[78-L] Mike Seeger

[David Lennick]

Not unexpected, but I don't think I saw his death mentioned on this list yet.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/08/10/mike-seeger-obit.html
Folk revivalist Mike Seeger dies at 75
Last Updated: Monday, August 10, 2009 | 4:43 PM ET
CBC News

Mike Seeger, an American folk musician and folklorist who was younger 
half-brother to singer Pete Seeger, has died. He was 75.

Seeger died of cancer Aug. 7 at his home in Lexington, Va., according to his 
wife, Alexia Smith. He had multiple myeloma.

He is credited with reviving American folk music in the 1950s and 1960s, and 
with saving many songs from before the age of recording from disappearing.

     'He was the supreme archetype [of the folk musician]. He could push a 
stake through Dracula's black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and 
revolutionary type all at once."'—Bob Dylan

Mike Seeger was a collector of traditional Southern rural music and, as a music 
scholar, gathered the stories behind old-time music as well as recording and 
archiving them.

He had a distinctive voice and played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, 
guitar, mouth harp, mandolin and dobro.

In 1958, he formed the New Lost City Ramblers, recording albums such as 
American Moonshine and Prohibition Songs and Gone to the Country.

Their trademark was musical authenticity — performing songs from the rural 
string bands of the 1920s and 1930s — rather than protest and politics like 
Pete Seeger's group, the Weavers.

Mike Seeger played on the Ry Cooder album My Name is Buddy in 2007 and played 
autoharp on the Grammy-winning Raising Sand, by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

Seeger was born Aug. 15, 1933 into a New York family, son of ethnomusicologist 
Charles Louis Seeger. His mother Ruth, a composer, worked at the Archive of 
American Folk Song during a period when the family lived in Washington. His 
sister Peggy also became a folk singer.

Folk musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, and others 
were frequent guests in the Seeger home and Mike Seeger began collecting songs 
at about age 20.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, he performed songs that would otherwise have 
been lost with the New Lost City Ramblers. The group did a series of recordings 
for Smithsonian Folkways, a non-profit record label of the Smithsonian Institution.

He was an influence on the young Bob Dylan who once said of him: "Mike was 
unprecedented. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He 
could push a stake through Dracula's black heart. He was the romantic, 
egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once."

Seeger has been a special consultant for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, 
Newport Folk Festival, and other major folk music organizations and was 
director of the American Old Time Music Festival.

He had six Grammy nominations including nods for the 1998 recording Southern 
Banjo Sounds and the New Lost City Ramblers' 1997 album There's No Way Out.

Seeger is survived by his wife, three sons and four stepchildren.