings and anthologies for little-known traditional songs; they trained other singers and involved them in political-musical documentary theatre and instigated the revolutionary Radio Ballads that invented the modern radio documentary. One of the Radio Ballads, โ€™Singing the Fishingโ€™ won the 1959 Prix Italia for documentaries. Their work was halted by Ewanโ€™s death in 1989.

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