First Time Ever: A Memoir

(Paperback, Main)

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A Sunday Times and Telegraph Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize
The Bookseller's Most Picked Book in General Non-Fiction Round Ups of 2017

Peggy Seeger is one of folk music's most influential artists and songwriters. Born in New York City in 1935, she enjoyed a childhood steeped in music and left-wing politics - they remain her lifeblood. After college, she travelled to Russia and China - against US advice - before arriving in London, where she met the man with whom she would raise three children and share the next thirty-three years: Ewan MacColl. Together, they helped lay the foundations of the British folk revival, through the influential Critics Group and the landmark BBC Radio Ballads series. And as Ewan's muse, she inspired one of the twentieth century's most popular love songs, 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'.

With a clear eye and generous spirit, Peggy writes of a rollercoaster life - of birth and abortion, sex and infidelity, devotion and betrayal - in a luminous, beautifully realised account.

Reviews

"A quirky, unique, and fabulously memorable memoir."--STARRED Kirkus Reviews "I loved this book - it is deeply personal and idiosyncratic and generous, and evocative of so many different eras and moments. Peggy Seeger is a master of traditional song who's life has spanned many important and fascinating eras of musical and cultural life on both sides of the Atlantic. Her memoir brings all of this to life in a distinct voice: eloquent, feisty and wise."--Sam Amidon "This whirling memoir follows the folksinger and activist through international tours, crises in her famous musical family, and a long, all-consuming relationship with the British singer Ewan MacColl. Seeger's conversational prose has a flair for capturing the common (a 1938 Chevy 'had a vertical fish-mouth and a fat lady's rump') and the cataclysmic; remembering her mother's early death, she writes, 'I try to see and hear things for her, to lure her spirit back from the lost body.' Colorful characters flit in and out, and, remembering them, Seeger, who is now eighty-two, is often wistful. Of one friend, she writes, 'He died, but he is still in my present tense.'"--New Yorker

Author Bio

Peggy Seeger is an activist songwriter. She has recorded twenty-three solo albums and has contributed to more than a hundred others. In 2014, she was awarded the inaugural Women in Music Award for Creative Inspiration, and she has an Honorary Doctorate in Art from the University of Salford. She continues to write and perform prolifically: she often tours with her musician sons, Neill and Calum, and in 2015, she and Calum were awarded Best Original Song at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. She lives in Oxford, England.